Are we predisposed to be excessively hawkish?
Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon argue we are too quick to pick a fight:
Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.
In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses–only a few of which we discuss here–incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.
Since the first-best, optimal number of wars is zero, this is correct. The more difficult and also more important question is whether "the good guys" fight too many or too few wars, given this strong martial propensity of "the bad guys," and treating the bad guys as the first movers. Another bias is that some "just wars" (but can they succeed?) remain unfought, usually when we do not care much about the slaughter of "out-group innocents," as evidenced by Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, etc. The U.S. entered World War II too late rather than too early, and did too little to limit the Holocaust.
Of course we need to adjust any estimate by the probability that we are sometimes "the bad guys" rather than "the good guys."
Here is one critical comment, here is Matt Yglesias. Dan Drezner offers commentary.
Comments are open, but the discussion will be better if we consider the biases rather than debating the merits of particular wars.
Assorted links
1. What are the best and worst companies for customer service?
2. Against classical music ringtones; I usually try to pass along links of surprise and substance, but this is instead simply a point worth noting.
3. Jason Kottke does his Best Links of 2006
In Defense of Mess
When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.
That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of…um…mess. Here is my previous post on this topic.
The correct metaphysical views about everything
There are “repeatable” fundamental “kinds”, which explains why there are relations of causal necessity. Realism about universals confuses the semantic generality of concepts
for ontological generality. “Instantiation” and “exemplification”
relations add nothing useful to property instances (tropes).
So there, you scoundrels! Will Wilkinson has more, in his very entertaining post. Why can’t we get more of this from him?
Sickness makes you poor
“I find almost no role of financial anything in the onset of
disease,” Dr. Smith says. “That’s an almost throw-you-out-of-the-room
thing,” he confesses, but the data, he and other economists insist, is
consistent.Income, says Dr. Preston, “is so heavily influenced by health itself.”
Here is more. The main point of the article is that education is strongly correlated with better health outcomes, although the author too quickly assumes a causal connection. For instance education may signal rather than cause low time preference and thus responsible behavior. In a slightly different health context, here is Jane Galt on causation vs. correlation. Is it worse to be overweight, or not to exercise much?
Robust discount rates
The case for a low discount rate is stronger than you think. If we are uncertain what is the right discount rate, and we count values in our averaging (rather than averaging discount rates per se), lower discount rates get more weight in the expected value calculation. In his book on catastrophe, Richard Posner writes:
Suppose there’s an equal chance that the applicable interest rate throughout this and future centuries will be either 1 percent or 5 percent. The present value of $1 in 100 years is 36.9 cents if the interest rate used to compute the present value is 1 percent but only .76 cents (a shade over three-quarters of a cent) if it is 5 percent. Now consider the 101st year and remember the assumption that the two alternative discount rates are equally probable. If the interest rate used to discount the future to the present value is 1 percent, then the present value of $1 at the end of that year will have shrunk from 36.9 cents to 36.6 cents. If instead the interest rate used is 5 percent, the present value of .76 cents will have shrunk to about .75 cents. This means that the average present value of $1 at the end of the 101st year will be 18.68 cents, implying an average discount rate of less than 2 percent, rather than 3 percent. The reason is that the more rapid decline in value under the higher discount rate (5 percent) reduces its influence on present value.
The bottom line: If we are unsure what is the right discount rate, in practice that usually means something like a low discount rate.
Assorted links
1. Ariel Rubinstein complains about behavioral economics.
2. Mario Rizzo’s new home page: "I believe that philosophy is a more important sister discipline to economics than mathematics."
3. Many surveys are biased because we prefer to mark questionnaires on their left side.
4. "The word "time" is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary"; here are 99 other facts.
5. New WSJ blog on the wealthy, via Greg Mankiw.
6. Who you can meet using a blog
Addendum: The comments function on typepad now seems to be fixed…
Can we just scale up Denmark?
The ever-inquisitive Matt Yglesias asks why the successful social welfare policies of smaller countries cannot be scaled up to a larger level. I don’t know of serious work on this question (there are papers on whether smallness is an advantage for economic growth, but that is not the same issue), so we should not jump to hasty conclusions. Nonetheless I can think of a few factors:
1. Perhaps homogeneity is the advantage, not smallness per se. So a Denmark of 150 million people might work quite well, if only there were 150 million Danes. There aren’t, and if we imagine the Danish population growing they might not stay so homogeneous in nature. Peer effects dissipate or perhaps turn negative at some scale.
2. Perhaps the ability to dispense with federalism helps government efficiency in small countries. I favor federalism for larger units, such as the United States, but I think of it as a necessary evil. Singapore and New Zealand don’t have much federalism, nor should they.
3. Concentration of power in a major city may account for some of the special properties of small countries. It is often striking how many of the small-country elites went to the same high school, and they can strike efficient political bargains relatively easily; postwar Austria has been cited as an example. Larger size makes these Coasian bargains impossible. Note that Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo are all far more important than the second cities in those countries.
4. Feelings of social solidarity are limited across space and across numbers, and this simply won’t change.
5. Orderly countries aren’t very interested in larger political units. The Nordic countries have in the past existed in larger political confederations, but somebody always was persnickety enough to break away. Many of the Nordic countries, even today, are relatively skeptical about the EU.
Addendum: Comments on this post seem to be working now…
Creative Destruction Hurts!
You can’t find "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the
Fairfax City Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry
Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson’s "Final Harvest"?
Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.It’s not that the books are
checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians
took them off the shelves and dumped them.Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works
have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new
computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at
least 24 months.
First Tower, now this. In any case I do not think they are using the correct algorithm; here is more. Circulation figures, by the way, have become a bargaining chip for more government funding. That, plus growing demands on space, explain the ruthless culling underway.
Clay Shirky is optimistic
Most of the really important parts of our lives — who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.
Here is more. Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications. Arnold Kling comments on same.
How to cook with Indian spices
Buy whole spices, not ground. Get:
Cinnamon stick (not the Mexican kind)
Cumin
Coriander
Cloves
Cardamom, preferably both green and black
Black peppercorns
Red chilis, or red chili powder
Wet ginger paste (go to an Indian grocer’s), or fresh ginger, never ever ever powdered ginger
Garam masala, here a good powder from an Indian mart is OK though better to make it fresh
Turmeric, powder will do
For bases, draw upon:
1. Sauteed and pureed yellow onions
2. Plain yogurt, some will wish to add heavy cream as a thickener
3. Coconut milk
Now start your dish. Create the chosen base. Ghee (clarified butter) can be added to #1 or #2 for yummy richness but I usually don’t for health reasons. Don’t mix #2 and #3.
Then take your preferred mix of spices. Fry the hard ones for two to three minutes over medium heat (3.5 on an electric stove) and puree them. Cinnamon stick should be left whole in the sauce to leach out its flavor. Never are more than three cloves needed and they can be left whole too. Cardamoms can be inserted whole and then removed, especially if large ones are smashed open a bit with a blunt edge. Otherwise experiment with preferred combinations.
In a separate pan, quickly cook your preferred meat over high heat, just enough to make it a bit translucent or pink. Insert the partially cooked stuff into the liquid base and turn to low heat until the dish is ready.
Vegetables can be substituted for meat.
You can introduce mace and mustard seeds, or tomato can be a base in sauces.
You now have a combinatorial knowledge of many many Indian recipes and you need not memorize anything.
By the way, if you must buy powdered curry, Golden Bell is by far the best. It is packed with bay leaves and stays potent for months. You can sautee some chopped yellow onions, toss in ground lamb, douse it in Golden Bell, cook over low heat until dry, and when on the plate, over rice, coat it in plain yogurt.
Uncertainty is the Friend of Delay
Regarding global warming and what to do about it, Brad DeLong approvingly paraphrases Tyler, "uncertainty is not the friend of doing nothing." Bearing in mind the obvious dangers of contradicting both Brad and Tyler let me counter with "uncertainty is the friend of delay."
If you are faced with two environments one of which has outcomes somewhere between -10 to 10 and the other somewhere between -100 to 100 then I agree that the greater uncertainty of the latter provides no necessary reason for doing less relative to the former.
Suppose, however, that we are uncertain about which environment we are in but the uncertainty will resolve over time. In this case, there is a strong argument for delay. The argument comes from option pricing theory applied to real options. A potential decision is like an option, making the decision is like exercising the option. Uncertainty raises the value of any option which means that the more uncertainty the more we should hold on to the option, i.e. not exercise or delay our decision.
Imagine, for example, that there are 100 doors before us. We can enter any door but once we enter it will be costly to exit. If we don’t decide then over time we learn a little bit about what is behind each door. If our uncertainty to begin with is small, we know that behind each door is more or less the same thing, then learning has little value and we should decide now (assuming some modest cost to waiting). But if our uncertainty is large then learning has a lot of value and we should delay our decision until some of our uncertainty has been resolved.
Applying the theory to global warming isn’t easy because our decisions involve many options and exit costs but if we think that our knowledge of the extent, cost, cause and solutions to global warming are increasing at a faster rate than the danger of global warming then delay of any major decision is a rational policy at the present time.
Which universities are declining for revolutionary science?
The American West is rising, Harvard is falling:
Nobel laureates nations and research institutions
were measured between 1947-2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum
threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to
each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of
award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus
Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and
USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year
segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful
institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by
Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7). But the Western United States
has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary
science, generating a new generation of elite public universities:
University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle;
and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine,
UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle. Since 1986 the
USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in
the world only the College de France has achieved this. In UK’s
Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College
have declined from 17 prizes in 1967-86 to only 3 since then. Harvard
has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the
top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint
sixth position. Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won
by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national
strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and
newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these
elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is
apparently the only nation with a scientific research system that
nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.
That is from a forthcoming paper by Bruce Charlton, here is the full link.
Walt Whitman on protectionism
The protectionists are fond of flashing to the public eye the glittering delusion of great money — results from manufactures, mines, artificial exports — so many millions from this source, and so many from that — such a seductive, unanswerable show — an immense revenue of cash from iron, cotton, woollen, leather goods, and a hundred other things, all bolstered up "protection". But the really important point of all is, into whose pockets does this plunder go?…The profits of "protection" go altogether to a few score select persons–who, by favors of Congress, State legislatures, the banks, and other special advantages, are forming a vulgar aristocracy full as bad as anything in the British and European castes, of blood, or the dynasties there of the past…
That is from p.332 of Specimen Days & Collect, Dover edition. Thanks to Michael Gibson for the pointer.
The most amazing cultural events of 2006
Here is a Slate.com feature; here is my response:
In January and February 2006, Lincoln Center presented a festival of
live music called The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Golijov, an
Argentinian Jew, is the first breakthrough composer of the new
millennium. His Ayre (song cycle), Passion According to St. Mark, and Aindamar (opera) make classical music passionate and popular and theatrical once
again. In particular, I am amazed that a mix of tango, klezmer music,
gospel, Cuban music, and the classics can bear so many repeated
listenings. Golijov also reflects the growing role of Latin America in
North American high and popular culture.