When I first discussed the Clear and Sapphire situation, I characterized it as a coordination game, i.e., a game in which the players wish to coordinate their choices. The sides-of-the-road game is the classic example of a coordination game: it doesn’t really matter which side of the road people drive on, so long as all drivers do the same thing. The model applies to bars because people generally want to go where other people go.
However, Ellen made an interesting comment in the comments box: “Reminds me of the star-bellied sneeches [sic] and the plain-bellied sneeches [sic].” Although there are some similarities, this is actually a quite different game. For those who don’t know Dr. Seuss’s parable of racism, the story goes like this: Some Sneetches had stars on their bellies, while other Sneetches did not. The plain-bellied Sneetches wanted to hang out with the star-bellied Sneetches, but the star-bellies excluded them. So the plain-bellies went through Sylvester McMonkey McBean’s Star-On Machine, which gave them stars. Upon discovering this, the star-bellied Sneetches had their stars removed using McBean’s Star-Off Machine. And then the once-plain-but-now-star-bellied Sneetches went through the Star-Off Machine, and then the once-star-but-now-plain-bellied Sneetches went through the Star-On Machine, ad infinitum.
This game is identical to other famous games of game theory, including Matching Pennies and One-Two-Three-Shoot. In all these games, there is one player who wants an outcome in which both players take the same action (the initially plain-bellied Sneetches wanted to blend in), while the other player wants an outcome in which the players take different actions (the initially star-bellied Sneetches didn’t care whether they had stars or not, as long as their bellies differed from those of the initially plain-bellied Sneetches). Unlike the sides-of-the-road game, in which there are two equilibria, in the Sneetches game there is no equilibrium unless the players randomize. Instead, you get a round-and-round chase effect like the one described by Seuss.
So how does all this apply to the bar situation? Suppose there are two kinds of bar customers, the “hip” and the “unhip.” The unhip want to hang with the hip, but the hip do not want to hang with the unhip. The analogy to the Sneetches is straightforward. The hip will colonize bars, thereby attracting the unhip, whose presence eventually drives away the hip, who then colonize another bar, where they are eventually followed by the unhip, ad infinitum.
So now we have two game theoretic representations of the bar situation. Which is correct? Both have plausible characteristics. One the one hand, it is certainly true that people tend to want to coordinate their bar choices, at least with the kind of people they like. On the other hand, it also clearly true that some people seek to avoid other kinds of people (without the other people necessarily feeling the same).
I suspect that a complex combination of both games is going on. Early in the game, a new bar is discovered (or rediscovered) by some fraction of the hip. A coordination game ensues, because hip people want to hang with other hip people. The bar acquires a reputation as a hipster hangout, which is good because it attracts even more hip people, but bad because word eventually gets out to the unhip, transforming the coordination game into a Sneetches game. Once enough unhip people start showing up, the desirability of the bar begins to wane, and some hip people eventually try a new place with fewer hip people but a better hip-to-unhip ratio. A new round of the coordination game follows.
This combined model provides a better explanation than the coordination game alone. The basic story is one of coordination – people want to congregate in the same place. But the Sneetches aspect of the game helps to explain the switching phenomenon I described in the earlier post. The arrival of an undesirable crowd creates instability in an equilibrium that would otherwise be hard to escape.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Bar Flight, Part 2
Monday, June 21, 2004
Acronymic Acrimony
The college I work for used to be called the “College of Business Administration and Economics,” a.k.a. COBAE (pronounced "co-bay"). Close observers will notice that the acronym doesn’t quite match the words. Why should “of” get representation while “and” does not? I figured the acronym should be either “COBAAE” or “CBAE.” I attributed the use of “COBAE” to its greater ease of pronunciation.
But then the faculty voted a couple of years ago to shorten the college’s name to “College of Business and Economics.” Ah, I thought – finally the COBAE acronym will have become accurate. To my surprise, many people here now refer to the college as COBE. Having subtracted “Administration” from the full title, they subtracted an “A” from the acronym. I see the logic, but I still protest. I’m willing to give nouns privileged treatment (as in CBE) or not (as in COBAE), but I can’t abide the disparate treatment of conjunctions and prepositions. If “of” gets representation, so should “and,” since the new name has rendered the pronunciation issue moot.
American Decadence and the Marginal Terrorist
The preliminary report of the 9/11 Commission included many disturbing revelations, but there was one detail I found heartening. The following is from the print version of an L.A. Times article from last Thursday (abbreviated version, without the portion below, available online with registration)
The report also revealed that some of the conspirators grew skittish about the plans in the final weeks and days of preparation and may have considered dropping out.Why is this heartening? Because it indicates that American-style decadence very nearly induced at least one terrorist to abandon his murderous plans. American culture does not always triumph, and it did not triumph here – but it is still, I contend, a force for good in the world. Contrary to the popular all-or-nothing model of the terrorist mind, according to which one is either a terrorist or not, what we see here is the marginal terrorist, who can potentially be turned from terror by the enjoyment of material pleasures. And material pleasures are what America does best.
Among the possible defectors was Ziad Samir Jarrah, the suspected pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, whose frosted hair, taste for Beirut discos and beer drinking apparently caused friction with plot leader [Mohamed] Atta. [emphasis added]
The report indicates that Jarrah reconsidered withdrawing after “an emotional conversation” with [Ramzi] Binalshibh, who “encouraged Jarrah to see the plan through.”
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Machine Machines and Number Numbers
I wonder what you’d call a machine whose function was to make automatic teller machines (ATMs). Would it be called an ATM machine? Well, no, of course not, since ATM machine means the same thing as plain old ATM: If you see a sign saying “ATM machine inside” when you enter a grocery store, you will find an ordinary ATM, and you won't find some other kind of machine that has something to do with ATMs.
This kind of redundancy also occurs with acronyms whose final N stands for number. The ones I can think of right now are PIN number, VIN number, and ISBN number. I also recently heard someone talk about an IM message, referring not to a message regarding an instant message, but to an ordinary instant message.
I’ve heard plenty of people (including myself) complain about this careless treatment of acronyms, including a character in the comic strip Jump Start, in the installment from December 17, 2002:
Son: There’s an ATM machine next to the escalators.But we must go beyond mere complaining, and ask ourselves, “Why?” OK, OK, we linguists must go beyond mere complaining, etc., but anyway: Why is it that speakers tend to redundantly expand these acronyms? Why don’t we ever hear about AT machines, PI numbers, or I-messages? (Actually, I have heard about the last item, but only in anger-management contexts.) Right now, I don't know, so instead, I’ll ask “When?” When, exactly, are acronyms subject to this kind of expansion? The four data points so far have several things in common:
Mom: Really? An automated teller machine machine?
Son: Mom, you’re repeating yourself.
Mom: I am?
Son: You said the word “machine” twice.
Mom: You’re the one who called it an “ATM machine.” “Machine” is what the “M” stands for in the acronym “ATM.”
Son: Just enter your PIN number, willya?
Mom: Personal identification number number?
- Phonetic: They all end in a nasal consonant (M or N).
- Syntactic: They are all common nouns (not proper nouns, such as FBI).
- Semantic: The final letter stands for the “main” noun (which linguists refer to as the head noun). That is, an ATM is a kind of Machine; PINs, VINs, and ISBNs are kinds of Numbers; and an IM is a kind of Message.
So far, then, any combination of these facts could be the magic combination that correlates with a tendency to be redundantly expanded. Let’s check them one by one.
Phonetic: Are there redundantly expanded acronyms ending in letters other than M or N? The closest I can think of is scuba gear, which isn’t quite an example of what we’re looking for (it would be if people called it scuba apparatus). When Dad worked at a refinery, there was a device technically known as the Fluidized Catalytic Cracking Unit, or FCCU. Does anyone ever call this an FCCU unit? I don’t know; all I know is what Dad and his coworkers called it, which I won’t write here out of respect for the high standards of Glen’s blog. What about OR room, or ER room? I haven’t heard these, but I could imagine them being out there.
Syntactic: Are there redundantly expanded acronyms that are parts of speech other than common nouns? I can’t think of any. You’d better get here PDQ quick sounds pretty bad to me (i.e., even worse than ATM machine, etc.).
Semantic: Are there redundantly expanded acronyms whose head noun is abbreviated by a letter other than the last one? Has anyone ever heard someone talk about the OMB office, or the BLM bureau? For a better comparison, I should find similar acronyms that aren’t proper nouns, though. Let’s see … OK, how about ETA time? I’ve never heard it, but I suppose it could be out there.
My working hypothesis, then, is that redundant acronym expansion (RAE for short; “RAE expansion” for medium) happens only for acronyms that are nouns, and whose head noun is abbreviated by the final letter. I imagine there are further restrictions, too. Even better than being able to say “RAE occurs only under conditions X, Y, and Z,” would be to be able to say, “… and always under these conditions (for speakers who permit RAE).” I’m nowhere near that point, though. Submissions of acronyms that have undergone RAE are welcomed, as are submissions of acronyms that in your personal opinion could not undergo RAE.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Bar Flight
There are two bars near my home in Studio City, CA, one called Clear and the other called Sapphire. They are located within one block of each other, and both aim at approximately the same demographic (single 20- to 30-somethings). When I first visited these bars, just over a year ago, Clear was the undoubted champ. On Friday and Saturday nights, people would line up and wait for an hour or more to get in; and even on weeknights, Clear could still get a respectable crowd. Sapphire, on the other hand, subsisted on Clear’s overflow – the people who got fed up with waiting at the door on weekends. On weeknights, Sapphire was almost deserted.
After frequenting Clear and (occasionally) Sapphire for two or three months, I went on a several-month hiatus. Now I’ve returned to the scene, and a transformation has taken place. Sapphire now dominates, with Clear picking up the scraps. On a weeknight, when Sapphire is about half-full, Clear is a ghost town. On weekends, Sapphire fills up first, with the overflow going to Clear. Sapphire does not usually have a line, though, so Clear’s overflow crowd can be substantial.
What happened? What we have here is a textbook case of network externalities. Network externalities exist when consumers’ satisfaction from a good or service increases with the number of other customers using it. In the case of bars and nightclubs, customers may care about ambience and service, but they care even more about meeting and mingling with other people – especially members of the opposite sex. As a result, customers choosing between two near-equivalent bars will tend to choose the one with the larger crowd, at least up to a point. The result is herding: one bar will attract large numbers, while the other remains largely empty. If people did not care about the actions of other customers, we would expect a more even distribution of customers across locations.
Network externalities set the stage for multiple equilibria. Just as left-side-driving and right-side-driving are both viable equilibria of the sides-of-the-road game, most-people-go-to-Clear and most-people-go-to-Sapphire are both viable equilibria of the choose-your-bar game. Which equilibrium actually occurs can result entirely from random factors (slightly more people happened to visit Clear early on, resulting in a snowball effect leading to Clear’s dominance), or it can result from historical factors (Clear might have opened a short while before Sapphire did).
But what explains the switch from Clear to Sapphire? I surmise that as Studio City became known as something of a Valley hotspot, more and more people found themselves having to wait too long to get into Clear. Eventually, Sapphire was getting enough overflow traffic that it reached the tipping point (another common feature of network externality situations). People realized that, at least on weekends, there would be enough people at both bars to make them worthwhile. Sapphire’s reputation as a place to meet-and-mingle caught up with Clear’s, and the expectations transferred over to the weekdays as well. For some relatively short period of time, people might even have randomized between the two locations, because either place could have had the better crowd on any given night. But that kind of equilibrium is unstable, just as randomizing over left-side-driving and right-side-driving is unstable. Very small differences in choices can tip the balance in favor of one of two extremes. In this case, a small handful of committed Sapphire patrons might have snowballed into the current Sapphire equilibrium.
UPDATE: Read my further analysis here.
Monday, June 14, 2004
Supreme Court Punts on Pledge Case
Back in March, I observed that the “under God” crowd could only come out on top in the Pledge case by technical knock-out, by having the case vacated on grounds of standing. Well, they got their TKO.
Jacob Levy’s comments are on point: “On the standing question itself I have no view; I like to see stringent standing requirements, but think that they're pretty hard to make sense of in establishment clause cases, since by definition establishment that doesn't also impair free exercise doesn't commit any easily-cognizable harm against any easily-identified individual.” Exactly. In principle, does it really matter that Michael Newdow was not the custodial parent of a child in school? Is he not, like everyone else in our society, affected by the state’s decision to incorporate religious affirmations in the daily rituals of the public schools?
Friday, June 11, 2004
The Two Things about Being a Public Intellectual
1. You’ll work your ass off trying to devise new, exciting, and sophisticated ideas.
2. You’ll be remembered for some silly piece of fluff you threw together based on a bar conversation.
Every three months or so, in a fit of narcissism, I’ll Google myself or my website to see who’s been linking to me. Here’s what I discovered the last time I did it: I’ve gotten more publicity for The Two Things than anything else I’ve done, casually or professionally. Periodically, someone new will discover The Two Things page and link it, and I’ll only know because of the unexpected deluge of emails with more submissions. Today it was MetaFilter. I’m not annoyed, just amused. Keep those submissions coming.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
If You Multiply Two Negative Rights, Do You Get One Positive Right?
Lots of people are still talking about this negative-versus-positive rights thing, so I guess they (the writers, not the readers) must not be bored yet. So I’ll just make one more observation that I hope will clear up some confusion. I’ll try to keep it short. Consider two hypothetical rights claims:
(1) I have a right not to be punched without my consent.
(2) I have a right to police assistance in enforcing claim (1).
These claims are not identical. Claim (1) is only a claim to the non-interference of others (they should refrain from punching me). It is therefore a negative right, assuming that I have an underlying property right in my own body. Claim (2), on the other hand, is a claim to the provision of specific services by other people – police officers and, by extension, the taxpayers who fund them. It is therefore a positive right, unless we assume that I own the labor of the police or a fraction of the wealth of the taxpayers.
By merging claims (1) and (2), Eugene and some others reach the conclusion that some allegedly negative rights are actually positive. It is a natural merger (though not a necessary one, as anarchists will emphasize), because claim (1) does not seem terribly useful unless backed up by claim (2). Libertarians who support both claims are indeed supporting some positive rights, albeit only those used to back up negative rights. But nonetheless, the two claims are conceptually distinct, and dehomogenizing them will clear up much confusion.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Atom Enabled
At the request of a reader, I have enabled Atom, which is some kind of syndication device. I don't know much about this, but if it makes the site easier to read for some people, I'm in favor (although it apparently strips out all paragraph breaks and text formatting). The link is to the right.
Is the Square Root of a Negative Right an Imaginary Right?
Good lord, what a lot of confusion on the topic of negative and positive rights. Eugene Volokh. Stephen Bainbridge. Jane Galt. Jonathan Wilde.
Here’s why everyone is confused: They are working under the mistaken notion that negative rights and positive rights are fundamental concepts, which can be defined by reference to specific kinds of actions and behavior. But negative and positive rights are in fact derivative concepts: they have no particular meaning without reference to some more fundamental notion of rights, specifically, of property rights.
Example: I have a negative right not to be punched in the nose. This accords with the standard definition of a negative right, inasmuch as it requires someone else to refrain from something rather than doing something. But what about that other fellow’s negative right to swing his arms around without interference, perhaps as part of a funky dance? These two rights, both seemingly negative, seem to be in conflict, and the conflict is resolved in my favor only by the presumption that I own my nose. If I did not – say, if I had signed a contract giving someone else the right to make decisions regarding my nose – then the conflict would be resolved in the arm-swinger’s favor.
This is exactly equivalent to Eugene’s point about private property: that my negative right not to have strangers walking around on my land entails a restriction of the negative right of other people to walk wherever they please. To assume that other people have such a right is to assume an underlying regime (moral or legal) in which land is communal. And if that is the case, then I have no negative right to exclude others at all. Once again, the conflict between seemingly negative rights is resolved by an assignment of underlying property rights.
Any positive right can be recast in negative terms, if you’re willing to jigger with the underlying property rights distribution. For instance, a right to food and shelter is usually treated as a positive right, but we can cast it as a negative right if we are also willing to say that those who must provide these things do not own the labor and resources needed to do so. And indeed, that’s essentially what we say in cases where the initial owners have specifically agreed to provide the goods or services in question, such as through a grain futures contract. The contractual arrangement changes the distribution of property rights.
So are libertarians wrong to say their position supports negative rights and eschews positive ones, and that this distinguishes libertarianism from other points of view? If they intend those terms to carry much philosophical weight, then yes, they’re wrong. But the language of positive and negative rights is better understood as a shorthand summary of the libertarian point of view, given a context in which the basic elements of the libertarian understanding of property rights – one of self-ownership and private ownership of external resources such as land – happen to be pretty well accepted. Very few Americans, at least, would be willing to admit that you don’t own your labor or your private home. Libertarians can thus use the language of positive and negative rights to explain how their vision builds on (though is not identical to) commonly understood conceptions of self- and world-ownership.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Everything Must Be Banned or Required Department
The usual justification for ratings systems is that they allow parents greater control over their children’s viewing habits. But every now and then, the nannies betray their real agenda: they want to do the parenting themselves.
Example: According to an article in today’s L.A. Times (not available without registration), a movie theater chain has started created special IDs for kids under 17, by which parents can give permission for their kids to see R-rated movies without parental accompaniment. Parents have to accompany their kid to the movie theater just once, for the purpose of creating the ID. Great idea, right? Not according to the hand-wringing set:
Critics argue that the cards amount to parents handing to their kids the delicate decision about what movies are appropriate, a shift they say violates the intent of the motion picture industry's voluntary rating system.Now, why in the world would giving parents greater choice undermine their faith in the system? The parents signing the ID cards obviously don’t mind. So the real concern here is that other parents will get annoyed at the permissive parenting of their neighbors and demand government intervention to set them straight. And the threat of regulation is, of course, what motivates industry spokesmen like Jack Valenti to oppose what is clearly a great concept.
"All R-rated films are not alike. It is the parents' responsibility to make specific judgments about R films — and wrong to give a blanket endorsement to all," said Jack Valenti, president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which issues movie ratings.
…
Some opponents fear that leaving movie choices to teens could taint the ratings system, voluntarily enforced by theaters since 1968. They say that could open the door to government regulation that would stifle creativity and experimentation in filmmaking.
“If parents lose faith in the system, the first thing they'll ask is ‘What are our recourses?’ Then, we could start hearing from every politician that wants to make a name for himself in the name of family values,” said Dann Gire, president of the Chicago Film Critics Assn.
Head of the Class
Some people are upset about the phenomenon reported in this NYT Magazine article. It seems that teenagers are having a lot more oral sex these days, presumably as a means of avoiding HIV transmission.
Amy blames the phenomenon on abstinence-only education:
And yet, it seems not to have occurred to people that teenagers are having unprotected oral sex because their teachers have told them that having protected intercourse is too dangerous. No one is talking about the fact that preaching abstinence and telling kids that pre-marriage romantic relationships can hurt them may be encouraging promiscuity.I agree with Amy that abstinence-only education is pretty stupid (read the rest of her otherwise excellent post for more details). But is the shift to oral sex one of its ill effects? Are the abstinence-only classes really telling kids to avoid having sex and just failing to mention that oral sex counts as sex? Given the right-wing origins of abstinence-only education, I figure the classes probably tell students not to have any form of sex, especially not the crime-against-nature variety.
So why the shift to oral? It sounds to me like a fairly rational response to the risks involved. I’m inclined to present it to my students as an example of how people respond to changes in relative costs by substituting in favor of less costly activities. The fact is that while both oral and vaginal anal sex can transmit HIV (and other STDs), the risk is a good bit lower for oral sex. Comparing unprotected oral to unprotected vaginal or anal, the evidence, such as it is, indicates that oral is much safer. I assume the same goes for the comparison between protected oral and protected vaginal or anal. I have not seen any comparisons of risk for unprotected oral versus protected vaginal or anal. But even if the former is riskier than the latter, they are both safer than unprotected vaginal or anal, so it makes perfect sense that both would increase in frequency relative to unprotected vaginal or anal, once people became aware of the risk differential. The fact that vaginal sex can lead to pregnancy shifts the balance even further toward oral.
Yes, the kids are still engaging in a risky activity. Then again, they’re engaging in a risky activity every time they cross the street. People take calculated risks all the time. Indeed, the most salient point raised by the opponents of abstinence-only education is that teenagers will take some sexual risks, so it’s foolish to just exhort them not to have sex at all. But by the same token, it’s also foolish to think that teenagers will always minimize risk by using protection even for the lowest-risk activities. Instead, they probably perceive condom use and oral sex as two different modes of reducing their risk, and they figure doubling up is overkill. After all – they might reason – if you’re going to reduce your sensitivity by using a condom, you might as well skip the oral and go for the vaginal.
Belle Waring and Eszter Hargittai have a different objection. They’re disturbed by the fact that boys are receiving oral sex without returning the favor. Well, okay, they should return the favor. But most high school boys are socially maladroit asses – that’s old news – so I’m betting that the girls weren’t getting much out of the vaginal sex in the old days, either. Are the girls being pressured into doing it? Sometimes, I assume, and that’s bad but hardly new, either. So it seems to me that girls are probably getting a better deal than they used to, because they can satisfy their horny boyfriends with less chance of getting infected and no chance of getting knocked up. In fact, my reading of the NYT Magazine article is that girls are playing a key role in negotiating the shift in behavior: “According to Jesse, Caity set the ground rules. ''Caity told me, ‘Adam knows he's not going to get in my pants, but I might get into his.’” That doesn’t sound to me like a girl getting pressured into an unequal relationship; it sounds like a girl deciding what kind of risk she’s willing to take.
What He Said
Lots of eulogies for Reagan. Lots of execrations of Reagan. I feel almost an obligation to add something. But over the last 15 years, I’ve gradually realized two things about Reagan’s legacy: (1) It is a profoundly mixed bag, filled with substantial chunks of both good and bad. (2) It’s hard to even distinguish the good chunks from the bad ones.
Anything else I added would just be a repeat of Will’s post, so I’ll quote him in full, with emphasis added:
I am fairly nauseated by the Reagan retrospectives, left and right. It's dispiriting to see that it [is] apparently next-to-impossible for human beings to go beyond their ideological commitments and make a more or less objective assessment of a man's accomplishments. We see all the usual mechanisms of ideological insulation. Any good during Reagan's reign would have happened anyway. Reagan's scandals are justified by his larger visionary struggle against unfreedom. All our ills are directly traceable to Reagan's malign influence. All good is directly traceable to Reagan's forward-thinking moral clarity. It's really just too, too much. Why do we not see that there is no need to make devils or gods of men?Exactly.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Public Education: Where Markets Dare Not Tread
At Marginal Revolution, Fabio Rojas takes on the tired old claim that paying low salaries for teachers means we don’t consider education important.
The salary one makes is determined by supply and demand. A price doesn't indicate how important the job is, or even if people think it is important. Take a simple example: water - it's cheap because there is plenty of it, not because we don't think it is important!I agree with Rojas’s main point, which is that wages do not and should not reflect some abstract notion of importance. However, in America’s monopolistic government-run public school system, applying a simple model of supply and demand is problematic. The wages paid to teachers result not from the interaction of supply and demand in a competitive market characterized by many buyers and sellers, but by the interaction of monopsonistic buyers (legislatures and boards of education) on the one hand and monopolistic sellers (teachers’ unions) on the other. These two groups negotiate the terms of trade, while the actual customers – students and their parents – are relegated to the sidelines. In such a situation, teachers’ wages could be either too high or too low. (Bilateral monopolies typically yield multiple equilibria.)
…So why the low pay? Teacher's low pay is due mainly to the fact that there are tons and tons of teachers! There is a huge supply of teachers. Education schools have huge enrollments - and surveys routinely report that education is one of the most popular majors in the country.
As a benchmark, we might be tempted to look at the wages of teachers in private schools, which are generally lower than those of public teachers. But there are a couple of reasons those wages might be distorted by the public system. First of all, the availability of a “free” public education drastically reduces the demand for private education. Only those parents who think the whole price of a private education is justified by the difference in quality will opt for a private school. A voucher system would change the story, of course; under such a system, parents would opt for the private school if the difference in price were justified by the difference in quality. The rise in demand would likely drive up the wages of private teachers. But under the status quo, such competitive pressure is lacking. Second, the lower wages of private school teachers probably reflect the greater desirability of those jobs, as they avoid much of the violence and bureaucracy associated with public schools.
There’s also an important issue of teacher quality. The wages paid to teachers might be high enough to attract enough people to fill all the positions, which is fine if all teachers are equally good. But if they are not, then buyers have to decide what is the right quality level. A higher wage offer might attract more qualified people – potentially drawn away from other important professions, of course, which is why we shouldn’t automatically assume attracting higher quality teachers is a good thing. But there is also no good reason to think the political process chooses the right level of quality. In a private competitive system, parents might well choose higher quality and pay for it with higher wages. The point is not that teachers should get higher (or lower) wages. The point is that a politicized education system is incapable of discovering the answer to that question, which is yet another argument in favor of privatizing education: doing so will allow us to utilize the spontaneous market process to discover the correct wages (or wage schedules) for teachers.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Just Deserts
Number of Google hits for “desert island”: 447,000
Number of Google hits for “deserted island”: 73,900
So “desert” outnumbers “deserted” by a factor of more than 6 to 1. I had always assumed those islands that castaways crawled onto were devoid of people, not rainfall. I wonder how many islands there are with less than 10 inches of rainfall per year? And I wonder whether there are six times as many of them as islands with no people?
Also, can someone point me to one of those “dessert islands” (2310 Google hits) – that is, islands filled with tasty treats? Does Jamaica count?
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Pornoconomics
There’s a store just down the road from me called “Red Hot Video.” It has all black windows. I figured it was a porno store. But then I noticed the signs advertising that they had “All Ratings” and the “Widest Selection.” Why would they put up signs like that if they only had porn? So one evening, after failing to find the title I was looking for at Blockbuster, I decided to check it out.
You know how sometimes you judge a book by its cover, and then you actually check it out and discover you were all wrong? Yeah, well, this was not one of those times. It was a porno store. But here’s the funny part. Although the back room was filled with porn, the little front room had four walls covered with the most amazingly craptacular collection of non-porn movies ever. “Ishtar,” Howie Mandel’s “Little Monsters,” “Gremlins 3”… you get the idea. It was like they had deliberately gone through and removed every movie with more than 1.5 stars. It was a veritable vortex of suckiness. And no new movies either, mind you. It was all from the 1980s, as far as I could tell. Oh, and no DVDs.
In the center of the room, I did not find more racks of crappy movies. Instead, there were 15 or 20 large bins of lousy merchandise. Popcorn and candy, maybe? Nope. In one bin I found a pile of plastic disposable razors. In the next, a jumble of plastic spider-rings, like kids wear on Halloween. In another, temporary tattoos. Thumbtacks. Hair scrunchies. Rubber balls. I can’t remember what else, but it was all random, low-quality, disposable, and made in China or Taiwan.
What was going on? As always, I have a theory. I suspect there must be some arcane zoning regulations that, among other things, regulate the percentage of a store’s floorspace or inventory that can be devoted to sex-related products. Or perhaps sex stores are subject to regulations not imposed on other businesses, and you can avoid the sex-store classification by stocking enough other stuff. Either way, the business ends up buying a bunch of merchandise they don’t expect anyone to buy, purely to meet some arbitrary quota. Stocking the bins with crapola makes sense because (a) it’s cheap to stock, and (b) no one will ever bother to buy it, which means no delivery and restocking costs. Sure, they could put high-quality merchandise there, but who would ever walk into a porno store looking for it?
A similar phenomenon occurred in New York City while I was living there, after Giuliani pushed through a slew of anti-sex-shop zoning regulations. And I have confirmation on my theory here, because the regulations had been the subject of a public debate. The new rules specified (among other things) that no sex-related business could be located within X yards of a school, church, community center, or other sex-related business. They defined “sex-related business” in terms of floorspace, as I recall.
The stores responded (I, uh, heard somewhere) by stocking 90% of their shelves and floorspace with a sparse array of other items. And then they’d cram literally hundreds of porn videos into one little corner of the shop. The result? Stores that were almost completely empty, except for a crowd of horny men all clustered together in an area about the size of a walk-in closet, trying to avoid eye contact. All part of the mayor’s brilliant plan, I assume.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
More ambiguous song lyrics
I remember a one-liner from one of Rodney Dangerfield's old routines. It went like this:
Even in high school, I got no respect. A girl called me up and said, "Why don't you come on over? There's nobody home." I went over. There was nobody home!I was reminded of it when I went with my cousin and Glen to see Shrek 2 while I was in Austin last week. The dance number at the end of the movie was "Livin' La Vida Loca," and one line went:
She'll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rainIt had me imagining a dialogue in some never-released Rodney Dangerfield movie...
RD: She said she'd make me take my clothes off and go dancing in the rain!
Other guy: Sounds kinky! So what happened?
RD: She made me take my clothes off, and then while I was standing there ready to go, she went dancing in the rain! No respect, I tell ya!
More on Punitive Damages
Alex Tabarrok comments on the punitive damages issue I blogged about last week. He makes the important point that taxation of punitive damages (and, by extension, my tongue-in-check proposal to burn them) would create a greater incentive for both parties to settle out of court. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
UPDATE. A conversation with some colleagues prompted me to add the following: Juries might simply inflate their punitive damage awards if they knew the “victims” would only get 25% of them. Is this really likely to happen? The key question is why juries are inclined to make large punitive damage awards. If their desire is to give victims giant lottery jackpots (even though compensatory damages are supposed to be large enough to make the victims whole), then there is good reason to think they’d inflate the damages. On the other hand, if their desire is to punish the evil corporations (or whatever), then they’d have no reason to inflate the damages any more than they do now, because the defendants have to pay the entire amount.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
What Don't You Know?
Another item from last week's visit to Austin:
During my sister's graduation ceremony, at one point in the program a woman sang "Colors of the Wind" from the movie Pocahontas. The first verse ends with these lines:
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger,I've written before about song lyrics that are just ambiguous enough to distract me from appreciating the song itself while I mentally diagram the possibilities, and this is another prime example. In this line, is the speaker merely repeating you never knew for emphasis, or does she actually intend the meaning captured in the paraphrase "things such that you never even knew you didn't know about them"? After ten years, I've finally decided that this is indeed the intended meaning, and what's more, I now see that it's another case of the Unknown Unknowns!
you'll learn things you never knew you never knew.
The Unknown Unknowns, of course, are what Donald Rumsfeld referred to in a concise and insightful, but nonetheless widely ridiculed, quotation a few months back:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.Geoff Pullum at Language Log wrote in Rumsfeld's defense (at least as far as the logic and clarity of this particular quotation go), and even compared it to the first line of an old Persian saying:
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.So now in this Disney movie is another instance of someone talking about what we don't know that we don't know, and understanding it doesn't seem to have caused people any trouble--indeed, when I searched for the line on the Internet to make sure I got it right, I found it on a site devoted to "Cool Quotes". I also found the phrase "you never knew you never knew" in the title for a session in a seminar, in a list of facts about dogs, a page of tips for digital imaging , and several other places that I won't bother to list.
Word.
Merriam-Webster has released the results of its “top 10 favorite words” poll. A few old favorites of mine made the list:
defenestrateBut I think the voters focused excessively on multisyllabic words of Latin or Greek origin – you know, the kind of vocabulary words people feel proud of themselves for knowing. Some of my favorite English words that didn't make the list are much more pedestrian:
callipygian
juxtapose
dungGo ahead, say each one of those a few times, and savor their simplicity and rich Anglo-Saxon flavor.
chicken
blow
Fine Dining
My 4-year-old son Adam has an autism spectrum disorder, and is undergoing some early intervention therapy to learn explicitly what most kids learn by osmosis. Many of his learning programs are intended to give him social skills, and one of these skills is to be able to say the formulaic responses for common situations. One of these targets is for him to say, "I'm doing fine," when asked, "How are you?" Realizing that this question is not a request for information is one of the things that autistic-spectrum kids often have trouble with.
Adam has done well with this target. Of course, "I'm doing fine" is just a start, enough to get him through the most common social-greeting situations. But to truly master this social skill, he'll need to generalize it, so that eventually he can recognize and use other possible responses, be able to ask someone else how they're doing, and know when he can get away with replying, "Not so good, actually." And maybe one day his generalization will be so advanced that he will confidently answer, "Not much!" when asked, "How ya doin'?" and "Pretty good!" when asked, "What's up?"
Today, though, Adam did some generalizing with the pronoun and the tense in the target response. He was finishing his lunch when his therapist returned from her own lunch break. She asked, "How was your lunch?"
Adam said, "It was doing fine."
Friday, May 28, 2004
Block the Box
This op-ed by Chris Edwards contains a long list of proposals for new spending, all gleaned from the Kerry website. It really is appalling. Democrats who criticize the Bush Administration for its profligate spending have no business proposing laundry lists of new programs. Edwards’s bottom line: “In November, Americans will have to decide whether Kerry's big-spending promises are worse than Bush's big-spending record.”
But how to decide? We need to break out of the narrow mindset that trains all attention on the presidential candidates and their specific platforms and personal qualities. What matters far more is the balance of power. When one party is in charge of both Congress and the Presidency, the outcome is a spending binge, regardless of the party. Repeat after me: The pro-Kerry argument is not Kerry’s platform. The pro-Kerry argument is gridlock.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
The Cosby Show
Whoa. Click this link, and scroll down past the titillating story of the Capitol Hill sex diarist. You’ll find a column reporting recent comments by Bill Cosby (yes, that Bill Cosby) about the failure of black people to raise their children properly. Among other things, he says:
I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol? And where is the father? …Wow. Cosby makes challenging points here, but if he were white and made the same comments, I suspect he’d be called a racist. Yet the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume stated that Cosby had “said what needed to be said.” A similar thing happened a few years ago when Jesse Jackson admitted to being a little scared when two young black men were walking behind him in a deserted neighborhood. Apparently it’s easier to take criticism from a member of one’s own group.
The church is only open on Sunday and you can't keep asking Jesus to do things for you. You can't keep saying that God will find a way. God is tired of you.
I wasn't there when God was saying it, I am making this up, but it sounds like what God would say. In all of this work we can not [sic] blame white people. White people don't live over there; they close up the shop early. The Korean ones don't know us well enough, so they stay open 24 hours.
People putting their clothes on backwards: Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? …People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to the crack and got all type of needles [piercings] going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damn thing about Africa.
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail. Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. We have to go in there -- forget about telling your child to go into the Peace Corps -- it is right around the corner. They are standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
Basketball players -- multimillionaires -- can't write a paragraph. Football players -- multimillionaires -- can't read. Yes, multimillionaires. Well, Brown versus Board of Education: Where are we today? They paved the way, but what did we do with it? That white man, he's laughing. He's got to be laughing: 50 percent drop out, the rest of them are in prison.
Five, six children -- same woman -- eight, 10 different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you are going to have DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You don't know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I am telling you, they're young enough! Hey, you have a baby when you are 12; your baby turns 13 and has a baby. How old are you? Huh? Grandmother! By the time you are 12 you can have sex with your grandmother, you keep those numbers coming. I'm just predicting…
What is it -- young girls getting after a girl who wants to remain a virgin? Who are these sick black people and where do they come from and why haven't they been parented to shut up? This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen.
There’s much truth in what Cosby said, but he’s also missing something. The importance of taking responsibility for oneself and one’s children can hardly be overemphasized, but here’s the puzzler: why has responsibility taken such a beating in the black community? It wasn’t always that way, so something must have changed. I would argue that the twin tornadoes of the welfare state and the war on drugs have created an environment in which honest work is discouraged and dependency and criminality rewarded, and the outcome has been the erosion of long-held values of personal responsibility and parental guidance. And that problem is hardly unique to the black community, although it’s especially visible there.
Right to Die Lives On
Good news: a federal court just upheld Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law against John Ashcroft’s challenge. This is not just a victory for the right to die; it is a smack in the face to the Bush administration’s fair-weather federalism. No word on whether the case will go to the Supreme Court.
Punitive Damages
My grad-school buddy Susanne emailed me this L. A. Times article about Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal to divert 75% of punitive damage awards to the state. I first encountered this idea as a debate case on the APDA circuit, but I didn’t know any actual policymakers had proposed such a thing. But it turns out that several states (Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, and Utah) already collect some percentage of punitive damage awards.
In favor of the proposal, there's the fact that punitive damages will deter tortious behavior regardless of who receives the award, and giving the damages to the plaintiff (on top of compensatory damages that he will receive regardless) just encourages more lawsuits.
Against the proposal, we should recognize that plaintiffs do need a sufficient incentive to file suit. Especially when a large chunk of all damages, including compensatory damages, goes to the plaintiffs’ attorneys instead of the actual victims, punitive damages might be needed to fill in the gap to make the bottom-line payment to the victim large enough. (Punitive damages serve some other purposes besides giving plaintiffs incentive to bring suit, but all of those other purposes would be served just as well if the damages went to the state.)
But what is a “large enough” payment for the victim to receive? It depends on the goal. Damage awards serve two purposes – compensation of victims and deterrence of future tortfeasors – and the correct amount for the former might not be the optimal amount for the latter. The right dollar amount for deterrence purposes could be greater or less than the right amount of compensation. Think about it this way: if someone did $1 million of damage to you, but you could only get $800,000 of it back, would that stop you from filing suit? I think not. Thus, there’s no particular reason to think that a damage award (net of attorney’s fees) equal to the monetary damage suffered by the victim necessarily induces the right amount of lawsuits.
On balance, the proposal sounds good to me, because I'm not terribly concerned about having too few lawsuits. I think it's pretty clear that we currently have too many. Given that punitive damages are often determined as a multiple – sometimes a very large multiple – of compensatory damages, I suspect allowing plaintiffs to keep 25% of punitive damages is sufficient to make sure they actually receive full compensation even after paying off their attorneys. Still, if I were voting on the proposal, I’d want to see some figures on typical punitive damage awards to be sure.
I’m squeamish about giving the government a new source of revenues, though. If we could trust that the new revenue stream would be offset by decreases in other sources, like income taxes, that would be one thing. But that never happens. The state will spend whatever money you give it and ask for more. Indeed, the Governor’s proposal is part of his plan to balance California’s budget. Worse, the state might have an incentive to encourage larger punitive damage awards or more tortious behavior. Those baleful possibilities would have to be weighed against the reduced incentive for plaintiffs to file lawsuits.
Here’s an alternative proposal: collect the punitive damages from the defendants, give the plaintiffs a 25% cut, and burn the rest. Destroying dollar bills does not reduce wealth or resources; it just increases the value of the remaining money supply. The punitive damages would still deter people from committing torts, without creating perverse incentives for potential plaintiffs or the agents of the state. (I’m joking, but only by half. Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this proposal?)
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Rampant Speculation
Last weekend I went to Austin to see my sister graduate from the University of Texas (congratulations, Ellen!). During the visit with Mom, Dad, Glen, and Ellen, we had several conversations about English grammar, and just before they took me to the airport for my return flight, Dad was complaining about the strange vocabulary used by airline employees. Now for years, he's expressed his dislike of the word deplane, meaning "to disembark." ("To deplane should mean to remove planes from someone!") This time, though, he had an item that was new to me: the use of ramp to refer to what the rest of us call the runway or the tarmac. He said people in the industry could be quite adamant about using this term, and that he had even had a heated discussion on the subject with my uncle, who is a commercial pilot. My uncle's position: It's not made of tarmac! Dad's position: Even so, it's not a ramp!
I think calling a runway a ramp is just plain wrong, too, but my family expects me to put on my descriptive hat in situations like these, so I did.
"Well, Dad, I'm sure you wouldn't object if I told you that ramp can also mean a kind of wild leek found in Appalachia, would you?"
He said no. So he wasn't in principle against ramp being an ambiguous word. He (and I) could accept both the "inclined plane" and "wild leek" meaning for ramp, but not the "runway" meaning. Why not?
"So," I said, "when someone uses ramp to mean 'wild leek,' you accept that they have two meanings for the word. When they use it to mean 'runway,' which is hard and flat like a ramp, but doesn't have the one essential property of being an inclined plane, is the problem that it looks like they think they're dealing with a single concept, and they're not?"
"Yeah!" said Dad. "Exactly!" added Glen.
It made sense to me, too, but I wonder: How much in common with an inclined-plane-type ramp does any given object have to have before calling it a ramp triggers alarm bells for people like Dad and Glen and me? Is being human-made enough? What if a certain kitchen utensil were called a ramp? I think I'd be OK with it. Maybe human-made plus flatness is enough. Could a kind of bed be called a ramp? No, if I heard of a bed called a ramp, I'd wonder how you'd keep from sliding out of it. What about flatness all by itself? Could a plateau be called a ramp? No, I'd object to that in the same way as I do to calling a runway a ramp. Is having an incline sufficient? Could a soft, squishy slope of mud after a mudslide be called a ramp? I'd say no, since you can't move stuff up it; evidently, the function of helping move things is an essential part of the definition of ramp. I know plenty has been written on the question of "how alike do X and Y have to be before they can be denoted by the same word?" (for example, see this page about Eleanor Rosch, as well as all the current IT work on ontologies), but this question of "how alike do X and Y have to be before the differences between them preclude giving them the same name?" is one I haven't run into before.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Did Massachusetts "Legalize" Gay Marriage?
On the news this evening, reporters were saying that Massachusetts had “legalized gay marriage.” I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I think there is a subtle distinction to be made between recognizing gay marriages before the law and legalizing them. To “legalize” something usually implies that it was illegal before. But it was not against the law for gay people to make solemn vows to each other, to exchange rings, to have binding ceremonies, even to have religious weddings if they could find churches willing to perform them. What distinguished straight marriages from gay ones (and what still distinguishes them outside of Massachusetts) was that the former were legally recognized and granted certain privileges by the state, while the latter were largely ignored by the state. Gay marriages were analogous to private agreements that the courts declined to enforce. But declining to enforce an agreement is not the same as outlawing it.
Why belabor this point? Because if my reasoning is correct, then use of the word “legalize” in this context helps perpetuate the myth that the institution of marriage is and must be a creature of the state. Intimate relationships do not require the approval of the state to exist. Gay marriages exist right now, in every state in the union, and the only question is whether the people in them will receive equal treatment before the law.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Permissive Parents Beware...
...they eat brats in Ohio! (Only they pronounce it so that it rhymes with "rot," not "rat.")
Other food-related dialectological observations from my 12 years in Ohio:
What I have always known as a Reese's peanut butter cup is by and large known here as a Reesey cup. I think it's a little strange, but this guy seems to have some serious issues with it:
There once was a guy named Reese. He created a Peanut Butter Cup. He put his name on it. It became what we now know as Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.In response to his unsupported sociolinguistic observation: None of the people I've heard say it have been uncultured or rednecks, much less both at once.
Later they made an M&M -type candy and called it Reese's Pieces. This made sense because Reese's rhymes with pieces.
Let me repeat that: Reese's rhymes with pieces.
Reese's is not pronounced reecey. It does not rhyme with fleecy.
Please stop referring to your Reese's cup as a Reecey cup. It makes you sound like an uncultured redneck.
If you're in the produce section of a grocery store here, and see a sign for "mango fruit," they're not being redundant. For some of the population here, unless otherwise specified, mango means green pepper. And green pepper, BTW, means what I grew up calling a bell pepper. Nevermind that bell peppers come in yellow, red, and orange, or that jalapeno peppers are green--if you want bell peppers on your pizza here, you'd better ask for green peppers. Otherwise, the server might just hear the initial [b] and mark you down for banana peppers. That's what happened to me when I ordered my first pizza in Ohio, and it was quite an unpleasant surprise. (That and the fact that they had parmesan cheese all over the top of the pizza, and sliced it into rectangles!)
A popular breakfast item is sausage gravy and biscuits. The first time I saw this written down, it was on the dorm breakfast menu, written just like I wrote it here. I thought, "Great! I love sausage and biscuits! I'll ask them to hold the gravy." Another unpleasant surprise: The comma I'd mentally inserted between sausage and gravy had been left out on purpose! The dish is biscuits with gravy that's been made with sausage. Actually, I know that this term exists outside Ohio, because a regional restaurant chain named Bob Evans serves the dish.
In fact, all of the above terms may well be in usage outside Ohio. All I know is that I sure never heard them when I lived in Texas, and since I became aware of them in Ohio, I'm listing them here.
Apportioning Blame
In re: Abu Ghraib, Mark Kleiman notes that moral and legal responsibilities need not sum to one across parties; thus, holding one person (say, a prison guard) responsible for the abuse of prisoners does not imply letting another person (say, Donald Rumsfeld) off the hook. A valid point, I think. But then Mark applies his principle to a substantially different issue, concluding that food corporations and their consumers are jointly responsible for the ill effects of obesity.
Mark and I have scuffled on this point before. As I said then, the argument for holding consumers responsible for their own actions while holding corporations blameless (assuming they have not withheld relevant information) does not rely on the notion of moral/legal responsibilities summing to one. Rather, it relies on the notion that the consumer is the only person in a position to decide whether the activity in question is harmful on net, since the benefits and costs are ultimately subjective.
Mark’s position rests on the implicit notion that moral/legal responsibility and physical causality are the same. They are not. Using a physical “but for” test, my grandparents are responsible for every sin that I commit. But for my grandparents’ decision to procreate, I would not have existed and thus would have committed no sins. So they are certainly “responsible” for my sins in a physical sense. Similarly, if I stop a woman on the street to ask for directions, and as she walks away she gets crushed by a falling piano, I am physically “responsible” for her death. But for my having asked directions, she would have continued walking and been safely beyond the piano’s future point of impact. Yet few people would hold my grandparents responsible for my sins, and no one (I hope) would hold me responsible for the death-by-piano. Clearly, moral/legal responsibility and physical causality are not the same thing.
From a legal or moral perspective, the issue not determining physical causality, but giving appropriate incentives. To conclude that it makes sense to hold someone legally or morally responsible for an act, and to punish him for it, you have to believe the act is in fact a bad one. I am comfortable making that judgment about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Holding more than one person morally responsible for the torture will make it that much less likely that it will happen again.
But with respect to the eating of jelly doughnuts, I’m not comfortable concluding that the act is in fact bad. Jelly doughnuts have good and bad effects whose relative value can only be compared by the subjective preferences of an individual consumer. Holding Dunkin Donuts responsible for the ill effects would probably lead to fewer jelly doughnuts being eaten, but that’s not necessarily a good outcome.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Full Disclosure
Of course, this site is also 62% good (there's no in between), but my purpose here is to avoid getting sued for inadvertently converting people to the dark side.
Also, it turns out you can reduce your evil intake by only reading the text (while ignoring headings and the right-side bar), which reduces the evil percentage to 35%. Also, you could stop reading Neal's posts, since it turns out they are 36% evil, while mine are only 25% evil. (I'm not sure how the math here works. I post a larger fraction of the material on this page, so the overall number should presumably be closer to my percentage than Neal's. But evil works in mysterious ways.)
Check out the Gematriculator for yourself.
Sign Me Up
Is it just me, or do the new enhanced MPAA movie ratings sound more and more like advertisements? Here’s the rating for Van Helsing:
Rated R for Non-Stop Creature Action Violence and Frightening Images, and for SensualityDude, I am so there! And here’s the rating for Mean Girls:
Rated PG-13 for Sexual Content, Language & Some Teen PartyingYeeeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
And the Creep Goes On
Cigarettes, guns, fast food, and now booze. Alcohol is the next target of the nanny lawyers, as reported in USA Today. Here’s the wedge: they’re suing alcohol companies for “using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.” Is there a connection to the previous lawsuits? Of course:
The plaintiffs' attorney in that case [against Miller and Anheuser-Busch], Steve Berman, represented Washington state in the tobacco settlement. Berman says his alcohol lawsuit "wholeheartedly" borrows reasoning used in tobacco cases.I won’t rehearse all the usual arguments against holding firms responsible for the voluntary choices of their customers. I have a different question this time: how can you distinguish between a marketing campaign that targets young people and a marketing campaign that targets older people who want to feel young? Marketing compaigns assuredly portray young and active lifestyles, but marketing images are often not about what people are, but what they want to be.
The lawsuits say that alcohol companies market to underage drinkers by running ads in magazines like Highlights and Teen People… wait, no, that’s not what they say. They say the companies market to underage drinkers by advertising in Maxim, FHM, Stuff, and Glamour. But, says an article from DIRECT (a marketing journal), the average age of Maxim and FHM readers is 27, with an income of $70,000; the average age of a Stuff reader is 25, with an income of $50,000 or more. I’m sure there are men under 21 reading these magazines, but they are not the center of the distribution. Assuming a normal distribution, for every 20-year-old reading Maxim, there is a 34-year-old to balance him. Admittedly, if the distribution’s not normal, then the median or modal reader might be closer to 21 years. But the point is that these magazines capture a range of ages that clearly goes far beyond the under-21 crowd.
Oh, and there are probably some 15-year-olds reading Maxim, too; should the auto companies pull their ads? Since when does the fact that people of a particular age cannot legally use something mean that they can’t legally be exposed to images of it?
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Evolutionary Question Begging
According to this article, handsome male features like high cheek bones may have evolved because of a shift in female mate-selection strategies. As the importance of physical dominance waned, females began choosing handsome males over aggressive males. Interesting, but also, I think, question-begging. The story assumes the attractiveness of high cheek bones. What makes high cheek bones inherently more attractive than sloping brows and enlarged canines? When aggressiveness was more important for survival, I’ll bet females found the large canines pretty hot. For a good evolutionary story, we would need to know what shaped perceptions of attractiveness.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Friendster vs. Fiendster
Last week, I finally got around to joining Friendster, after several friends told me it was worth checking out. Can’t say I’m blown away, but it is moderately interesting. It was probably more interesting back in the early days, when lots of people were trying it out for the first time and trying to expand their “friend networks” as much as possible. I sense that there is now a lull, except perhaps for whole groups of friends who are all just trying out Friendster for the first time.
Anyway, I was thinking about the mathematical properties and assumptions underlying the Friendster system. The implicit assumption is that friendship is a quasi-transitive operator: if A is friends with B and B is friends with C, then A is (sort of) friends with C. But the extent of friendship attenuates with the degrees of separation. We could imagine a friendship function F(n), where n is the degrees of separation. F(n) might have a form like so:
F(n) = k^nwhere k is some real number in the interval (0, 1]. If k = 1, then friendship is perfectly transitive: a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend is just like a friend. On the other hand, if k < 1, then friendship attenuates with distance.
And then I thought, what if someone started a new website called “Fiendster”? On this website, you would create a network of your enemies. You’d send your enemies Fiendster invitations: “Glen has invited you to be his enemy. Do you accept?” And then you could check out your enemies’ lists of enemies to find potential allies, working on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Mathematically, in this case k lies in the interval [-1, 0). For instance, we might have F(n) = (-.9)^n. This would mean that my enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.9, my enemy’s enemy is my ally to an extent of .81 (notice the sign change), my enemy’s enemy’s enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.729, and so on. Mathematical difficulties might arise if someone were both my enemy and the enemy of my enemy, because that person would be assigned both a positive and a negative number. In such cases, perhaps you would have to choose which of your enemies is the greater enemy. Or not – maybe the mathematical contradiction maps a real contradiction in human relationships.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Weighty Considerations
The comments on my previous post on obesity and overweightness got me thinking more about the issue. Specifically, Tim noted:
Obesity and anorexia are both bad things. People should have reasonable expectations for their body weight, and for an average-height woman, 100 pounds and 200 pounds are both unhealthy. The people prone to obesity are typically different from the people prone to unhealthy dieting. They have different problems, and therefore need to hear different messages.Fair enough, although I wonder if the messages are reaching the intended targets. Maybe the anorexics are hearing the anti-fat messages, while the obese people are hearing the anti-skinny messages.
Tim’s point also made me wonder about the prevalence of the different problems. In the previous post, I said the average American woman is 5’ 4” and 140 pounds. I assumed, given the recent reports that 60%+ of Americans are overweight or obese, that 140 pounds was too much for a 5’ 4” woman according to the new government standards. But I just plugged the numbers into a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, and it turns out that 5’ 4” and 140 pounds is in the government-approved range.
So what’s going on here? How can over half the public be fat, when the public still has an average weight that’s just fine? I can see a few possible explanations.
• First, the mean and median are not the same. It could be that, once the anorexics in the bottom 40% of the population are taken into account, their extreme underweightness balances out the top 60%’s overweightness to create a “healthy” mean, even though the median person is still overweight. But this strikes me as an unlikely explanation. It’s easier to be 200 pounds overweight than 200 pounds underweight; therefore, I would guess the weight distribution is positively skewed (much like the income distribution), leading to a mean that’s higher than the median, not lower.
• Second, a gender difference could resolve the paradox. Perhaps men are overrepresented in the overweight/obese category, meaning that a smaller percentage of women are overweight/obese. However, this fact sheet says that 61.9% of women over 20 years old are overweight/obese, so the paradox remains. (The percentage of men who are overweight/obese is indeed higher, though.)
• The comparison between the average woman figures and the percent overweight/obese figures is confounded by the latter being calculated based on BMI, which considers height as well as weight. Maybe there are a lot of short and fat women who still have relatively low weights compared to women of average or greater height, and their weights pull down the average even though they are overweight. I haven’t fully worked through the logic on this one, but my instinct is that it means short women must be more likely than tall women to be overweight.
• The “average woman” is not really an average woman, but an ideal woman according to the government’s standards.
Anyone who has the answer is invited to email it to me or put it in the comments box. Incidentally, nothing I’ve said here should be taken to mean I agree with the government’s standards for healthy BMI. Read this article to find out how the government actually changed the criteria, yielding a sudden jump in the number of people classified as overweight.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Uncanny
Mark Liberman's recent posting on the different meanings of can depending on how wide a scope it takes reminds me of my first brush with a scope ambiguity (though at the time I didn't know what it was called). It was back in my sophomore year in high school, in Linda Misenhimer's 6th period biology class. We were having a multiple-choice exam on our genetics unit, and one of the questions went something like this:
John has type AB blood, and Marsha has type B. What blood-type child can they not have?OK, I thought. If John contributes an A gene, and Marsha contributes a B, then their kid will be AB, so that's not the answer. If John contributes an B, and Marsha contributes a B, then their kid will have type B, so that's not the answer. What about type A? Well, John can certainly contribute an A gene, but the rest depends on Martha. If her genotype is BB, then their child will have to have type AB. On the other hand, if her genotype is BO, then she can contribute an O, and their kid will have genotype AO, and type A blood. So item C isn't the answer. That leaves item D, type O. For that to happen, both parents have to contribute an O gene, and since John is AB, that can't happen. Regardless of Marsha's unknown gene, they cannot possibly have a child with type O blood. The answer is D.
a. AB
b. B
c. A
d. O
I did well on the test, but I noticed that I'd lost two points on that question. After class, I asked why.
"You should have marked both C and D," Mrs. Misenhimer told me.
"But they can have a child with type A, if Marsha's genotype is BO," I said.
"Yes, but if Marsha's genotype as BB, then they cannot have a child with type A."
I didn't understand why this mattered. Until Martha's unknown gene was known, we could not rule out them having a type A kid, so why was I supposed to mark that answer? I asked. Mrs. Misenhimer clarified with her intonation:
"If Marsha's genotype is BB, then they can ... NOT-have a type A child!"
"But ... but ..." was all I could say.
I thought about it some more at home. I came to the realization that the problem was in how we were interpreting the can and the not. Like any other native speaker of English, I was interpreting them to mean, "not able to have," or using parentheses to represent it, NOT(CAN-HAVE). (As semanticists put it, not has wide scope over can.) But it was also possible to interpret them as "able to not have" (or if you don't like split infinitives, "able not to have"); using parentheses, CAN(NOT-HAVE). (In other words, not has narrow scope, and can has wide scope.) A less common interpretation, but sensible enough in context (for example, "Here's what I can do to annoy Jim. I can not laugh when he tells that joke he always tells."). The problem was that Mrs. Misenhimer wanted to have it both ways. She wanted the "not able to have" meaning to say that it was impossible for John and Marsha to have a type O kid, and the "able not to have" meaning to say that it was possible for John and Marsha to have a kid that was not type A. It all seemed so simple now! Geez, using her logic, I should have marked all the options, since it was also possible for John and Marsha NOT to have a type AB kid (if John contributed a B), and NOT to have a type B kid (if John contributed an A).
I went to Mrs. Misenhimer again the next day to point out the ambiguity, so she could see why her question was unfairly graded, and I could reclaim my two points. I wasn't grade-grubbing, you understand; this was an important semantic principle. Unless you're making a pun, you can't just claim every possible meaning of an ambiguous phrase as the one you intended. Imagine someone saying, "I could care less" and meaning both that they didn't care at all AND that they did care!
"I think I see where the confusion came from on this question," I said. "First, you agree that 'not able to' and 'able not to' mean different things, right?"
"No."
I couldn't argue any farther. I had to accept my grade of a 96 on the exam instead of a 98.
UPDATE: I've been thinking about it some more, and I realized that actually it's just barely possible that Mrs. Misenhimer was not trying to interpret the question two ways. The bizarre CAN(NOT-HAVE) interpretation of the question not only allows "type A" as an answer, but also my choice of "type O." That is, if it's impossible for John and Marsha to have a type O child, then it is trivially possible for them to not have a type O child. They CAN(NOT-HAVE) a type O child! But there's still a problem. Not only does the CAN(NOT-HAVE) interpretation allow choices C and D as answers; as I remarked above, it allows every choice as an answer!
So why was Mrs. Misenhimer looking for just answers C and D instead of all of them? The only interpretation I can come up with that requires "type O" and "type A" as answers but not "type AB" or "type B" is this:
What blood-type child is it possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have?Let's go through the choices one by one. Type AB: it is not possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type AB child, since it is a fact that John can contribute an A gene, and Marsha can contribute a B. Type B: it is not possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type B child, since it is a fact that John can contribute a B, as can Marsha. Type A: it is possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type A child; it is impossible in the case in which Marsha's genotype is BB. Type O: it is impossible for it to be possible for John and Marsha to have a type O child, since it is a fact that John's genotype is AB.
But seriously, that's not how can works, is it? No, the bottom line is this: Mrs. Misenhimer should have given me full credit on that question!
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Weight a Minute...
Is this a contradiction?
1. The nannies tell us that overweightness and obesity are on the rise. More than 60% of Americans are overweight or obese, they say.
2. The nannies (perhaps a different group of nannies) also tell us that the media have distorted the American vision of a desirable body. While the average model is 5’ 11” and 117 pounds, the average American woman is 5’ 4” and weighs 140 pounds.
Obviously, the height of models – and hence the height to weight ratio – is far out of reach for most people. But if the nannies are correct about overweightness, then the average weight for American women must be too high – so what business do they have using it as the appropriate benchmark when talking about body images?
On a related note, are these the same nannies who get huffy about fat jokes and consider it discrimination to charge fat people for two seats on an airplane? I try not to make fat jokes myself (though I admit that I’ve occasionally succumbed) because I consider other people’s eating and exercise choices their own damn business. But the food-nazis have been pressing the line that your weight is not your own business, but a pressing social issue. If they really believe that, shouldn’t they be encouraging more fat jokes, and higher airfares for fat people, as a means of increasing the psychological and economic costs associated with overweightness?
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Healthcare and the Tax Code
Tyler is puzzled by the usual economic argument against the tax treatment of health insurance. In a nutshell, the current system allows health insurance to be bought with pre-tax dollars, but direct purchases of healthcare products and services must be made with post-tax dollars. The usual economic argument, as stated by Glenn Hubbard, is that this system encourages a system of third-party payment in which consumers are rarely confronted with the true cost of their choices at the point of sale.
Tyler raises some tough questions about this line of argument. I’ll try to respond, while admitting that I (like Tyler) am not an expert in this field.
If the argument is that tax deductibility leads to too much health care, I can see the logic. But then the problem is in the pretzels and beer markets; health care should be doing fine, albeit in bloated form.A bloated healthcare market is indeed part of the problem. It seems likely that many Americans do purchase more healthcare services than they really need. But the bigger issue is that greater expenditures don’t necessarily translate into more health services. The fact that consumers cannot use untaxed dollars to buy healthcare directly creates a strong incentive to have as much of our healthcare as possible purchased through middlemen (the insurance companies), which at a minimum drives up administrative costs. Instead of you just handing a check to your doctor, your employer has to pay an insurance company, you and/or your doctor have to fill out reimbursement forms, and bureaucrats at the insurance company have to process the claims and payments. (Lest it seem like I’m arguing against insurance in general, I’m not – for low-risk high-consequence health events, insurance makes perfect sense for purposes of risk-spreading, despite the administrative costs. But for small and routine expenses, out-of-pocket payment is more sensible.)
In addition, there is an incentive problem created by third-party payment. Patients have no incentive to economize on their health purchases when someone else is paying at the point of sale. They tend to purchase more doctor visits, more hospital days, more name-brand medicines, more pain medication in the hospital, more physical therapy, etc., and they have no reason to ask if the price is right. More on this below.
Alternatively, it might be argued that buying health insurance involves a negative externality on others. Maybe insurance companies are intrinsically bad monitors, and more insurance corrupts the system as a whole.Tyler’s point, I think, is that the problem of uneconomical health purchases, brought on by third-party payments, could be solved through better cost monitoring. That’s true, but it creates problems of its own. First, the enforcement itself is costly, because it involves having insurance companies regularly reviewing and sometimes overruling the decisions of doctors and patients. Second, it engenders the animosity of doctors and patients, who don’t like having their decisions second-guessed. The essential purpose of an HMO is to ration healthcare by means of lines and bureaucracy instead of by price; hence the recent vilification of HMOs. Facing such resistance, the insurance companies can either (a) continue their monitoring and face the public’s wrath, (b) raise premiums, or (c) a little of both, which is what we’ve in fact observed.
Grant this premise, but where do we end up?Actually, the argument is for equalizing the tax treatment of health insurance and direct healthcare expenditures. One way to do this is to tax health insurance; the other is to remove the taxes on direct health expenditures. The latter approach would continue to subsidize healthcare relative to other goods and services, but it would get rid of the perverse incentive to get all healthcare through insurance companies. Either approach would be preferably to the status quo.
1. We would have a good argument for taxing insurance purchases. Yet the insurance point is rarely raised with this conclusion in mind. We might have (yikes!) an argument for greater government involvement in health care.
2. If insurance companies are such poor cost monitors, why doesn't this raise premia accordingly? The poor monitoring of the company would be reflected in policy price and thus would be internalized by the people or institutions who buy the policies. The externality should vanish or at least significantly diminish.See above points about cost monitoring. The bottom line is that even if there is substantial competition among insurance companies for institutional customers, the competitive price is still higher than it would be otherwise. Even the most efficient health insurance company can’t eliminate the administrative and enforcement costs entirely.
3. Why should insurance subsidies lead to "low copayments and deductibles"? Insurance with high copayments and deductibles is favored by the tax system as well. That being the case, why do we blame the tax system for how insurance is (perhaps) poorly structured?It’s not exactly true that the tax system favors high-copayment/low-deductible policies as well, because in general, such copayments and deductibles must by paid out of consumers after-tax dollars. Recent change in the tax code have made it possible to have limited Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs), which allow you to put aside some pre-tax dollars for copayments and deductibles. This is a move in the right direction. But my understanding – again, limited by lack of expertise – is that such MSAs have been hobbled by a variety of restrictions. For them to create the proper incentives, it must be possible to “roll over” any unused dollars into your general income, which to my knowledge is not possible in the status quo. The patient’s incentive is to use the dollars before they disappear.
All these points collapse into a more simple query: how can a simple relative price, whether a distortion or not, corrupt the cost control practices of an entire industry?The issue is not the distorted relative price between healthcare and other products and services. It’s the distorted relative price between health insurance and directly purchased healthcare. That, as outlined above, leads to higher administrative and enforcement costs.
And if government provision of health care is ineffective and costly, isn't there a positive externality from the purchase of private health insurance?Certainly, private insurance is better than government provision. But what would be even better is a combination of private insurance and private direct payment.
For more commentary on healthcare, much of it inspired by Gephardt’s plan, see my previous posts here, here, and here.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Giving Credit Where It's Due Department
The Doonesbury strip from the Sunday before last featured a reporter calling Bush to task for supporting so many constitutional amendments:
Mr. President, you have always said you believed in strict constitutional constructionism … and yet you favor amending the Constitution to prevent gay marriage … and you favor another amendment to outlaw abortion, and another to criminalize flag-burning … and another one to balance the budget … and yet another to enshrine victims’ rights.With the possible exception of the balanced-budget amendment, I oppose all those proposals. But there is absolutely no contradiction between supporting constitutional amendments and favoring strict constitutional constructionism. The strict constructionist opposes reading one’s own opinions into the existing Constitution, not changing it. If you want the government to do something not specifically authorized, according to the strict constructionist view, proposing a constitutional amendment is the right way to go about it. I wish I could say this Bush administration was always this respectful of constitutionalism.
To be fair to Gary Trudeau, Bush is being disingenuous. He claims to believe in the principles of our Constitution – a claim belied by his willingness to (for instance) create a special loophole in freedom of speech to punish flag burners. But this contradiction has nothing to do with strict constructionism.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Fecal Meter
Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reporter Barbara Carmen had a story in the Metro section yesterday about a notorious apartment complex just south of the airport. I’m always interested in stories about these apartments, since I lived in one of them for about a week back in 1993. It looks like the latest attempts at renovation aren’t going so well; Carmen had this to say about one tenant’s unit:
(1) Feces float on her living room floor when it rains.That sentence almost jumped off the page at me, it was such a poetic line in a column filled with ordinary prose. I even went to Poetry Daily and checked out a few poems there, to compare what “real” poetry looked like these days, and I’m telling you that Carmen’s one sentence had more poetry in it than the entire first two poems I read at Poetry Daily.
First, notice the [f] alliteration at the very beginning, in “feces float.” Effective metrical composition, too: “Feces” is two long syllables, both stressed, giving us a spondaic foot, encouraging the reader to slow down and dwell on the words. This effect is amplified by the long, stressed syllable of “float,” followed by a caesura—that is, a pause instead of the rest of a metrical foot.
Once we get past the caesura, the line quickly runs to its end in three anapestic feet: three sequences of two unstressed syllables and one stressed one, as shown here (note also the continued [f] alliteration):
(2) on her LIV/ing room FLOOR / when it RAINSAlliteration and a detectable meter, neat! I’ll have to be on the lookout for more of Barbara Carmen’s journalistic poetry.
Language as Signaling Mechanism
I’ve defended a mild form of linguistic prescriptivism in the past, but a distinct argument for linguistic prescriptivism has been running around in my head for a few weeks now, and Neal’s post below helped me finally pin it down. Neal said, among other things:
Ultimately, I had to concede to my wife that criticizing someone for thinking that “beg the question” means “induce one to ask the question” is little more than saying, “Ha, ha! I’ve read books on logic and you haven’t! I know the code and you don’t!”This reminded me of something Bill Poser said about a month ago:
Prescriptive grammar has very little to do with maintaining the clarity and precision of the language. What it really has to do with is maintaining the dominance of the upper classes and enforcing social norms. It used to be that only the wealthy had access to the kind of education that would provide knowledge of the particular type of English enshrined in the prescriptive standard, so discriminating against people who did not command this type of English helped to preserve class distinctions and to keep the lower classes in their place by making them believe that because they spoke differently they were inferior. This isn't as true as it once was, but the idea persists. Prescriptive grammar is a tool of the kleptocracy.Whoa, that’s harsh. The general message one might glean from Neal’s and Bill’s posts together is that many rules of grammar and style have no purpose but to keep certain people down while privileging the elite. (I should recognize that Neal’s position is not as extreme as Bill’s.)
I wonder if there might be a more charitable way of saying the same thing. Perhaps the rules of grammar and style perform a useful social function by providing signals about the educational backgrounds and effort levels of communicators. Consider the analogy to university education. One popular theory about such education is that it actually imparts useful knowledge to students and increases their productivity. That is, I hope, at least true to some extent. But another theory about education – one that I find increasingly plausible – is that it simply helps us to distinguish the more and less capable students. Someone who has graduated from college with a good GPA has (at least with some colleges) demonstrated a combination of native talent, work ethic, and persistence – all virtues that future employers value. Your degree is thus a signal of your productivity, even if getting the degree did not actually make you more productive.
For a signaling mechanism like education to work efficiently, there must be some cost of acquiring the positive signal, and the cost must be greater for the low productivity person than for the high productivity person. To put it simply, it must be harder for a low-talent person than for a high-talent person to graduate or get a good GPA. The valuable output of the signaling process is information about talent levels. I suspect that rules of grammar and style may perform a similar signaling role. To learn the rules, you need reasonably good instruction, and you must apply yourself to learn them. When you speak and write, listeners and readers acquire information about your education and work ethic.
It would be silly, of course, to judge a person ignorant or stupid on the basis of a single infraction of the rules. There are too many idiosyncratic rules for every person to learn every single one. I would not assume, for instance, that someone who uses “beg the question” to mean “induce one to answer the question” is uneducated. I might, however, infer (as Neal indicates) that the speaker had probably never studied logic. That inference might be buttressed by his reference to “ad homonym attacks.” The more errors (deviations from traditional usages) a person makes, the more confidence I have in my conclusions. This is similar to how I grade essays for style. I realize that style is unavoidably subjective, so I don’t subtract a standard number of points for each stylistic problem. Instead, I mark every stylistic problem I see, and then I make a holistic judgment of how badly written the paper was, taking into account the total number of red marks I see.
If my argument sounds elitist, that’s because it is. But it is an elitism grounded in information inferred from behavior, as opposed to irrelevant factors like sex or skin color. Most Americans do have the opportunity, if they apply themselves, to learn the basics of good writing and speaking. Indeed, learning to speak and write clearly, and in line with traditional rules, is probably one of the most accessible means of crossing class boundaries. Listeners should, of course, make exceptions for immigrants and others who cannot reasonably be expected to have fully absorbed the rules of the language. But the fact that a mechanism is imperfect does not imply that it has no use at all.