Remarking on some recent poll results, Eugene says, "Repeat after me: I will not think that statistically insignificant changes in poll results are statistically significant -- even if I really, really like them."
In general, I agree with Eugene’s point (which he has made many times): people ascribe way too much import to small differences in polling results, without paying attention to the margin of error.
However, Eugene’s position may foster the false impression that all differences in poll results that fall within the margin of error are equally insignificant. Suppose that two candidates are separated by just 2 percentage points in the polls (say, 49% to 47%), and the margin of error is 3 percentage points for each figure. And suppose that two different candidates in another election -- or the same two candidates in a later poll -- are separated by 6 percentage points (say, 51% to 45%), again with a margin of error of 3 percentage points for each figure. While both differences are “insignificant” in the sense that the difference is within the combined margins of error, the latter result is clearly more significant than the former.
Indeed, the latter result would most likely have been deemed statistically significant had a very slightly lower level of confidence been applied. The margin of error is constructed using a conventional but essentially arbitrary confidence level. The typical convention is 95% confidence, but other levels of confidence could also be used; 90% and 99% are relatively common. These are the confidence levels employed by scientists, who don’t want to affirm a hypothesis unless they are very confident of it, and who are willing to remain agnostic in a wide range of cases. Lower levels of confidence might well be acceptable in other contexts, such as business, where some decisions have to be made without great confidence (e.g., should I plan to expand next year if I am 75% confident that consumer demand will pick up?). It’s not obvious what the appropriate level of confidence is for political prognostication, but I’ll put it this way: in the example given above, I would be willing to bet a larger amount of money on the second race than the first.
The broader point is that statistical significance is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Despite the way statistical significance is often taught, there is not a sharp discontinuity between significance and insignificance. Significance lies on a gradient.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
The Significance of Insignificance
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Dietary Efficiency
Economists’ and engineers’ minds are very similar, as indicated by (among other things) the fact that many economist jokes are recycled engineer jokes, and vice versa. It’s no coincidence that my dad is an engineer. But one major difference between them is their notions of efficiency. Engineers’ notion of efficiency is typically driven by the physical or technological relationship between inputs and outputs. Economists’ notion of efficiency, on the other hand, is typically driven by subjective human valuations.
Here’s a nice illustration: What does it mean for the human body to be “a more efficient machine”? That’s a phrase you’ll sometimes hear about the alleged effect of dieting and exercise on the human body. To an engineer, a more efficient human body would presumably be one the generates the greatest amount of energy (or work) from a given amount of caloric intake. But I suspect that is not the kind of efficiency people want out of their bodies, at least in the modern age of cheap food. What most people (or Americans, at any rate) really want is a body that burns up lots of calories without really doing much with them. We want to maximize the amount of tasty food we can ingest without having to exert energy to lose the calories. And we don’t even want the calories to be stored; that just means fat. Nope, what we want is to waste calories.
The point is that our bodies could be inefficient from an engineering perspective and yet economically efficient. Economic efficiency is measured in terms of preference satisfaction, and a body that “wastes” lots of calories actually makes many of us happier.
ADDENDUM: Just to be clear, I realize that engineering efficiency could be “tweaked” to make it isomorphic to economic efficiency. It’s just a matter of redefining what the relevant inputs and outputs are. My point is about how notions of efficiency are typically deployed by the two professions. Specifically, economists usually place much greater emphasis on the subjective aspect of the problem.
Monday, March 29, 2004
The Two Things about the Two Things
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the two things. Lots of people commented, and others replied on their own blogs. As a result, I now know…
The Two Things about the Two Things:Why do people love to play the Two Things game? I suspect it's because two is a welcome change from the hackneyed three. Three leaves room for fluff, while two forces you to give a lean and mean summary of what's really important, without the padding. And why do computer people love the game even more? On that one, I'm unsure. It could be the result of the inherent bias of having asked the question on the web. Or it could be the whole binary thing, though no one went so far as to call their list the "10" Things.
1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.
I have now created a Two Things webpage, which includes all the Two Things entries I’ve found thus far. Please feel free to send me more, and I’ll update the list periodically.
(In the earlier blog post, I promised to post only the best entries. But there was lots of disagreement, especially for anything computer-related, so I decided to just post them all and let the reader decide.)
Friday, March 26, 2004
Everything Must Be Required or Banned
The Georgia House of Representatives recently voted to ban female genital mutilation. Most likely, they were rightly appalled at the cultural/religious practice of clitoridectomy. (Were they motivated in part by anti-Arab sentiment? I wouldn’t be surprised, and that’s sad. But on this matter, multiculturalism loses in my book. Cutting up your daughters’ genitals doesn’t become okay because it’s a cultural or religious practice. And yes, I think that about male circumcision, too.) But in a typical example of legislative overreaching, the Georgia state legislators went ahead and banned genital piercing as well, even when voluntarily chosen by adults. Once again, government can’t seem to make that crucial distinction between “inherently wrong” and “wrong because it’s not by choice.”
Thursday, March 25, 2004
What's Not at Stake in the Pledge Debate
This report by Dahlia Lithwickon the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Pledge of Allegiance case (a.k.a. Elk Grove United School District v. Newdow) highlights a delicious irony of the “under God” side’s position. The folks who have been beating their breasts about the powerful importance of the phrase “under God” can only win the constitutional debate by admitting the phrase is not really important at all! The key argument in support of their position is that the phrase “under God” is nothing more than ceremonial deism with no real (or at least, no serious) religious connotations. If the phrase carries any more significance than that, the Justices will have little choice but to strike it down as unconstitutional. Having “under God” in the Pledge is either (a) meaningless and constitutional or (b) meaningful and unconstitutional.
Only if the Supreme Court vacates the Circuit Court’s decision on grounds of standing will the “under God” crowd be able to have their cake and eat it, too. No wonder they’ve spent so much time focusing on the standing issue: they don’t want the Court to decide the First Amendment issue at all, because no outcome of that decision would be a favorable one. They just want this case to go away.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Lucifer, the Lord's Servant
Radley links to this pants-wettingly funny Onion article, from the Onion’s first post-9/11 issue. The article got me thinking about the economics of the afterlife again. The usual Bible story is that God and the Devil are enemies. But if you think about the functional quality of hell, it would seem that Lucifer still serves the Lord. God wants people to behave virtuously and eschew sin. The pleasures of heaven provide a carrot, the torments of hell provide a stick, and together they constitute a comprehensive incentive program. If Lucifer had really wanted to spite God, wouldn’t he have made hell a glorious paradise? Inquiring minds want to know.
This question seems so obvious that I figure somebody must have asked it before, but I don’t know who.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Slip-Sliding Away
You can now access my co-authored (with Mario Rizzo) article on slippery slopes, mentioned in a previous post, without Lexis-Nexis access. I don’t normally advertise my own articles on this page, though perhaps I should – all the other academic bloggers do. But I decided to mention this one since slippery slopes discussions have been popular in the blogosphere lately. And before anyone asks: Yes, I’ve read Eugene Volokh’s article on slippery slopes, which is excellent and cited in Mario’s and my article.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Orgasmetrics
Steve Landsburg talks about the economics of orgasm (thanks to Alex for the pointer). I can’t improve on Landsburg’s explanation, so just read the article. However, I do think he makes one incorrect inference:
According to the 2000 Orgasm Survey (did you know there was a 2000 Orgasm Survey?), 72 percent of women have faked at least once in their current or most recent relationship, and 55 percent of men say they can tell when their partner's faking.Hold on, there. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that someone’s deluded, but the statistics cited don’t prove it. 55% is not the percentage of men who think they’ve caught a faker, or the percentage of recent sexual relationships that men perceive to have involved faking. 55% is the percentage of men who say they can detect faking when it occurs, and that is perfectly consistent with 72% of women faking.
Apparently someone's deluded, though it's not clear whether it's the woman who overestimates her acting ability or the man who overestimates his perceptiveness.
For example, assume (for argument’s sake) that the pairing of women and men for sexual relationships is independent of women’s tendency to fake and men’s perceived ability to detect faking. Then the two figures together imply that approximately 40% (55% x 72%) of recent sexual relationship paired faking women with men who thought they could detect faking. If the men are correct about their detection abilities, we should expect 40% of men to have detected faking by their last partner. If a survey indicated that 40% of men had in fact detected faking in their most recent relationship, there would be no particular reason to think any men were deluded about their perceptiveness. If the survey indicated otherwise – if fewer than 40% of men said they had detected faking partners – then we would have evidence that some men are, in fact, deluded about their perceptiveness. (Either way, some men are being fooled, in the sense that some women are faking undetected. But being deluded, as Landsburg uses the term, means overestimating your perceptiveness or acting ability – i.e., thinking you couldn’t have been fooled when you were.)
However, even the evidence of fewer than 40% of men having detected faking by their last partner, if such evidence existed, would be tainted by the independence assumption. It might be that faking women are most likely to stay with men who are easily fooled, because nobody wants to get caught. A countervailing effect would result from women choosing to dump men whose inability to satisfy them leads them to fake more often. The balance of the effects could go either way, but suppose the first effect is larger. Then we would expect to get faking women paired mostly with oblivious men, and non-faking women paired with perceptive men. In this scenario, while there would certainly be many men getting fooled, few people would actually be deluded in Landsburg’s sense of the word, because most or all of the men being fooled would also recognize their lack of perceptiveness.
Friday, March 19, 2004
Meta-Fallacy
Matthew Yglesias praises Eugene Volokh’s excellent article on slippery slopes. But oddly, he still characterizes slippery slopes as a form of logical fallacy. “It's quite true, as people say, that the ‘slippery slope’ argument is a kind of logical fallacy. Nevertheless, it is often empirically true that a slight change in one direction leads to further change.”
Perhaps I’m focusing excessively on the definition of “fallacy,” but I think Yglesias is missing a major point of Eugene’s article – a point further developed in Mario Rizzo’s and my later article on the same subject (warning: Lexis-Nexis access required). A fallacy is an argument that is false, mistaken, or invalid. There is nothing inherently invalid about slippery slope arguments, just as there is nothing inherently invalid about (say) arguments that rely on judgments of probability. The argument can be valid or not, depending on the steps in the argument and the empirical claims made. When slippery slopes are indeed fallacious, it is most often because they include a non sequitur – that is, they fail to specify the mechanism or process that will allegedly lead from the initial decision to the “danger case.” But Eugene’s article presents several slope mechanisms (indeed, the word ‘mechanisms’ appears in the title), and Mario’s and my article specifies at least four slope processes.
One of the primary reasons that slippery slopes do occur is that decision-making often takes place in a social context. The current decision-maker is not always identical to the future decision-maker: future legal cases are decided by different judges, elections change the composition of legislatures, and so on. It is therefore unwise for a current decision-maker to think, “I’ll simply do what I think is the right thing now, and then I’ll just resist doing the wrong thing later.” Even if the current decision-maker could indeed resist the temptation to make a bad decision later, other (future) decision-makers might not be so resistant. A wise current decision-maker will therefore consider what effect her decisions now are likely to have on future decision-makers. The truly fallacious argument is one that asserts – without support – that there is not, in fact, a connection between present and future decisions in a social context.
To understand the slippery slope argument, you need to see it as a meta-argument. The maker of the argument claims that the acceptance of Argument A in the present case will make the acceptance of Argument B – which may be made in subsequent cases – more likely. Thus, a slippery slope argument is an argument about arguments. Inherent in the slippery slope argument is a claim to know something about people’s ideas, and how their ideas change in response to their environment (including both economic incentives and the ideas of others). Now, it’s certainly possible to be wrong about what ideas people hold and how their ideas are likely to change, but it’s also quite possible to be right. Characterizing all arguments of this general form as “fallacious” does the valid ones a disservice.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Congress: "Don't Blame Us, We Just Work Here."
So everyone knows now that the Medicare prescription drug program will cost at least $100 billion more than advertised ($550 billion and counting, instead of $400 billion). And the Bush administration knew this before the bill was passed, told the chief Medicare actuary to keep his mouth shut, and kept quoting the inaccurate lower number. And, as Mark Kleiman notes, it’s well known that the bill would not have passed if the correct figure had been revealed.
Of course, this means that the Bush administration is filled with lying rats. But we already knew that. Here’s what irks me almost as much: the Democrats, and many Republicans for that matter, are quite willing to point fingers at the administration, but what are the chances they will pass a bill to repeal the prescription drug program right now? It’s not too late, you know. The program hasn’t been around long enough to be fully implemented, let alone entrenched, though it will be soon. Congress could vote to repeal that baby this moment. Unless Bush actually dusted off the veto pen and struck down the bill to repeal (thereby putting himself on record as supporting the program even with the $550 billion figure), we would avoid what is widely regarded as a disaster in the making.
But that won’t happen, of course, because even with the exorbitant price tag, most members of Congress don’t have the stones to stand up to the special interests and do the right thing. And that, to my mind, makes them nearly as culpable as the Bush administration.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Why Do We Crucify Ourselves?
One thing I discovered in the course of my own research on suicide (for academic, not personal, purposes) is that suicides and attempted suicides are, for the most part, very different phenomena. People who actually intend to kill themselves usually succeed once they put their minds to it. Most people who try and fail are not really wanting to end up dead, but seeking attention.
Here’s further evidence for that proposition, courtesy of Radley:
A Hartland man was treated at a Pittsfield hospital after he nailed himself to a cross. The 23-year-old man apparently was trying to commit suicide Thursday evening in his living room, the Bangor Daily News reported...I wonder if he was listening to Tori Amos’s “Little Earthquakes” album while he did it.
...Lt. Pierre Boucher said the man took two pieces of wood, nailed them together in the form of a cross and placed them on the floor. He attached a suicide sign to the wood and then proceeded to nail one of his hands to the makeshift cross using a 14-penny nail and a hammer.
"When he realized that he was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911," Boucher said.
It was unclear whether the man was seeking assistance for his injury or help in nailing down his other hand.
Do I feel bad for making light of the situation? Not really. I feel bad for people so unhappy that they want to be dead. I also feel bad for people so unhappy they’re willing to harm themselves for attention. But when we lavish positive attention on those who seek it by means of attempted suicide, we make it even more likely that other people (or even the same people again) will employ this destructive and expensive attention-getting method. They should be encouraged to actually speak up and ask for the help they need.
My Predictions Come True
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that the New York law being used to prosecute the mayor of New Paltz for performing same-sex marriages could, by one reading of the text, be used to prosecute clergymen for performing same-sex marriages as well – even if they made no pretense of the ceremonies having legal force. The key question was the interpretation of the word “solemnize.” In response to my question about the legal meaning of this word, MLS answered (in the comments box) that it does indeed have a more restrictive meaning in New York law that would restrict its application.
I’m relatively confident MLS’s interpretation is correct. But nevertheless, at least one New York prosecutor has chosen to prosecute ministers for performing same-sex marriage. The fact pattern is darn similar to the one I described. The prosecutors’ spin is that the ministers were arrested only for their acts as government officials, not their acts as religious leaders. But Eugene nicely deconstructs that argument: “[T]here's no danger that people will wrongly think the ministers have indeed exercised government power. Everyone knows that the ceremony is purely a combination of religious ceremony and political protest, and not the actual creation of a governmentally recognized marriage.”
What we have here is a nice demonstration of the danger posed by vaguely worded laws in the presence of prosecutorial discretion. Even if reason and precedent point toward a narrow interpretation, that won’t stop the authorities from harassing people using a broader one, at least until a clarification is made.
In any case, I think I deserve credit for having foreseen this kind of case before it happened.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Sourcing: Doing the Old In-Out, In-Out
Others have already blogged it, but this is a point that bears repeating: Foreign outsourcing to America outweighs American outsourcing to foreign countries, at least with respect to white-collar jobs.
Aside on language usage: In a couple of places, I’ve heard people call outsourcing by foreigners “insourcing.” It sounds intuitive, but actually “insourcing” already has a meaning. It’s what we do when we don’t outsource: we make something in-house or, in the international trade context, buy domestic. And we also already have a different term for what Americans do when foreigners outsource to us. We call it “exporting” (which often, in the modern era, takes the form of “service exporting”). Let’s stop this particular linguistic confusion before it really gets rolling, okay?
If You've a Date in Peking, She'll Be Waiting in Beijing
Bill Poser of Language Log has an informative post on why there are so many different names for the capital city of China – Peking, Peiping, Beijing, etc. The short version: different names for the same city, different dialects’ pronunciations of the same names, and different romanizations of the same names and pronunciations.
However, none of this answers my question, which is why American journalists and officials have felt the need to keep changing how we refer to this city. With respect to European places, English writers and speakers have felt no special need to update their names or pronunciations to achieve greater fidelity to the names and pronunciations used by the natives. We call Deutschland Germany, München Munich, Firenze Florence, and so on. We write Paris for Paris, but only the pretentious pronounce it “Pair-ee.” So there is a longstanding tradition of using Anglicized place names without apology or correction. But in the case of China, influential people decided to keep changing the name and pronunciation instead of sticking to just one. Why?
Given the perceived need to change the name, I’d also like to know why journalists felt the need to sneak the changes in without notice. I remember when news anchors started talking about some city called “Beijing” in the 1980s, and I remember wondering why this place was important, and whether it was anywhere near Peking. It was a good while before someone explained to me that they were the same place. Somehow I missed the memo. My parents said they could remember the previous change, when Peiping became Peking; they, too, never received notification. Couldn’t journalists at least institute a “phase-in” period during which both names are used?
UPDATE: Answers! But also more questions. Bill Poser emailed me the following:
That's a good question. I suspect that part of the answer is that using Peiping instead of Peking showed that you were a good anticommunist. Peking then resurfaced as virulent anti-communism died down. The change from Peking to Beijing seems less clear. There was, I suppose, an upsurge in interest in China triggered by the US recognition and all, but it didn't in other respects extend to people learning Chinese or becoming all that knowledgable about China, so I don't know why the change occurred.And then he sent a follow-up:
I asked Bill Bright, a "retired" linguist who is interested in placenames, about the switch from Peking to Beijing. He says that it came about when the Chinese news service, Xinhua, announced that henceforth they would give all placenames in Pinyin romanization. The big western news services decided to follow suit, and so it trickled down. I'm guessing that it was a matter of convenience. If you get an item from Xinhua and want to use traditional names, you've got to have staff who recognize the Pinyin versions and can convert them into the familiar versions. You can't automate this since it isn't just a mechanical conversion from one romanization to another; it requires some fairly knowledgable people and/or reference books. So life is a lot easier if you go along with Xinhua.Aha! So there was a memo. I still want to know why American journalists didn't bother to clarify all this for us at the time. But I didn't (and still don't) watch the news every single day, so maybe there was an announcement and I just missed it.
On the other hand, it seems to me that news sources haven't done this with complete consistency, especially in the case of personal names. For instance, Sun Yat-Sen is always referred to as such, which is the Cantonese form of his name. A Xinhua item that mentioned him would presumably give his name in the Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin version, which is Sun Yi-Xian. But maybe Xinhua itself uses the familiar forms of the names of famous people in their English service - I'm not sure.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
The Corpse Theorem
I’ve been meaning to say a couple of things about the UCLA cadaver-selling case. Jacob Sullum beat me to one of them: that part of the problem here is the legal ban on selling human body parts, which naturally just drives the market underground. Legalizing the trade would bring it aboveboard, reducing corruption while allowing heirs (including institutional heirs) to profit.
Let me take the argument a bit further. It’s clear now that the body parts illegally sold by Henry Reid, the director of UCLA’s Willed Body Program, were highly valuable. If it were possible to sell them on the legal market, UCLA would most likely have treated the bodies as assets that could either (a) be sold to increase the university’s endowment or (b) be used in the university’s medical programs. And any time the university chose option (b), the opportunity cost of the choice would have been the forgone market price of the body parts. That opportunity cost would have motivated UCLA to keep the body parts only when they were more valuable in UCLA’s programs than in alternative uses, such as corporate medical research. In other words, a legal market would have encouraged more efficient use of body parts.
Furthermore, the fact that UCLA could not legally sell the body parts, even when they had a high value elsewhere, assured the existence of a tempting opportunity for malfeasance – one that Reid capitalized on. Reid’s actions were deplorable, of course – not because he was selling body parts, but because he was selling body parts that didn’t belong to him. Still, he would have been less likely to act as he did if the black market incentive were not so great. UCLA’s authorities might also have taken greater interest in the fate of the donated bodies if those bodies had had legal monetary value.
One more observation: for people who are interested in helping their alma mater and advancing medical research, the body donors and their families are being strangely irrational about this. Consider the following passage from the CNN article:
In their lawsuit, family members said they had contracts signed by university officials, guaranteeing their loved ones' remains would "never" be sold. The plaintiffs also noted the practice violates California State law.Now, the donors can specify whatever conditions they want in their wills, so if they want to prohibit sale of their bodies, fine. But why impose such a silly condition? When people donate their cars to charity, they don’t generally stipulate that the car be added to the charity’s own fleet. It’s natural and expected that the car might (and probably will) be sold, so the charity can get the cash value instead. The same should go for a body. If your goal is to help UCLA’s medical program, why not let the medical program’s directors decide how best to use your donation? If they can use the body, great. But if they would get greater benefits from more centrifuges, for example, why not sell the body and use the proceeds to buy centrifuges?
Shirley Williams, whose husband Richard died of a stroke two years ago, was assured by UCLA officials that her husband's remains would be used in medical research, cremated and returned to her. Instead, Williams, the lead plaintiff in the civil suit, fears his body parts were sold for profit.
And if the donors’ goal is not just to help UCLA but to advance medical research, I wonder what they think Johnson & Johnson’s doing with the bodies? By and large, it’s medical research. Even if the body ends up being used for auto safety research instead of medical research (or for some reason you think that non-profit medical research is better than for-profit medical research), it still maximizes the research value of the body to let the university sell it, because the university gets more cash to run its non-profit research program.
Here’s a more plausible argument for banning sale of the body in the will: If you want to make absolutely sure it is only UCLA’s medical program that benefits from your donation, an unmarketable body could be useful because it’s not fungible. If the body were sold, the university might allocate the proceeds to (say) the English literature program. A clause in the contract specifying that any funds from sale must go to the medical program wouldn’t prevent this, because the university could simply divert non-earmarked funds away from the medical program and into other programs. However, even this argument doesn’t quite work. If the medical program is receiving bodies, that means it is receiving assets that can substitute for funds – so the university may choose to allocate a smaller share of general funds to the medical program to compensate for the bodies’ value. Thus, if the university really wants to soak the medical program for the sake of other programs, it can almost always find a way to do so.
Bottom line: The sale of body parts should be legalized, and people donating their bodies to science should drop the no-sale clauses if they really want to maximize the value of their donations.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
No Folklore Monopolies
Tyler’s made a couple of recent posts on the topic of copyright protection for folklore. In his earlier post, he asked for arguments against it; in today’s post, he replies to the arguments.
My argument against copyright protection for folklore is that the folklore has already been produced, and therefore giving it protection would create no added incentive to produce creative works. Here’s Tyler’s response:
Folklore has already been produced. TC: Of course you could say the same for a good deal of music. Why treat folklore differently?The difference is that the music in question was produced while copyright laws were in effect. The expected monopoly rents resulting from copyright may therefore have been part of the motivation for producing the music. Of course, revoking a given work's copyright would not cause it to blink out of existence. But a precedent for revoking copyrights would indicate to potential future creators that the expected rents won't be there, thereby reducing their incentive to create. The same cannot be said of folklore, because there was no copyright to begin with; thus, there is nothing to revoke.
This is very much the same issue raised by the "Mickey Mouse Extension" Acts. Disney lobbies for retroactive extension of the copyright period whenever Mickey Mouse's copyright is about to expire. But a retroactive extension does nothing (or almost nothing) to encourage more creative work; it only extends the monopoly. The granting of copyrights to existing folklore is just a radical form of retroactive extension, which creates monopoly rents without the corresponding gain from the encouragement of new work.
Preemptive Legislative Strike
The House of Representatives just passed a bill to ban lawsuits against the food industry for making people fat. I oppose this bill on federalism grounds: the federal government has no business deciding this kind of matter, except with regard to the federal courts. (The law would apply to both state and federal courts.) In addition, given Congress’s talent for botching even the best ideas, I worry that the law might be drafted badly. The biggest danger is that too-broad wording could make it difficult to launch legitimate lawsuits for mislabeled or tainted food. As the friend who sent me the link said, “It’s always suspicious when Congress gets involved in deciding which lawsuits are okay and which ones aren’t; particularly when a member of Congress receives political contributions from cigarette or gun manufacturers, or, most likely in this case, the fast food industry.”
Still, at least Congress is on the right side of the substantive issue here. The McDonald’s-made-me-fat lawsuits are outrageous, and it’s pleasing to see Congress taking a stand in favor of personal responsibility and choice for once. Yeah, they’re assuredly getting campaign donations from Big Food corporations – but in this case, the corporations are right. (Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if they backed small changes in the wording that would protect them against more legitimate lawsuits.)
At the moment, the problem is not dire, and the legislation is premature. None of the fat lawsuits has succeeded – yet. So far, the courts have done the right thing. But if these lawsuits begin to win, legislation (federal or state, as necessary) will indeed be justified. Congress mucks with judicial precedent all the time to limit freedom and weaken personal responsibility. A movement, however small, in the other direction would be a welcome change.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Random Observation
When you eat any chocolaty Girl Scout cookie right after brushing your teeth, it tastes like a Thin Mint.
Does Abortion Decrease Abortion?
Alex links to a cool article by Donohue, Grogger, and Levitt, which claims that legalized abortion is responsible for the recent decline in unmarried teen childbearing. This is not as obvious as it sounds, because the drop in unmarried teen childbearing began about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. DG & L attribute the decrease to an abortion-induced drop in the number of teenagers who would be likely to get pregnant. In short, people aborted the fetuses that would have been most likely to get pregnant 13 to 19 years later. Here’s how DG & L put it:
While the link between the current availability of abortion and teen childbearing is straightforward (since abortion is an alternative to carrying a baby to term), the relationship we focus on is far more subtle: legalized abortion in the 1970s led to fewer babies being born under circumstances in which their parents were less willing or able to provide nurturing environments. When these cohorts grew up to be teenagers, their improved childhood environment had the benign effect of reducing the frequency with which they themselves became teen mothers.Now here’s an interesting possibility: abortions in the 1970s may have had a downward impact on the number of abortions in the 1990s. DG & L’s results show that unmarried teen childbirths decreased in the 1990s as a result of earlier abortions. So far as I can tell (from skimming the article), they do not break down the different routes for the reduction in childbirths – some of the reduction would be from abortions, some from pregnancies that never occurred in the first place. Thus, earlier abortions presumably helped to reduce later abortions.
This is, of course, a partial offsetting effect, not a total effect. Looking at DG & L’s Figure 3, we see that the total number of abortions rose from 1973 to 1981 and then stabilized. But interestingly, the figures are not per capita (unless they’ve been population-adjusted without any note of that fact), which means there must have been a decline in abortions per capita since 1981. I’m not sure where that would put the latest per capita abortion figures relative to pre-1973, but I’m guessing the recent figures would still be higher. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating that abortion could actually produce its own offsetting effect.
Thursday, March 04, 2004
Theories of Punctuality
I love it when economists show up sociologists. Alex points to a seemingly good example: why do different cultures have different attitudes toward punctuality? The sociologists’ explanation appeals to “national personality,” religion, etc. The economists’ explanation relies on simple game theory. Arrival-time behavior is a kind of coordination game: you want to arrive at the same time the other guy does, and he wants to arrive at the same time you do. In this kind of game, there exist multiple equilibria, all of them viable (though not necessarily all desirable). Alex’s analogy to left-versus-right-side driving is excellent: both left-side driving and right-side driving are equilibria of the system, so there’s no particular reason to predict one equilibrium over the other.
Economists: 1
Sociologists: ½
Why am I willing to give the sociologists half a point? Because Alex’s analogy also illustrates a problem with the pure game-theoretic explanation. Although it explains why we can observe different equilibria, the theory tells us very little about why one equilibrium happens and the other does not. Why do the British and Japanese drive on the left, while Americans and French drive on the right? Yes, both left and right are equilibria, but why did some cultures end up in one and some cultures in the other? Random chance is one explanation, but legislative decree (as in Alex’s Swedish example) is another. So the antiseptic game theory model tells us just enough to indicate more historical and cultural research may be required. And the same goes for punctuality: the game theory explains why it makes sense that we’d observe different norms, but it doesn’t tell us why the punctuality norm occurred in the places that it did. Random chance might explain the pattern – it was just an accident that Latin American countries happened to evolve a lateness norm – but then again, maybe something else was at work. Maybe influential people at some point in Spanish history had a propensity for lateness, and their activities created the focal point around which others’ expectations formed. In short, an economic theory that predicts multiple equilibria doesn’t shut the door to sociological explanations – it opens it.
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Old Yeller
Radley approvingly posts a letter he found in the Washington Post, which says among other things:
The Feb. 14 editorial "Focus on Red-Runners" mentioned a Fairfax City study that apparently showed a 44 percent drop in one year in red-light running at five intersections with cameras. But it did not mention the results of a 2001 analysis by the National Motorists Association of a Fairfax County intersection. That organization found that red-light violations dropped 96 percent at the intersection when yellow light time was increased from 4 seconds to 5.5 seconds.The implication, of course, is that the government should extend the length of yellow lights. Apparently something is “special” about the difference between 4.0 and 5.5 seconds, which makes those added 1.5 seconds especially useful in avoiding accidents.
A 1998 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety also found that 80 percent of red-light entries occur within the first second of the light turning red, indicating that inadequate yellow time is the major cause of red-light entries.
I don’t buy it. The 96% reduction in red-light violations was almost assuredly a temporary effect, brought on by the fact that people adjust their driving behavior to the expected duration of yellow lights. People are willing to go through a yellow if they think it will last just long enough to get them about halfway through the intersection before it turns red. If the duration were permanently raised to 5.5 seconds, people’s unconscious timers would gradually readjust, and they would start blowing through yellows that under the 4.0 regime would have seemed stale.
And then, if someone performed another study on the effect of increasing the duration of yellows from 5.5 to 7 seconds, I’ll bet it would have the same effect: a dramatic but temporary reduction in red light violations, which could be used by the credulous to justify another increase in the yellow light time.
UPDATE: Radley responds, pointing out some studies that apparently show the driver adjustment effect I’m talking about is small. Unfortunately, the studies are unavailable on the web. Radley also gives more details about the 96% reduction:
In 2001, the National Motorists Association persuaded the Virginia DOT to lengthen the yellow light at one particularly egregious intersection in Fai[r]fax by 1.5 seconds -- from 4.0 seconds to 5.5. A camera installed at the intersection monitored the number of infractions. About 70 days after the yellow was increased, infractions fell from 52.1 per day [to] less than one per day -- or about 96%.I’m still skeptical, because this could easily be the result of the change having been made at a single traffic light. My “internal timer” is not so finely tuned that it knows the typical length of all the different traffic lights, even the ones I go through regularly. I assess the expected length of a yellow light by reference to all the yellow lights I deal with. So it doesn’t surprise that extending the yellow on a single intersection might result in a substantial reduction in red-light infractions at that one light. But it doesn’t follow that extending the duration of yellows at all the intersections would have a similar effect, because people would then get used to the longer yellows. The conclusion that does follow is that extending the yellow at especially notorious intersections might be an effective strategy, because it makes use of internal timers that have been calibrated on the basis of shorter yellows.
That was three years ago. NMA reports that infractions at that intersection have remained at about .80 per day in the three years since.
I’ll concede (as I did in the comments box) that there might be an optimal duration for yellow lights, but I still stand by my argument that this experiment is very far from proving it. I also agree with Radley's broader point, which is that local governments seem more interested in maximizing revenue than preventing traffic violations.
Can This Be Right?
Eugene posts the following New York statute, and I want to know if I’m reading it correctly:
If any clergyman or other person authorized by the laws of this state to perform marriage ceremonies shall solemnize or presume to solemnize any marriage between any parties without a license being presented to him or them as herein provided or with knowledge that either party is legally incompetent to contract matrimony as is provided for in this article he shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine not less than fifty dollars nor more than five hundred dollars or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year.The statute is suddenly relevant because the mayor of New Paltz has been performing marriages of gay couples (who don’t have marriage licenses). But as written, this statute would apply to clergymen as well.
Now, suppose that I’m a minister, and as such I am authorized by the state to perform marriage ceremonies. And suppose that I officiate for a marriage ceremony without a marriage license, and with no pretense of this marriage having the state’s sanction. Everyone involved understands this to be a religious marriage, with no more legal significance than the state should choose to grant it. Notice that I haven’t specified the sexes of the participants. My actions would seem, under a commonsense definition of “solemnize” and a strict reading of the text, to fit within the statute’s language and therefore constitute a crime. If so, then the statute would also pretty clearly constitute a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of speech, association, and free exercise of religion. Does anyone know if “solemnize” has a more specific statutory meaning of which I’m not aware?
Monday, March 01, 2004
Federalism Cuts Both Ways
Eugene (who tentatively favors same-sex unions) says the following Constitutional amendment would be defensible on federalist grounds:
No part of this Constitution shall be interpreted as requiring any state, or the federal government, to recognize or allow same-sex marriages.I agree. But if we’re going to insert a new amendment purely for the purpose of safeguarding federalism, why not add the following?
Nor shall any part of this Constitution be interpreted as prohibiting any state, or the federal government, from recognizing or allowing same-sex marriages.This addendum would assure the correct federalist interpretation. Now, I suppose it might be superfluous, because the “part of this Constitution” that might conceivably be interpreted to require recognition of same-sex marriages is the Full Faith and Credit clause, and no plausible interpretation of that clause would prohibit a state from recognizing another state’s authorized same-sex marriages. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a little redundancy in defense of principle and clarity. Furthermore, tacking on this extra bit would force conservatives who oppose it to admit their disagreement with the federalist principles to which they so often pay lip-service.
Regulating Healthcare = Regulating Religion
Libertarians often emphasize that the distinction between personal liberties and economic liberties is a phantom one, because restrictions on economic liberty inevitably affect the personal sphere. Here’s an outstanding example: The California Supreme Court has ruled that the Catholic Church must provide birth control in its employees’ health plans.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) 3.1.04, 11:50a -- A Catholic charitable organization must include birth control coverage in its health care plan for workers even though the nonprofit is morally opposed to contraception, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.When the state starts meddling with the terms of contracts, as it does when it dictates the contents of health plans, entanglement with personal liberties, including freedom of religion, is sure to follow. The state can either (a) treat religious enterprises just like other enterprises, as the California high court has done, or (b) make a special exemption for religion, which puts the state in the position of deciding what a religion is and what its defining doctrines are (e.g., is opposition to contraception really inseparable from Catholic doctrine?). I'm curious to know whether abortion coverage is also required under state law.
…
The high court said Catholic Charities is no different than other businesses in California, which is one of 20 states that require company-provided health plans to include contraception coverage. In California, "religious employers" such as churches are exempt from the requirement.
In an earlier post, I argued that, when it comes to subsidies for education and other activities, the state ought to adopt a neutral policy that does not require it to decide what is religion and what is not. But in this case, we are not talking about the provision of a benefit by the state, but the imposition of a regulatory burden with the potential to interfere with free exercise. Forced to choose the lesser of two evils, I would reluctantly take option (b) above, as it provides at least a limited opportunity for people to escape the state’s regulations when they conflict with conscience. But it is the state’s unjustified regulatory policy that generates the need to choose between evils.
Stale Jackson Joke Makes Comeback
Look where Michael Jackson’s been shopping:
Michael Jackson was pulled over by police and asked to identify himself after shopping at a Wal-Mart while wearing a ski mask.Yep, he must’ve heard little boys' pants were half-off.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
A Constitution Is Not a Dictionary
Here’s the best thing I’ve seen written on the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage – and I found it on a linguistics blog.
Go ahead, make my day (as Dirty Harry used to say): if they want a wedge issue, bring it on. Let them go ahead and try to pass, for the first time in the history of our country, a constitutional amendment aimed at taking rights away from a proper subset of the people. (The prohibition amendment was an ill-advised subtractive social amendment of similar type, but at least it took away the specified rights from all of the people. It was a big mistake, anyway, and soon had to be repealed.) But don't let them try to tell me they are revising a definition. It's nothing to do with defining the word "marriage". Webster's has done that perfectly well. It's about a denial of rights. The idea is that if you fall in love with a lesbian and want to marry her and live with her forever and share your life and property with her and be with her until you sit by her side at the hospital when she dies, that's O.K., but your rights will be subject to a limitation: you will be permitted all this under the sanction of the institution of marriage if you are male, but denied such permission if you are female. To add an insistence on that point in the constitution would be an act of discrimination, not of definition, so let's call things the way they are.RTWT.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
We Won't Punish You, We'll Just Reward Everyone Else
The blogosphere is awash with discussion of the Supreme Court’s Davey decision, which essentially said the state can create a blanket education subsidy that specifically excludes religious education. I won’t rehash all the arguments – instead, I’ll link to both Amy and Eugene, both of whom get it exactly right. So does Justice Scalia’s dissent: “No field of study but religion is singled out for disfavor in this fashion.”
I will make one argument that I haven’t (yet) seen on anyone’s blog. This decision validates the notion that the state can draw a line between religion and non-religion, thus allowing it to fund the latter while denying funds to the former. The problem is that no such line exists. There is no unambiguous way to distinguish spiritual from secular ethical belief systems. Where, for instance, does Scientology lie on the spectrum from religion to non-religion? Originally, the Scientologists did not call their organization a “church”; they changed their tune when they realized they could get the benefits of First Amendment protection plus tax exemptions by going the full-on religion route. But there is nothing in the Scientologists’ belief system (so far as I know) that implies the existence of a deity or even a supernatural realm. Although the Scientologists chose to go in the secular-to-religious direction, it would certainly be possible for other groups to go the opposite direction in light of the Davey decision and policies like those of Washington state. Even if very few groups alter their creeds at the margin to exploit the state’s definition of religion, there will exist groups that sit near the arbitrary borderline, and these groups will be treated differently for essentially arbitrary reasons. Rather than put the state in the position of deciding what's religion and what's not, I would have the state adopt a neutral stance that requires no definition of religion.
No One Expects the Spammish Erudition
The last time I raised a puzzle about spamming strategies, a reader solved it in the comments box. So here’s another: What’s up with bogus sender names like the following?
Aristocracy O. SpenglerNaturally, spammers can’t give their real names. But why pick such bizarre fake ones? Do some people’s spam filters filter out normal names? Is some kind of random word generator being used? (If so, why not just use random letter sequences?) Does curiosity induce recipients to open more emails with unusual sender names?
Pique I. Prorating
Acanthus E. Dragooning
Pricy B. Hijacker
Corpulence P. Ecology
Book Me
Other libertarian bloggers who take the “What book are you?” Quiz have turned out to be Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But me, I turn out to be the freakin’ dictionary. Maybe that’s why their blogs get more traffic than mine.
You're The Dictionary!
by Merriam-Webster
You're one of those know-it-all types, with an amazing amount of knowledge at your command. People really enjoy spending time with you in very short spurts, but hanging out with you for a long time tends to bore them. When folks really need an authority to refer to, however, you're the one they seek. You're an exceptional speller and very well organized.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Bigots for Religious Tolerance
An audiotape with the voice of an Al Qaeda officer threatens more terrorist attacks – and criticizes France’s ban on Muslim head scarves in public buildings:
Two audiotapes purportedly of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant were broadcast on Arabic TV stations, one taunting President Bush and threatening more attacks on the United States, the other criticizing France's decision to ban Islamic headscarves in schools. ...The irony is rich. A leader of Al Qaeda, an organization dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, champions the Western value of religious tolerance. France’s policy is, of course, abominable. But isn’t this a case of the cast-iron pot calling the tarnished-copper kettle black?
The audiotape aired by Dubai-based al-Arabiya criticized France's decision to ban religious symbols in public buildings, including headscarves worn by Muslim women. The law is expected to go before the French Senate early next month.
"The decision of the French president to issue a law to prevent Muslim girls from covering their heads in schools is another example of the Crusader's malice, which Westerners have against Muslims," the recording said.
Monday, February 23, 2004
Quote of the Day
Alex Tabarrok, on the topic of excessive security measures: "It seems to me that the price of eternal vigilance is liberty."
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Dissing the Disinfopedia
Will draws attention to the newly created Disinfopedia. It’s like a Wikipedia for information on interest groups, think tanks, and other potential sources of disinformation. But as Will notes, the site is explicitly ideological in nature; the idea is to show just how beholden such organizations are to the wealthy and powerful. The Wiki format, which allows readers to freely edit the text, does not seem ideally suited to the ideological goal. Says Will: “Wikipedia works because of its ethos of neutrality on contentious issues. If somebody writes something biased, somebody comes along and balances it out. It will be interesting to see if an overtly ideological wiki can survive.”
I was surprised that Will didn’t point out the double entendre of Disinfopedia’s name. It’s supposed to be an encyclopedia on sources of disinformation – but the more natural interpretation is that the site itself is a source of disinformation.
In the “think tank” entry, in which Will inserted a minor edit just for fun, I found the following passage:
Of course, some think tanks are more legitimate than that. Private funding does not necessarily make a researcher a shill, and some think-tanks produce worthwhile public policy research. In general, however, research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.Now, think tanks’ positions do have an uncanny tendency to reflect the interests of their funders. But the implicit conclusion that causality runs in the funding-to-viewpoints direction does not follow. If the think tank is operated by committed supporters of some ideology, and they go out in search of funding, they are most likely to attract the support of those whose interests will be advanced by the ideology in question. Other sources of funding will withhold their funding and go elsewhere. As a result, we will observe a correspondence between funding and viewpoints, but with causality in just the opposite direction: from viewpoints to funding.
I’m not claiming that the choices of think tanks (and other non-profits) are never influenced by the desires of their financial supporters. If making a marginal change in a think tank’s position on a single issue could ease the job of attracting funds, even ideological managers might be tempted to do so, on grounds that gains in other areas from greater funding will outweigh the losses on a single issue. We could even imagine a slippery slope process that runs from a marginal decision like this one to wholesale changes in the think tank’s ideology, by way of personnel changes induced by the seemingly small position shifts. Moreover, the equilibrium number and size of think tanks presumably will have something to do with the general availability of funds for different positions. Nonetheless, the nefarious “guns for hire” implication of the Disinfopedia blurb does not seem justified. The interaction between funds and viewpoints is assuredly a two-way street.
Hey, maybe I should go insert all the above in the Disinfopedia entry and see what happens.
Friday, February 20, 2004
Inflation via Medicaid
Alex Tabarrok explains, briefly but lucidly, how Medicaid drives up prescription prices for everyone – and why the severity of the problem grows as Medicaid’s share of the market increases. I suspect the argument could be generalized to cover other markets in which government is a large-scale buyer.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
More on Publicly Funded Expression
Jack Balkin has responded to my post below. I won’t try to reply to all of his arguments, in part because Sasha Volokh and Juan Non-Volokh have already replied to some of them. But I do want to make a couple of points.
First, Jack overstates my position, thereby creating a strawman. He says, among other things:
But Glen overstates his case when he assumes that use of subsidies and provision of public goods is always suspicious and tyrannical in the same way that the use of criminal fines and penalities is suspicious and tyrannical. I think there is a big difference between throwing a person in jail for being a communist and deciding to create a public library so that children and adults can have books to read. There is a big difference between preventing all demonstrations on the town green and requiring that all schools that receive public funding teach reading and mathematics. There is a big difference between the local sheriff giving parade permits only to Democrats but not to Republicans and the local university deciding that it will offer courses on microbiology but not astrology. Glen has run together a wide variety of different activities under the simple rubric of government tyranny. [emphasis added]I never said that public funding of viewpoints is just as deplorable as the penalties and fines for the expression of particular views. It is not. I agree with all of the comparisons Jack makes (e.g., that it’s better to fund a public library than to jail a communist). But saying program A is preferable to the clearly awful program B does not imply the desirability of program A.
Second, in focusing on my final comment about the danger of having government try to distinguish good from bad ideas, Jack misses the primary argument of my post: that ideas create both positive and negative externalities. For that reason, his economic justification for public funding of the “ideas infrastructure” doesn’t stand up, because it rests on the implicit assumption that the positive externalities outweigh the negative ones at the margin. Jack focuses on the benefits of the public subsidy, without much consideration of the costs. I’ll point out just two examples of how state subsidy for particular forms of expression creates problems: (a) The Office of National Drug Control Policy spends lots of money funding anti-drug commercials that muddy the policy waters with bogus claims (e.g., by suggesting that drug users are funding terrorists) and gin up greater support for the immoral and destructive war on drugs. (b) Science funding that excludes politically unpopular areas of research, such as cloning and fetal stem cells, diverts resources and research programs away from those areas and into other areas likely to produce smaller benefits (such as adult stem cells).
Third, this is not just a First Amendment issue. I don’t claim that the First Amendment invalidates all forms of government-supported expression (hence, there is no constitutional requirement to “blow up” the Washington Monument). Some forms of government action are constitutional but still unjustified or undesirable, and that is my position on most, though perhaps not all, forms of public subsidy for expression.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Market Failure in the Marketplace of Ideas
In a response to David Bernstein, Jack Balkin defends public universities on economic grounds: he claims that free expression creates positive externalities, and therefore private markets will underproduce opportunities for it:
For me, freedom of speech involves important infrastructural elements in technology and institutions that undergird and enrich the system of free expression, produce an educated citizenry and give them the tools and the practical opportunity to participate in the growth and development of culture. … Put in economic terms, the infrastructure of free expression is a public good that markets will underinvest in.Juan Non-Volokh takes apart the economic argument, pointing out that (a) the existence of positive externalities at most justifies subsidized universities, not government-run universities; (b) the prospect of government failure often outweighs market failure; and (c) government provision tends to crowd out private provision of public goods.
I wish to add one more response. As I’ve argued before (and I think Ronald Coase made the same point), ideas produce both positive and negative externalities. There is no discipline of profit-and-loss to assure the weeding out of the bad ideas and the retention of the good ones. As a result, the economic theory of market failure offers as much support for taxing and restricting expression as for subsidizing and promoting it. It is strange indeed that liberals who have nothing but contempt for product markets voice such confident support for the marketplace of ideas, even though the latter are subject to potential failures that are arguably much greater.
If the government could distinguish between the good and bad ideas, then it could subsidize only the good ones. But I have little or no confidence in government’s ability to make such distinctions wisely, and the blanket subsidization of public universities assures funding of both the good and the bad. The strongest case for freedom of expression, I would argue, rests not on economic efficiency but on the inherent danger in giving a coercive government the power to decide what’s good and bad in the realm of ideas. From that perspective, David Bernstein’s position makes a great deal of sense: having public universities ipso facto puts the government in the position of having to make distinctions that it has no business making.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Economics of the Afterlife
Religious visions of reward-and-punishment in the afterlife fall into two basic categories. One category consists of what I will call “precipice” regimes, in which there are just two afterlife outcomes: heaven and hell. If you commit more than some threshold number of sins (possibly just one), you go to hell; otherwise you go to heaven. Many Protestant faiths seem to fall in this category. The other category consists of what I will call “gradient” regimes, in which there is a range of afterlife outcomes lying between sheer torment and pure bliss. In Mormonism (or so I am told), there are many different levels of heaven, and which one you reach depends on your behavior in this life. In Catholicism, how much you’ve sinned in this life determines the amount of time you spend in Purgatory. In Hinduism, your behavior now determines what kind of creature or class of person you’ll become upon resurrection.
Assuming that afterlife regimes are designed to deter bad (sinful) behavior, what beliefs about people’s preferences and choice mechanisms are implied by each type of regime? Let’s say you’re a deity who currently presides over a gradient regime, and you’re considering a switch to a precipice regime. Doing so will induce some individuals, who would have committed some number of sins under a gradient regime, not to commit any sins at all (if the hell-threshold is one sin) or to commit just under the threshold number of sins. That’s the upside. The downside is that individuals who have already passed the threshold will have no incentive to behave well. Since they’re already going to hell, they might as well commit all the sins they want. In addition, people sufficiently far below the threshold will have no incentive not to commit additional sins (unless there’s uncertainty about where the threshold lies). Thus, there’s a trade-off involved in the choice of regimes, and individual preferences and choice mechanisms will determine which regime is the more effective in deterring sins.
I hypothesize that precipice regimes are appropriate if you think that the utility of committing sins is relatively constant over time, whereas gradient regimes are appropriate if there will be occasional opportunities for sinning that are of such high utility that they cannot be resisted by many people regardless of punishment. The downside of a precipice regime is particularly high in the latter case, because many people will succumb to large temptations and then, figuring their souls are lost anyway, commit many more transgressions. On the other hand, if there are few super-sized temptations and many small-to-medium ones, the precipice regime might be more successful in deterring them, because people under a gradient regime will balance each additional sin against the minor reduction in afterlife status that will accompany it, and some medium-sized sins will be enjoyable enough to be worth it.
A precipice regime might also be more effective in preventing addictive sins, defined as sins with increasing marginal utility of commission: the more of the sin you’ve committed, the greater is your desire to do it again. Under a gradient regime, people who commit their first addictive sin will have an increasing inclination to do so repeatedly (unless the gradient becomes steeper and steeper as the number of sins rises). A precipice regime could not prevent the additional sinning, but it would stand a better chance of inducing people not to commit the very first sin.
Next up: mixed regimes, in which some sins are treated with a gradient and others with a precipice.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Barbecue Day
A student sent this letter to Jolene Koester, the president of my university, and for some reason I was CC’ed (along with two other people). I figure it’s an open letter, but just in case it’s not, I’m leaving out the student’s name.
I will not be attending class today. This day is a national holiday set aside to honor the presidents of the United States of America, especially George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. These men showed uncommon courage and leadership in successfully leading our country through some of the most difficult times in history. I could elaborate, but there are volumes of historical information about these and all the other US presidents.My first reaction was to snort; I figure this student is less concerned about honoring freedom and democracy than attending a backyard barbecue. But then I thought, what’s wrong with that? Lucky for me, I don’t teach on Mondays, so I’ll be attending a barbecue myself – not because I admire the presidents (I can count the ones I truly admire on one hand), but because I like barbecue. And it is pretty bizarre that CSUN takes off Cesar Chavez Day but not Presidents’ Day. Setting aside the question of which day is more worth celebrating, there’s something to be said for the coordinating function of holidays: it’s easier to organize fun activities when everyone gets the same day off work. Given that most people in this country celebrate Presidents’ Day, not Cesar Chavez Day, CSUN’s calendar is just a little bit off.
In addition to the above-mentioned leaders, this “Presidents Day” holiday has been expanded to include honor to ALL the American presidents, regardless of political persuasion. And since this fine institution receives federal funding (approved by the president), it only seems consistent that the faculty, administration and students of Cal State Northridge acknowledge this day. I do hope that this scheduling error is corrected so that next year, we all will be able to reflect on this nation without whose leaders the world would not know the meaning of freedom and democracy.
Picking Fights with Libertarians
I enjoy Mark Kleiman’s blog, despite often disagreeing with it. But Mark does have an odd penchant for picking fights with libertarians even when we agree with him. This happened a year ago, on the subject of laws that allow health insurance companies to break their contracts (see my responses here and here, both reaching into topics we do disagree on). It happened again last month, when he skewered Bush’s risible moonbase proposal (see my response here). And now it’s happened again, in a post on the FDA’s decision on the morning-after pill. “Once again,” he writes, “we can expect a deafening silence from the libertarians, whose sincerity about personal liberty I keep doing my level best not to doubt.”
Weird. It’s true that libertarians haven’t said much on this specific issue, though some have – read this and this and this. But on the other hand, libertarians generally argue that the FDA should be either emasculated or abolished entirely; here's a page articles from Cato, and an entire website run by the Independent Institute. I’m pretty sure Mark would not support eliminating the FDA, but the point is that doing so would make the morning-after pill issue moot; as long as abortion remained legal for even the first three days of pregnancy, the morning-after pill would be readily available. (As an aside, I should point out that there are many pro-life libertarians, though I’m pretty sure they are in the minority.)
I’m guessing the bigger issue is that Mark wants to know why libertarians aren’t opposing Bush. But more and more, they are. I, for one, have stated my opposition to George Bush repeatedly on this site. Radley Balko has been so critical of George Bush that he had to declare a week off from Bush-bashing – a pledge that he’s been unable to keep. Indeed, Bush-bashing is a favorite activity on most every libertarian site I visit. From Cato, here is a scathing indictment of his fiscal performance, here's another, and here's another from two years ago, before it got popular; here is an article criticizing the civil liberties record of John Ashcroft, and here is page of links on civil liberties under the Bush administration. If the question is why libertarians aren’t flocking to the Democrats, Mark should know the answer to that one: it’s because the Democrats are awful, too, on almost every front, including civil liberties. Lest we forget, Democrats voted for the civil-liberties-violating Patriot Act, Democrats voted for the political-speech-restricting Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, Democrats voted for the nonpolitical-speech-restricting Child Online Protection Act, Democrats support hate speech laws, Democrats stand should-to-shoulder with Republican drug warriors. Even so, most libertarians I’ve spoken to are hoping a Democrat wins the next presidential election so that we can return to the glory days of gridlock.
UPDATE: In an update to his original post, Mark admits the silence has not been so deafening after all, posting a link to this post by libertarian Jacob Levy.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Love Needs No License
I support gay marriage (at least until government gets out of the marriage business altogether), but this statement by one of California’s gay newlyweds gets it all wrong:
“Now we’re not second-class citizens; now we can have a loving relationship like every other married couple we know," [Nancy] Felixson said.Hey, you don’t need the state’s permission to have a loving relationship. That’s already legal. What’s at issue here is not love, but equal access to state-granted privileges like married tax status and medical power of attorney.
Friday, February 13, 2004
Random Enfranchisement
A passing comment by Brian Weatherson (on the topic of vote-counting in Florida) got me thinking – and we all know how dangerous that can be.
So we’re just going to trust the computers. Given how reliable we all know computers to be, this is about as democratic as selecting candidates by lots. (Just for the record, I think it’s an interesting theoretical question about how democratic that is. It’s how we pick juries after all, and they are often considered an important part of the democratic process.)Set aside selecting candidates by lots, and consider a somewhat different proposal: selecting voters by lots. Instead of allowing anyone who meets the formal criteria for voting to vote, why not take a random sample of registered voters (or people in the census) and designate them as the only people allowed to vote in a given election? If the sample were sufficiently large, it would represent the views of the overall population, within some margin of error (a sample of a mere 10,000 would generate a vanishingly small margin of error, if the sample were truly random). The people selected would have a stronger incentive to become informed and vote wisely than in the status quo, because each vote would stand a greater chance of actually making a difference. The chance would still be very small, of course – it must be small in order for the law of large numbers to kick in and support my prior claim about having a representative sample. But apparently feelings of civic duty interact with very small chances of making a difference; otherwise, non-voting would be even more common than it is. I surmise, therefore, that increasing the weight of one’s vote by two or three orders of magnitude would have a substantial impact on voting choices, even if the absolute likelihood were still tiny.
Aside from the benefits of motivating qualified voters to consider their votes more carefully, the proposed system would reduce the administrative costs of voting. We could invest a great deal more per voter in safeguarding against fraud and error and still save money. We’d need a mere fraction of the ballots, voting booths, and manpower to run the system. Plus, everyone else could stay at work instead of taking time off to vote.
Yeah, yeah, this is a pipe dream. It’ll never happen, which is why I don’t have to worry much about the possible downsides of my scheme. But I’m curious – what would the disadvantages be? The obvious one is that people whose name never got randomly chosen would feel disenfranchised (which, by some definition of the term, they would be). Yet everyone would have the same chance of being a voter, so there would be no formal violation of equal treatment principles. The communitarian objection would be that participation in the voting process is desirable in and of itself, as a device for making people feel connected to each other and their government. This argument is not terribly persuasive to me, since I’d prefer that people feel attached to voluntarily chosen communities instead of the state, but I can still understand the objection. What other objections are there?
Thursday, February 12, 2004
You Can't Stem the Stem-Cell Tide
This is fantastic news:
South Korean and U.S. researchers said Wednesday they had cloned a human embryo and extracted from it sought-after cells called embryonic stem cells. The cloning was not intended to make human babies, but the first step toward developing cures for diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers said.As anyone who's spoken to me on the subject will tell you, I am bullish on both cloning and stem-cell technologies. In the past, I’ve predicted that these technologies, separately or in concert, will substantially extend the human lifespan within the next 20 or 30 years (if not sooner). However, the political resistance to both types of research, exemplified by Bush’s limitations on the use of fetal stem cells and his desire to ban all human cloning, dampened my excitement somewhat. Today’s news reignites it. Even if political opposition slows down or stops the research in the US, it will assuredly occur elsewhere in the world. Note that while both Americans and South Koreans are credited, the actual experiments took place in South Korea.
The experiment, the first published report of cloned human stem cells, means so-called therapeutic cloning is no longer a theory but a reality. Supporters of medical cloning say it can transform medicine, offering tailored and highly effective treatments for diseases. They say it could eventually lead to grow-your-own organ transplants.
In casual conversation, some people have given me skeptical looks when I’ve suggested that stem-cell and cloning research are closely related and will eventually merge. Today’s news confirms my suspicions. The cloning process was used to create embryonic stem cells with genetic codes identical (or nearly identical) to those of adult human beings. Stem cells have the potential to grow into any form of human tissue. Thus, we may eventually be able to grow new human organs that are exact genetic matches for recipients, a development that could both alleviate the organ shortage and decrease the frequency of organ rejection.
Keep eating your Wheaties, folks. You don’t want to die before the fruit of this groundbreaking research ripens enough for general use!
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Conservatives in Academia
So why are conservatives underrepresented in academia? Kieran Healy argues that conservatives are on the horns of a dilemma: they must either (a) admit the existence of institutionalized inequality or (b) admit that conservatives just aren’t as smart as liberals.
C’mon now, isn’t there a more obvious explanation? No, I don’t mean Ezra Klein’s idea that smart conservatives are more likely than liberals to seek material gain in the private sector (though there may be something to that). I mean the fact that academia is almost entirely a non-profit enterprise, and it’s much easier for discrimination to survive without the discipline of profit and loss. In academia, there is no bottom line. Whether one gets tenure has much to do with the popularity of your ideas with the old guard in your profession. Like will tend to hire like, and as a result the same biases get duplicated year after year. The dominance of liberalism decades ago perpetuates itself to the present day. (Note that it’s much easier for non-liberal professors to survive in institutions with a long history of non-liberal viewpoints, such as the University of Chicago.)
There is a very weak market test for schools based on ideological balance, because students can choose to go to other colleges – but rare is the student who will reject a prestigious school because of the ideology of its professors. The smart but non-liberal student will attend the most prestigious school he can get into, and then tolerate the views of his professors for long enough to graduate. The lack of diversity across colleges in their ideological balance makes it very difficult to find an equivalent college with a substantially different ideological balance.
Another possible reason liberals dominate academia was suggested by Robert Nozick: intellectuals are, in general, people who appreciate thinking and planning, and they feel underappreciated. They tend to think society would just work better if all the dumb people would stand aside and let the smart people run things. As a result, they tend to be more hostile to arguments in favor of spontaneous, decentralized orders like the market.
One more thing: When complaining about the ideological balance in academia, conservatives are generally not asking for any special privileges. They aren’t demanding affirmative action for conservatives. Rather, they are drawing attention to the hypocrisy of liberals who champion the need for diversity of every variety (gender, race, economic background, etc.) except the kind of diversity that presumably matters most in an academic setting: diversity of opinion. Perversely, they even justify race- and class-based preferences on grounds of engendering more diversity of viewpoints. I’ve yet to hear a liberal advocate of diversity-based affirmative action advocate the recruitment of more non-liberals.
(BTW, I’m not a conservative. I’m a libertarian. Since libertarians are usually lumped together with conservatives in the studies of ideological diversity, I don’t know whether libertarians are over- or under-represented relative to their numbers in the population.)
You Can't Plan This Kind of Thing
This evening, I was explaining to a class of MBA students how above-normal profit in an industry tends to attract entry into the industry (unless there are significant barriers to entry). I asked the students for examples of industries that are currently making above-normal profits, and one student volunteered the pornography industry. “Yes,” I said, “and I imagine there’s a great deal of entry in porn!”
Monday, February 09, 2004
WTC Insurance Case
A federal court will soon decide whether the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center constituted one event or two. The answer matters because the insurance policy carried by the WTC’s owners specified payouts on a per-event basis. If 9/11 attack was one event, they will receive $3.5 million from the insurance companies; if it was two, they will receive $7 million.
There is no obvious right answer here. The biggest lesson, one that I emphasize to my law & economics students, is that no contract is ever complete. There will always be contingencies unforeseen by the parties and left unspecified in the contract, because it is costly to predict unusual events and insert clauses to deal with them, and there are diminishing returns to doing so. The parties to a contract rationally choose to leave some things for the courts to decide ex post, and that’s why the courts have to establish default rules.
Still, I’ll take a stab at finding the most correct answer. While the 9/11 attack was highly unusual, non-independent events are hardly unknown to contract law. Consider the damage done to your car by a hailstorm – would it be considered one event (a hailstorm) or many events (hailstone 1, hailstone 2, … , hailstone 100…)? I’m not an insurance lawyer, but I strongly suspect it’s the former. Similarly, if you have cancer, and the cancer leads to the need for two different procedures (an operation to remove a tumor, and a series of chemotherapy treatments), your insurance policy’s “per condition” cap presumably applies to the total from both, not each one individually. In each case, the probability of a second event, conditional on the other having occurred, is greater than zero. Given that my car got hit by one hailstone, there’s a greater chance than usual chance it will get hit by another. If I need to get a tumor removed, the chance of my also needing chemo is greater than if I hadn’t needed to get a tumor removed.
The general rule, then, is that when two events are not statistically independent, they are treated as one for insurance purposes. (I’m assuming positively related events; I choose to ignore cases in which one event reduces the likelihood of another.) In the present case, the two airplanes that hit the WTC were pretty clearly part of a coordinated attack, and thus not statistically independent. So I would probably side with the insurance companies, unless their contracts defined “event” in some novel way. The precedent established would be consistent with the general pattern I noted above.
Naturally, people writing insurance contracts would have the right to contract around the precedent by defining “event” in some more specific way (and adjusting premiums upward accordingly, since the liability created for the insurance company would be greater). The same would be true of the opposite precedent as well (with a downward adjustment of premiums). This is one of the great virtues of contract law – if you don’t like the court’s rules, you can typically write your own, with the consent of the other party, of course. But since the rule I advocate here seems congruent with current practice in less dramatic circumstances, I think it would not require as much rewriting of existing contract forms as would the alternative.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, I realize there’s some ambiguity in the rule I suggest here. Among other, we would have to ask what other factors should be taken as given before doing the calculation of statistical independence. For example, an elderly person might be more susceptible to a variety of illnesses; if we didn’t control for age, then a person with condition X might have a greater chance (than a randomly selected person) of also having condition Y, even though X and Y are not related. To deal with this and similar cases, my rule might have to be adjusted to some threshold higher than zero correlation. The implication for events like hailstorms and WTC attacks is still pretty clear, though.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
The Linguistic-Economic Interface
What is the appropriate response when someone says “Thank you”? Most Americans would answer, “You’re welcome.” And in most situations that is the expected reply. But in some circumstances, the appropriate response to “Thank you” is another “Thank you.” When? After people have concluded a commercial transaction. The salesperson says "Thank you," and I reply, "Thank you." And that makes perfect sense. When one person gives another a gift, the recipient has given up nothing, and thus deserves no thanks. But voluntary commercial exchanges are generally mutually beneficial. Both sides gain, and this symmetry makes it sensible to have both parties give the same expression of gratitude.
(Giving credit where it’s due: I heard someone make the same point a long time ago, but I honestly can’t remember who. I think it might have been Walter Williams.)
Can’t … resist … tasteless … joke …
Just came across this article with the headline, “Infant dies after surgery to remove second head.” I guess it just goes to show… Two heads really are better than one!
Friday, February 06, 2004
Snowclone Wars
J-P Stacey despises my word coinage, saying it’s “redolent of William Gibson and other ‘writors’” and sticks out like “a chart R&B song in my CD collection.” I decline to defend myself. Instead, I’ll defer to Mark Liberman’s response: “I'm just a bystander here, but if I were Glen Whitman, I'd be happy to be classed with William Gibson and chart R&B songs.” Well, I could do without the chart R&B songs, but William Gibson’s no slouch. He coined the word “cyberspace,” after all.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Cutting-Edge Marketing Strategy
I heard this on the radio, but I can't find a source online. Dunkin Donuts plans to adopt a bold new marketing plan to compete with the likes of Starbucks. It will offer coffee and cappuccino at reduced prices, in sizes called "small," "medium," and "large."
This Is What Happens When You Have Group-Based Rights
The Pechanga Indian Tribe is trying to squeeze out some its members, saying their claim to Pechanga heritage is dubious. Of course, the remaining 90% of the tribe will get a larger share of the tribe's casino revenues.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Thanks, Bro
Neal's two-week guest stint is over, but I'm sure he'll return sometime soon. I've enjoyed his contributions, and I hope y'all have as well.
Monday, February 02, 2004
Choice Comments
Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson both have interesting comments on the growing “choice makes people unhappy” literature. Both Tyler and Will point out that, if your choice set really is too large to sort through at low cost, then it pays to have people who will do the sorting for you – editors who select the best articles, waiters who tell you the best items on the menu, etc. I made the same point about a month ago. Will adds that the need for editors creates new entrepreneurial opportunities for those who can do the most effective job of helping others narrow their choice sets.
Although sometimes presented as evidence against the standard microeconomic theory of consumer behavior (and possibly all rational-choice theories), the “choice makes people unhappy” literature doesn’t really shake my confidence in economic modeling. It just changes my assessment of the relative importance of different economic models. The usual static choice model, in which a consumer just chooses the highest-utility point available in a completely known and well-defined choice set, has always been a simplification. For some contexts, it’s an innocuous simplification. In other contexts, particularly those with a greater informational burden, other models must be brought to bear, the most obvious being search theory (as Will indicates).
I’ve long thought that search theory deserves greater play than it gets at present. It’s been applied extensively in labor economics (for job search), but its use elsewhere is more limited. I’ve been working on a search theory of suicidal choice for a while now, and long-time readers may remember my search theory of romance. Search theory also provides the utility-maximizing explanation of satisficing. What I haven’t seen yet, but would very much like to see, is a thorough reworking of basic consumer theory along search theory lines. (Please email me if you know of anyone who’s working on this!)