Does politics reflect personality?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new article in Psychology Today suggests the following:

†¢    Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color.  Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional.  Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
†¢    Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I’m the decider."
†¢    Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
†¢    Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
†¢    Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
†¢    Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
†¢    When people are prompted to think about death–a state of mind  psychologists call mortality salience–they actually become more conservative.
†¢    Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

I can assure you my room is messy, and I wonder if more finely grained categories would have been useful.

The real questions behind global warming

by  Tyler Cowen in

The key issue is what we can expect from China and India.  As I understand the evidence, if China and India continue to grow, the United States cannot succeed in much limiting global warming on its own.  Let us assume, somewhat dubiously (many European countries are further from Kyoto targets than is the United States), that Europe is already on board, what are the options?

1. China and India are less locked into fossil fuels than is the United States, and as Brazil has done they will take the lead in moving toward energy alternatives.  America does not need to get them "on board," and given their cooperativeness American energy policy will matter at the margin.

2. We can cut a deal with China and India at a suitably presented international convention.  China and India will enforce this deal and abide by it, overcoming previous problems they have had ruling their provinces and avoiding excess decentralization.

3. Forget about the international conference, we can pressure China and India by twisting their arms.  Like we’ve done with the Chinese currency.  We also can threaten them with trade taxes, as has been discussed in Europe.

4. We are best saying nothing to China and India and calling no conference.  There is some chance they will act unilaterally, out of pride and the desire to upstage the United States.  External pressure will be counterproductive, remember British imperialism and the Opium Wars?

5. China and India will continue to be major polluters.  If we tax American-generated carbon we pay a big price in terms of economic growth but make no real progress on global warming.

6. We do not know what China and India will do, but the United States is a world leader and ought to move first, set a good example, and do the right thing.

Do we know the relative merits of 1-6?  I don’t.  Keep also in mind that what works for China may not work for India, and vice versa.

Of course #5, however ignoble it sounds, is the most serious argument for doing little or nothing.  #6 sounds good, but at what point is the chance of #5 high enough to scare us off?

What would it cost China and India to make progress on global warming?  Yes Stern estimates it would be a relatively small percentage of gdp, but that is naive.  A major problem is institutional, not technological.

I am reminded of some estimates of the costs of cleaning up avian flu in Asia.  Measure how much it costs to kill (or vaccinate) one chicken.  Not much.  Multiply by the number of sick chickens.  You have your number.

Not.  Many Asian countries simply can’t get rid of avian flu.  Their institutions are too weak, too lacking in transparency, too decentralized, and too lacking in accountability.

Or how much would it cost to improve the standard of living in Haiti?  A few cops, some rule of law, free trade at the ports, and set up some real schools, right?  Under one plausible view of the world, that is only a few billion dollars or so.  But if we consider some of the very tight institutional constraints faced in Haiti, most of all the almost total unwillingness of the elites and the common voters to support a better politics, the price can seem almost infinite.  Which perspective is correct? 

The bottom line: When it comes to global warming, the most important question is how China and India will behave, and what kind of leverage "the good countries," if indeed there are any, might have.  The correct answer is not a simple matter of fact, but rather rests upon deep questions of how to measure the costs of institutional change and what we can justifiably take as an open variable amenable to change.

All other issues aside, that is why global warming is such a tough problem.  I don’t like #5, but if you want to sell me on your solution, talk to me some sense about China and India.

Addendum: Jane Galt has a lengthy post on discount rates.

My Law and Literature reading list

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bible, Book of Exodus

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Ambler, Eric, A Coffin for Dimitrios

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Saramago, Jose, Blindness

Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast

J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, translation by Neugroschel

Verissimo, Luis Fernando, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

Year’s Best SF9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

White, T.H. The Once and Future King

Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, Perennial Library edition

Glaspell’s Trifles, on the web

Moby Dick, excerpts, on the web, the parts of the common law of whaling

Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Depending on time we will view some movies, start by buying Double Indemnity.

The reading list is much changed.  There are fewer classics, more genre fiction, and more Latin fiction.   On the plane back from Miami I reread Eric Ambler’s Coffin for Dimitrios; few people know this novel but it is one of the best spy/detective stories, period.

Idiocracy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Made by the director of
Office Space, this politically incorrect dystopian comedy portrays a future where dysgenics
have made everyone a moron.  It should appeal to those who enjoy
watching stupid people behave stupidly, not to those who demand
legitimate filmmaking.  In other words, it’s pretty damn funny.  There
are some classic lines, like "Welcome to Costco, I love you."  DVD only.

Terminating private health insurance: inadequate counterincentives edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

[California] businesses with 10 or more workers that choose not to offer [health insurance] coverage would be required to pay 4 percent of their total Social Security wages to a state fund that would be created to subsidize the purchase of coverage by the working uninsured.

…The plan…would also require doctors to pay 2 percent and hospitals 4 percent of their revenues to help cover higher reimbursements for those who treat patients enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

Here is the full story.  I can’t imagine that the state of California has the fiscal wherewithal to deal with the inevitable results of these incentives.

Zero discounting and global warming

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the blogosphere, anti-Stern, high discount rate advocates tend to come from the political right.  The left is more pro-Stern and pro- low discount rate.  In a forthcoming article in the University of Chicago Law Review, I argue that this distribution of opinion does not follow naturally:

Counterintuitively, a concern for the distant future sometimes will militate against some environmental investments. For instance some of the costs of global warming appear to be "one-time" in nature, such as the costs of relocating coastal and inland settlements…At the same time stopping or limiting global warming might lower permanently the rate of economic growth. When the rate of intergenerational discount is sufficiently low, maximizing the growth rate tends to take priority over avoiding one-time expenditures and one-time adjustments. Even if those one-time expenditures are large, we will earn back that value over time and more, due to the logic of investment compounding.

Alternatively, other environmental issues will become more important. For instance many scientists have argued that global warming will increase the number of virulent and persistent storms. This can limit the prospects for economic growth (this is illustrative; I am not seeking to debate the facts). [Insofar as we are utilitarians] when it comes to global warming, we should be more concerned with the growth-affecting elements of the phenomenon, and less concerned with the one-off effects.

If the costs of moving away carbon are one-time in nature, and the benefits of energy alternatives show up in the growth rate, a zero discount rate encourages global warming activism.  Alternatively, to the extent the costs of moving away from carbon lower the growth rate and the benefits are one-time, the logic flips and a zero discount rate encourages passivity.

I am aware how much a low discount rate can skew expected value calculations.  I nonetheless believe that current debates are overestimating the importance of the choice of discount rate.  I hope to soon discuss the truly important factors in reaching a policy decision.

By the way, here is some rhetoric on global warming.

How does nudeness affect human behavior?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The NYT reports that nude parties are popular at Yale and Brown.  One commentator suggests:

“The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party.  People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated.  You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

One senior remarked that the skinny people look ugly.  A graduate "describe[d] the parties as an overload of the “liberal college environment where everyone’s talking about unfair conventions, post-structuralism, ‘boxes.’ I don’t know.”

I would expect the parties to be more socially egalitarian, given that clothing cannot be used for social signalling, or for that matter for social concealing.  I would expect less flirting, less drinking, less aggressive behavior, less lying, and more social seriousness.  These effects should also wear off over time, as people get used to nudity and develop other means of signalling and concealing.  Presumably there is informal data on such questions from nudist societies, although such groups may have greater selection biases than nude parties in the Ivy League.

My wild self gets in big trouble

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My wife was not at all happy about my recent post on the wild self.

The bottom line?  If you want to please the economist in me, send me
cash.  If you want to please my wild self (you know who you are!) use
your imagination.

Her words: "Your wild self is getting socks and don’t think any different.  Thank goodness my friends don’t read your blog." Uh oh, now I am in real trouble.

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