New paternalist Richard Thaler has posted his response to my essay on Cato Unbound. I won't be posting a reply until after all three respondents have had their say.
UPDATE, 4/8/10: Argh. Waiting is so hard.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Thaler's Response
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Rational Bias in Forensic Science
Somehow I neglected to mention this when it happened. My article on “Rational Bias in Forensic Science,” coauthored with Roger Koppl (pretty much the only economist out there studying the economics of forensic organization), was published in the journal Law, Probability & Risk. Unfortunately, the full text is gated, but your college or university may have access.
I’m proud of this article because I think it’s one of the most important I’ve done, at least in terms of significance to real people. In the course of writing the paper, I became increasingly appalled by the unscientific and haphazard nature of forensic science. Even DNA profiling, the gold standard of forensic techniques, is not as ironclad as you might think. Many other techniques verge on alchemy. But judges and juries in our Law & Order/CSI/Bones-immersed culture tend not to question the reliability of forensic conclusions and the trustworthiness of forensic analysts. The bottom line? A lot of innocent people are probably getting their lives ruined by the legal system.
The focus of the paper is narrower; it identifies one specific source of forensic bias. Here’s the abstract:The current organization of forensic science induces biases in the conduct of forensic science even if forensic scientists are perfectly rational. Assuming forensic examiners are flawless Bayesian statisticians helps us to identify structural sources of error that we might otherwise have undervalued or missed altogether. Specifically, forensic examiners’ conclusions are affected not just by objective test results but also by two subjective factors: their prior beliefs about a suspect's likely guilt or innocence and the relative importance they attach to convicting the guilty rather than the innocent. The authorities—police and prosecutors—implicitly convey information to forensic examiners by their very decision to submit samples for testing. This information induces the examiners to update their prior beliefs in a manner that results in a greater tendency to provide testimony that incriminates the defendant. Forensic results are in a sense ‘contaminated’ by the prosecution and thus do not provide jurors with an independent source of information. Structural reforms to address such problems of rational bias include independence from law enforcement, blind proficiency testing and separation of test from interpretation.
I think that’s pretty self-explanatory, but here’s an even simpler explanation. Say you’re a forensic examiner. For the most part, your test samples are provided by the authorities (police or prosecutors). And the authorities generally don’t bother giving you a sample unless they already suspect there’s reason to expect a match. So if you’re a rational forensic examiner, you may infer a somewhat higher probability of guilt by the mere fact that you’re doing a test at all. And that fact will affect your testing process, because there is no such thing as a purely objective test; your subjective beliefs about the likelihood of guilt necessarily affect your interpretation of the evidence.
Monday, April 05, 2010
A Question of Timing
Shortly after the healthcare bill’s passage, I made some comments about the weirdness of the timing. Specifically, I noted (following Bryan Caplan and David Henderson) that guaranteed issue appears to kick in three years before the individual mandate – which, if true, would set in motion a rather severe adverse selection problem.
But now I’m not sure that’s the timing after all. If you check out the official timeline, the first thing that’s supposed to happen, in 2010, is:
Immediate Access to Insurance for Uninsured Individuals with a Pre-Existing Condition. Provides eligible individuals access to coverage that does not impose any coverage exclusions for pre-existing health conditions.I took that to mean that guaranteed-issue would take effect immediately. But a couple of items below, the timeline includes a separate item, also in 2010, for “Eliminating Pre-Existing Condition Exclusions for Children.” And only in 2014 do we finally see something that sounds like guaranteed-issue for adults: “strong health insurance reforms that prohibit insurance companies from engaging in discriminatory practices that enable them to refuse to sell or renew policies due to an individual’s health status.”
So it appears that guaranteed-issue and the individual mandate might be coordinated after all. But if so, then does anyone know what the quoted passage above is referring to? One of the subsidies? A high-risk insurance pool? Anyone know?
Incidentally, I think some form of adverse selection will happen anyway, because I doubt that the individual mandate will be that effective in assuring compliance. But if the timing is right, the adverse selection won't be as severe.
Self-Promotion: Me in Cato Unbound
I wrote the lead essay in this month's Cato Unbound. The subject is "Slippery Slopes and the New Paternalism." A familiar topic to readers of this blog -- but this time I was forced to stay under a word limit, so maybe it will be more accessible. Response essays from Richard Thaler, Jonathan Klick, and Shane Frederick will arrive later this week, so stay tuned.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
It's a Joke, But I'm Not Foolin'
From our bulletin board at home:
This cartoon takes its inspiration from a conversation—a real gut-buster!—that I had with my kids. April would have foolishness enough, given that dread date smack in its middle, without April Fool's Day. You can thus take this joke seriously.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, TechLiberation Front.]
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