Here is the ever-insightful Brad DeLong on why the current productivity and employment data are so hard to understand. Read Brad here and here (a longer, more technical post) for more context. The key point is this: many companies are prospering, and increasing absolute output, even as they are laying off workers. The implied numbers for productivity increases, per remaining worker, are simply astounding.

This essay by the deceased Robert Nozick has a few years on it, but I never knew there was an on-line version. It is the best piece I know on why so many intellectuals oppose capitalism. See my earlier blog post on the inability of some researchers to find a single registered Republican within some departments of MIT and other universities (of course Republicans commonly fail capitalism but I suspect that is not the objection of the MIT faculty). With thanks to Cato, Newmarksdoor, and BrianMicklethwait.com.

Here is one excellent sentence of many:

“The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large.”

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is engaged in some fascinating work, read this summary:

“…the duration of an experience plays essentially no role when evaluating how well it becomes etched in our memories.

Kahneman believes the most direct way to evaluate experienced utility is to ask people how they feel at a certain moment, a notion he calls “moment utility.”…But because researchers are more interested in extended outcomes, more often the question they ask is memory-based: “How was it?” Kahneman said this is a different question that reflects the individual’s global evaluation of an entire episode in the past and it may not be a direct assessment of the individual’s real-time state. This “remembered utility,” said Kahneman, is not a very good guide when predicting outcomes. The “total utility” of a state is derived from the moment-based approach of measuring the real time pleasure or pain experienced by the individual.”

In other words, one of our selves does the living, another keeps the memories.

“”When people make decisions, the remembering self is in control, Kahneman explained. “We make our decisions in terms of our memories and basically, we maximize remembered utility, not the actual total utility,” he said. “The only thing we can learn to maximize through personal experience is remembered utility.””

And don’t you forget that.

Also read our earlier blog posts on whether people understand their own happiness, here, and here.

Steve Levitt, recenty profiled in the NYT Magazine has written another amazing and sure to be controversial paper. Levitt and co-author Roland Fryer begin The Causes and Consequences of Black Names with some startling statistics on the racial divide in names. For example, “more than forty percent of Black girls born in California in recent years received a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 white girls born in California in that year was given.” Blacks are more segregated by name than are other races – the majority of Asians, for example, choose from the same name-pool as do whites. Segregation by naming has also increased over time. Prior to the late 1960s, for example, blacks and whites chose from the same name-pool to much greater degree than they do today.

Other studies have shown that when sent resumes identical but for name, employers more frequently ask for follow-up interviews with applicants who have stereotypical white names. Levitt and Fryer respond to these studies in two ways. The first response I find unconvincing. They argue that it is unlikely that a black name could have a big impact on earnings because “Once an employer has met a candidate in person, race is directly observable. A person’s manner of speaking, dress, interview responses and on-the-job performance no doubt provide far better signals of productivity than a name.” No doubt – but this is a rather facile interpretation of the audit studies. The point of these studies was not the literal one that employers discriminate on the basis of a person’s name! The point is that if employers use names to discriminate on race at the resume stage then they probably discriminate on race at every other stage in ways that are harder to identify.

Levitt and Fry have a more convincing but sure to be controversial response to this larger issue. They find that black names signal a variety of other characteristics that could plausibly be connected with lower labor productivity. Here is a key quote:

a woman with a BNI equal to one (implying a name that no Whites have) is 10 percentage points more likely to have been born to a teenage mother and 9 percentage points more likely to have been born out-of-wedlock than a Black woman living in the same zip code with the same age and education, but carrying a name that is equally common among White and Blacks. The woman with a Black name is also more likely to have been born in a Black neighborhood and to herself be unmarried.

In other words, names carry information even after the typical information available on a resume has been taken into account and the information that especially black names carry plausibly suggests lower productivity. It’s papers like this that explain why professors need tenure.

No, says Andrew Rose, economist at UC Berkeley. His recent paper finds that countries don’t move towards more open trade policies after joining WTO. He views the WTO as “small and impotent…by design”, click here for a summary of the research.

Tyler disagrees (see his entry below for more information) with Loewenstein on the implications of happiness research. It’s evident that the key figures also come to different conclusions on even simple policy questions. Consider the following quotes from the NYT Magazine article (written by Jon Gertner):

One experiment of Gilbert’s had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

Yet just a few pages we are told that Daniel Kahneman, recent Nobel prize winner and another key player in this field, “sees a role for affective forecasting on consumer spending where a ‘cooling off’ period might remedy buyer’s remorse.”

“You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine.”

Conversely, a tense marriage or a trick knee will give you more agony than you think. But most things matter less than we think they will, an old theme from the seventeenth century French moralist La Rochefoucauld. There is a good deal of experimental evidence that we make these “happiness mistakes” time and again, failing to learn from experience.

So argues Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, profiled in today’s New York Times Magazine (registration required). Daniel Kahneman, last year’s Nobel Laureate in economics (with Vernon Smith), once told me that time spent with friends, not new gadgets, is what people really enjoy.

Our brains are trying to regulate our behavior, not trying to make us happy. According to Tim Wilson,

“We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to use, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”

We systematically fail to realize how powerful our psychological defenses are, once those defenses become activated. But Gilbert suggests we might need these carrots and sticks to get things done, even if they are illusions.

George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon, says

“…he [Loewenstein] doesn’t see how anybody could study happiness and not find himself leaning left politically; the data make it all too clear that boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of well-being, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference.”

I buy the basic claims about happiness, but dispute the political conclusion. To the extent we should care about happiness, our imperative is to boost the rate of economic growth, strengthen Western civilization, and hope that Western-style institutions spread around the world. All of these mean a heavy reliance on markets, incentives, and the rule of law.