I do not intend for this post to be about the minimum wage. I don’t really have anything new to add to the subject, except to point to my VC post on it, and to voice my basic agreement with Tyler Cowen and Steve Horwitz. But the topic of this post was inspired by the blogospheric discussion of the minimum wage, especially Jacob Levy’s question about the statistical questions involved.
Everyone who takes an undergrad stats class learns how to perform statistical significance tests. They learn to choose a significance level of 95%, corresponding to an alpha of 0.05. Sometimes, they learn that you can select a higher or lower level of significance, like 99% (alpha = 0.01) or 90% (alpha = 0.1). But what I’ve gradually realized, from speaking to (and testing) many undergrads, is that they typically have no clue why – and more importantly, when – that’s the right level of significance to choose. And I’m increasingly of the opinion that lots of professionals don’t, either. (Maybe I’m one of the ignorant professionals – I’ll judge that from the reactions to this post. Also, nothing I say here is meant as criticism of Jacob, who addresses a related but different question.)
The fact is that alpha = 0.05 is essentially arbitrary. Technically, alpha is the probability that your testing method will lead you to incorrectly reject some “null” hypothesis. The null is the complement (logical opposite) of the “alternative” hypothesis, which is the claim you’re interested in supporting. To take the minimum wage example, the null hypothesis is that there’s no relationship between the minimum wage and employment. With alpha = 0.05, there’s a 5% chance you’ll incorrectly reject that hypothesis and conclude there is such a relationship (when in fact there is not).
But why should alpha be so small? Why put such high value on not incorrectly accepting our alternative hypothesis? The idea is that, as scientists, we ought not put our faith in a conclusion unless we have very strong proof. And, again as scientists, we must be satisfied to remain agnostic if we fail to get statistical significance for a proposition. And this is the key point: The absence of statistical significance should not lead us to accept the null hypothesis. It should lead us to be agnostic about both the null and the alternative hypothesis. To take the minimum wage example again, if studies fail to show the minimum wage causes unemployment, the appropriate conclusion is not that there isn’t a relationship, but that we just can’t say so with much confidence.
Think about it this way. Above, I supposed we were interested in showing that there is a relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment. In order not to make the task too easy on ourselves, we set a rather high bar: 95% confidence. But what if we were interested in showing there’s not a relationship? In that case, we are interested in supporting the null, not the alternative, hypothesis. If we set alpha = 0.05, and if we accept the null whenever we fail to accept the alternative, then what is the chance of incorrectly affirming that there’s no relationship? It is not 5%, but in fact something much larger – what statisticians call the beta value, corresponding to a Type II error (the error of incorrectly failing to reject the null hypothesis). The smaller is the alpha, the larger is the beta. And that means using an alpha of 0.05 makes it way, way too easy to claim to have proven the no-relationship hypothesis.
Using a small alpha makes a lot of sense if you’re choosing between belief and agnosticism, and you wish to give agnosticism the benefit of a doubt. Scientists don’t want to express support for something unless they’re pretty darn sure of it. But what if the choice is not between belief and agnosticism, but between one belief and another belief? In practical decision-making, that is usually the case. The owner of a movie theater has to decide whether students’ ticket-buying behavior differs from the rest of the public’s, and if he makes the wrong decision he will not make as much money as he could have. He has no choice but to pick a belief – either he thinks students are probably different and he charges different prices, or he thinks they are probably the same and he charges the same prices. Similarly, a government can either impose a minimum wage or fail to do so. It can’t remain purely agnostic like the scientist can.
In cases like these, the arbitrary setting of a very small alpha doesn’t make sense, because both the alpha and the beta are important. Small alpha implies large beta. In the case of the minimum wage, a large beta means a high chance of assuming there’s no relationship between the minimum wage and employment even though there is.
Again, let me emphasize that I’m not trying to make a point about the minimum wage per se. The point I’m making here applies to business, public policy, and numerous other cases of practical decision-making in which one must choose between alternate strategies based on alternate beliefs about the world. The decision rules of pure science should not be confused with the decision rules of life.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
The (in)Significance of Significance
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Self-Promotion
I have an op-ed in the East Bay Business Times (free registration required), discussing state bans on direct shipping of wine to consumers. I'm not sure if it's okay for me to post it here as well, so you'll have to follow the link.
I see that some mild editing has been done, but nothing too serious. I do have one concern about my own claims: I used the phrase "Sonoma Valley chardonnay" without actually checking to make sure they make chardonnay in Sonoma Valley. For all I know, they only make cabernets there. But hey, I'm an economist, not a sommelier.
UPDATE: The piece has been picked up by the Tri-Valley Herald and the Argus. Cool! Also, Jason kindly informs me (in the comments) that I'm safe on the Sonoma Valley chardonnay issue.
Monday, July 12, 2004
Unfriendly Amendments
A friend just forwarded me an email alert, which began with the following:
In less than 48 hours, Congress will vote on an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would permanently deny marriage equality to same-sex couples. This is unprecedented -- never before has our Constitution been amended to take away anyone's rights. We've got to fight back.The proposed amendment is a bad idea, of course. But it’s false to say the Constitution has never been amended to take away anyone’s rights. What about the 18th Amendment, which instituted the prohibition of alcohol? That definitely took away people’s rights. We might also include the 16th Amendment, which allowed Congress to institute an income tax.
Does Divorce Encourage or Discourage Marriage?
The gay marriage debate has gotten me thinking about the effect of divorce on marriage. That divorce has a deleterious effect on marriage as an institution is a notion shared by both the advocates of gay marriage (“What’s really undermining marriage is divorce, not homosexuality”) and opponents (“Gay marriage, like divorce, will further the degradation of traditional marriage”). But is it really true that divorce is bad for marriage?
From an economic perspective, the answer is ambiguous. Marriage is a kind of contract. Divorce is a means of ending the contractual relationship. What happens when you make it easier to get out of a contract? On the one hand, people will be less inclined to enter a contract if the other party can bail out, potentially leaving you in a difficult situation (say, stranding your relationship-specific investments). On the other hand, people will be more inclined to enter a contract if they know they can end the relationship when it’s no longer beneficial for themselves. For example, if I like an apartment but I’m unsure I’ll enjoy living there, I’m more inclined to rent on a short-term lease. Likewise, if the landlord think I like a good tenant but can’t be certain, they’re more inclined to rent to me on a short-term lease. There’s a reason that business contracts often contain escape clauses: without such an option, some parties won’t contract in the first place.
The application to marriage is straightforward: easier divorce could increase or decrease the number of marriages performed. The participants in some potential marriages are made better off by divorce, others worse off. Now, the conservative defenders of marriage might argue that the total number of marriages, or the satisfaction of the participants, is not the issue – the real issue is having stable marriages, and easy divorce decreases stability through both the routes described above. People become less willing to make investments in a relationship that might end, and they become more willing to enter such relationships lightly because they have an escape hatch.
But why do we want marriages to be stable? The main argument is “the good of the children.” Realize that many couples who might consider marriage already have kids (or kids on the way). Being unsure about the lastingness of their relationship, they might be unwilling to marry if marriage is hard to quit, but willing to give it a try if it’s easy to quit. If they get married with an easy divorce option, the kids could end up better off because their parents are more inclined to stay together than if they hadn’t tied the knot. And even if the parents wind up getting divorced, arguably the kids are no worse off than if the parents had never married in the first place and eventually went their separate ways.
I’m not claiming the effect just described is significant enough to make easy divorce, on net, a good thing. But it is something to keep in mind, because it means that divorce’s effects are ambiguous in theory, even if we focus solely on its effects on children. In principle, it would make most sense to allow couples to choose the terms of their own marriage contracts. That would allow couples who feel the need for an escape clause to include one, without obligating other couples who want a stronger commitment to follow suit.
Friday, July 09, 2004
Suckers Wanted Here
I’ve received the following email a couple of times:
[Citibank logo here]I’m embarrassed to admit that I fell for it long enough to click the link. The logo was the main thing that fooled me, and I didn’t read closely enough to catch the weirdness of the language. But fortunately, I’m not enough of a sucker to fall for the next step. The form-window that popped up asked me to provide:
Dear client of Citi,
As the Technical Service of the Citibank have been currently updating the software, We kindly ask you to follow the reference given below to confirm your data, otherwise your access to the system may be blocked.
[hyperlink omitted]
We are grateful for your cooperation.
Full nameWhew. If anyone is willing to give away that much information, I think they just may deserve to get their identity stolen. Interestingly, the link was set up so that it simultaneously opened the form-window just described and the actual Citibank website. Clever.
ATM card number
Bank account number
PIN number
User name for online access
Social Security Number
Mother’s maiden name
Date of birth
Credit card number
Credit card expiration date
CVV2 number for credit card
Unfashionable Libertarians for Not-Bush
Virginia Postrel is one of the smartest libertarians around, but she’s got a big blind spot about the 2004 election. First, she makes the mistake of focusing on the presidential candidates’ platforms, instead of the dynamics of their interaction with Congress:
Vote for Kerry if you must, folks. But don't pretend you're doing it because Bush's economic policies are insufficiently free market or fiscally responsible. Kerry wouldn't be any better on economics. He'd be worse.I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The pro-Kerry argument is not his platform. The pro-Kerry argument is gridlock. Tyler Cowen expands on the point.
Second, Virginia accuses Jacob Levy – and by implication, other libertarians – of supporting Kerry to be politically fashionable:
[first post] But all rationalizations aside, I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerry-leaning libertarian hawks (now that's a small demographic!) are simply kidding themselves in order to stay on the fashionable side of politics.This is at once bizarre and insulting. Libertarianism is a small, largely unknown ideology. Nobody’s a libertarian to be popular. Libertarians who “out” themselves often run a risk to their academic careers – a risk that is hardly mitigated by supporting one Democrat in one election. Bill Clinton was much more fashionable and popular than Bob Dole or the LP’s Harry Browne – so where were all the pro-Clinton libertarians in 1996? It is only now, in the light of the catastrophe that is the Bush administration, that libertarians have begun to express nostalgia for Clinton.
[second post] Jacob Levy claims geeky fashion sense and a messy office as a defense against my suggestion that his Kerry infatuation is a sign of trying to be cool. Sorry, Jacob (whom I like very much). Bad aesthetics is no excuse. Artists aren't the only ones who fashionably hate George W. So do academics.
No, when a libertarian vocally supports a Democrat, there’s clearly a reason. In this case, it’s because George W. Bush has been a miserable failure, by both libertarian and common-sense standards.
Now, there’s a legitimate question about whether libertarians should vote for Kerry or the LP’s Badnarik. On that question, I’m torn. But realistically, since Badnarik hasn’t the slightest chance of winning, we might as well ask who is the lesser of the two major-party evils. To me, the answer is clearly Kerry – not because of his platform, and not because I want to be popular, but because the GOP doesn’t discover its limited-government principles until there’s a Democrat in the White House.
So how do we put one there? Whether you vote for Kerry or Badnarik, you’re still subtracting votes from Bush – so far, so good. The argument for voting Kerry is that each vote is a two-vote swing (one less for Bush, one more for Kerry), while voting Badnarik is only a one-vote swing (one less for Bush, no more for Kerry). But libertarian votes cast for Kerry will be indistinguishable from the votes of all the anti-trade, anti-market, pro-tax, nanny-state left-wingers. On the other hand, votes for Badnarik – especially in a key state – can easily be interpreted as “people who might have supported Bush if he weren’t a total disaster.” I think that’s a message worth sending, which is why I’m leaning slightly toward Badnarik.
UPDATE: Virginia Postrel's initial accusation of popularity-seeking seems directed only at Kerry-leaning libertarian *hawks*, so maybe her point is that Bush is clearly better on the war & terrorism issues. Not being a hawk myself, I'm unsympathetic. In any case, her second post strongly indicates that she thinks Bush would be better on economic issues as well.
Roundup
Lacking anything really interesting of my own to say, I’m offering links to some recent posts I’ve enjoyed:
1. Geoff Pullum at Language Log points out something really annoying about words painted on streets. I’ve been annoyed about it myself, but I never remembered it long enough to blog about it. This is why I need a personal voice recorder in my car. And the shower.
2. Inspired by an opinion article lamenting that there’s “Little Hope Left for Weapons Ban,” David Masten at Catallarchy offers a snarky response lamenting that there’s also “Little Hope Left for Speech, Press Ban.”
3. Will Wilkinson gives a healthy fisking to Lawrence Mishel, who’s wringing his hands about inequality while supporting government regulations that create poverty. Linguistic bonus: After Mishel dares to “daresay” something silly, Will ups the ante with a “double-dog daresay.” Hey Neal, what’s the past tense of “daresay” – “daredsay” or “daresaid”? Does it matter whether it’s one word or two?
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
In Defense of the Wal-Mart Model, Part 2
At the end of my previous post on Wal-Mart, I promised to consider Daniel Davies’s third point against Wal-Mart’s alleged productivity improvements. So here it is.
3. Employment practices - transferring risks to those worst equipped to bear themThere are a couple of different arguments mixed together here, so I’ll take them in turn. The first is that Wal-Mart has essentially shifted costs – specifically, the costs associated with bearing risk – onto the workers. As with Davies’s prior arguments, there’s probably some element of truth here, in that productivity gains may be overstated if some reduced costs are actually shifted costs. But does that mean the workers are actually worse off as a result of Wal-Mart? Wal-Mart has to offer terms of employment that will attract workers away from their next best alternative – either unemployment benefits or other employers. I conclude that, for whatever annoyances may be associated with working at Wal-Mart, the workers they hire must consider the package of benefits and costs to be better than the alternatives, all things considered.
… When one adopts “flexibility” in labour practices, and gains an improvement in output/input ratios as a result, then it can be made to look as if a massive productivity improvement has been made for free. This is not always the case. A large part of this apparent improvement in the company’s ability to generate outputs from inputs has come about simply as a result of taking the cost of mismatches between inputs and demand, and shifting it away from the company onto the shoulders of some other bugger - either the worker or the taxpayer through the benefits system. As Jerome Levy pointed out in the 1930s, one of the historical functions of the corporation has been the provision of implicit unemployment insurance to the working class, allowing them to smooth the volatility in their incomes by taking fluctuations in overall demand as variances in the profit rate. When an employer decides that he no longer wishes to provide for this cost, it doesn’t go away. WalMart are, notoriously, one of the most aggressive employers out there when it comes to alleged off-the-clock working practices, union-busting, sending workers home or keeping them waiting for shifts, and having a surprisingly high proportion of their cost base subsidised by the welfare system. If this cost of higher volatility in labour incomes is taken up by Joe Soap the taxpayer through social insurance, then it shows up in the figures as an increase in corporate productivity and a swelling of the bloated government sector.
The perception seems to be that Wal-Mart’s profit-seeking management has simply demanded a reduction in labor benefits. But employers can’t simply command a reduction in wages or benefits any time they want; and they can’t simply command a greater amount of work for the same wages and benefits any time they want. If they could, they would have done it already, long before Wal-Mart. Sure, Wal-Mart would like to be able to be able to get more work for less money, because that means higher profits – no surprise there. But people have always been greedy, and businesses have always been profit-seeking. Are we to believe that people are just greedier now than they used to be? Any analysis that purports to show that “profit-seeking” or “greed” explains a change in economic outcomes must meet the burden of explaining why the same profit-seeking and greed didn’t lead to the same outcome much earlier.
Davies’s argument also raises the question of efficient risk-bearing. It seems logical that a large corporation, which can pool risks over many workers, is a more efficient bearer of risk than individual workers. But if that’s true, then there’s an obvious deal to be made: Wal-Mart could reduce or eliminate some of the risks associated with sudden layoffs, showing up for work and being told to go home, etc., and then reduce the workers’ wages slightly to cover the risk. If it’s truly the case that Wal-Mart is the more efficient bearer of risk in this case, then that deal should make everyone – both the workers and Wal-Mart – better off. The fact that this deal hasn’t been made is prima facie evidence that Wal-Mart’s employment practices must improve productivity in some way, rather than just shifting risk to the workers.
The second argument is that Wal-Mart is taking advantage of the public welfare system by encouraging its employees to sign up for benefits, implementing sudden layoffs, and so on. What’s interesting about this argument is that it casts public benefits for workers (such as unemployment insurance) as a form of corporate welfare – surely a novel argument. I wonder if the liberals who (rightly) rail against corporate welfare would be willing to eliminate the benefits in question? In any case, as far as I know, Wal-Mart has never lobbied for the public welfare laws. It has just provided its workers a service by telling them how to access publicly available benefits. At worst, then, Wal-Mart is guilty of responding rationally to a public policy that was created by others and justified on grounds of helping the little guy. (I’ll take the forgoing statements back if I’m shown evidence that Wal-Mart has indeed lobbied for the expansion of public welfare.)
If Wal-Mart is indeed shifting costs onto the taxpayer – and maybe it is – then Davies is correct to say that the productivity improvements attributed to Wal-Mart have been overstated. But then my question is, whose fault is that? If you give your teenage daughter a high-limit credit card, and she runs to the mall and blows scads of money at the Gap and Express, is that Gap’s and Express’s fault? The “external cost” of the stores’ transactions with your daughter is one that you’ve brought on yourself by putting your own pocketbook on the line. And the same goes for state policies that deliberately create public benefits which encourage changes in behavior. If people engage in greater health risks because of free state-run health clinics, that is a cost the state has brought on itself (and the taxpayers). And if workers more willingly take less-secure jobs because of state unemployment benefits, that is again a cost the state has brought on itself (and the taxpayers). To blame Wal-Mart for “chucking [its] grass cuttings over the fence” (Davies’s phrase for imposing costs on others) is to deflect attention from the policies that gave Wal-Mart a positive incentive to do the chucking.
And just to be clear, the “chucking” in this case takes the form of hiring people, laying people off, and providing the workers with information that makes it easier for them to access state benefits. The former two are standard practice for any employer, and the latter is something the state does itself on a regular basis.
Monday, July 05, 2004
Moral Philosophy as if Incentives Really Mattered
Matthew Yglesias makes the following comment in a discourse on Spider-Man 2 (warning: spoilers in Yglesias’s post and the last paragraph of this one):
But as we move forward into modernity, intellectual types lose their faith [in heaven and hell]. But there's still a desire to come up with a moral system that people will want to follow. Hence we start hearing complaints that normative view X or Y is "too challenging" because morality, apparently, is supposed to be easy and it's just not cool for Peter Singer (and others) to go around telling us that it might suck to do the right thing.The implication is that there’s something facile or illegitimate about criticizing a moral philosophy for being “too challenging.” But even if the difficulty of following moral dictates is not the only relevant factor, surely it’s at least one relevant factor.
I take it as given that the purpose of a moral system is to guide the behavior of actual people. People are not angels; they cannot be expected to follow moral rules purely because they have (allegedly) been justified by religious or philosophical reasoning. Nor are they devils; they will sometimes set aside personal gain for moral reasons. In the real-world middle ground between angels and devils, whether people follow moral rules depends on the persuasiveness of the rules’ justifications, how fully people have been socialized to respect the rules, the degree of temptation they face to break the rules, and the degree of difficulty involved in following the rules. Given the last two factors, it follows that some moral systems may fail to guide the behavior of actual people – or more importantly, fail to guide their behavior in the intended manner – because the rules ask too much. To be more specific, the rules may ask too much incentive-wise, by demanding that people sacrifice too much; and they may ask too much information-wise, by requiring costly or inaccessible knowledge for their concrete application. (Mario Rizzo refers to the latter issue as “the knowledge problem of ethics,” which is analogous to Hayek’s famed knowledge problem of economics.)
Now for the crucial Spider-Man application. When Peter Parker begins to think that being Spider-Man entails giving up everything good in his life (romance, career success, etc.), he starts to become despondent. The physical manifestation of his depression is the temporary loss of his super powers. In short, the excessive moral demands of being a selfless superhero make him less effective as a hero. His powers only return when those he loves most – Aunt Mae and Mary Jane – are directly threatened by Dr. Octopus, and the return of his powers enables him to save the day. The activation of his own loves and desires brings out the best in him. The moral of the first movie, in the words of Uncle Ben, was that with great power comes great responsibility. But I think the moral of the second movie could easily be: if the burden of responsibility becomes too great, it becomes self-defeating.
(See also the comments from Henry Farrell and Brayden King, and Yglesias's favorable response.)
Sunday, July 04, 2004
July 4th Heresy
Like most libertarians, I like to complain about nanny-state regulations, especially on July 4th. And like most red-blooded Americans, I like to blow stuff up, which makes anti-fireworks regulations especially galling. I’ve noticed at least two libertarian bloggers complaining about anti-fireworks laws, and in my gut, I want to agree with them. If drunken fools blow their hands off, that’s their problem, right?
The problem is that exploding fireworks is not a purely self-regarding action; arguably, it’s not even close. The primary danger – and I realize it’s not a problem everywhere in the country, but it’s definitely a problem in Southern California – is that fireworks can start fires. In dry areas, that can lead to out-of-control conflagrations that destroy hundreds or even thousands of homes, not to mention taxing the efforts of firefighters, filling the sky with black soot, reducing air quality, sometimes shutting down highways and inconveniencing large numbers of people.
I hate to admit it, but I think regulating fireworks, and even implementing an outright ban in especially fire-prone areas, is probably a good idea. Will people flout the regulations, leading to smuggling and black markets? Yes, but I still suspect the gains exceed the losses (though I’m open to evidence showing that my concerns are out of proportion to the problem). We can’t eliminate the risk entirely, but we can at least reduce it substantially.
Friday, July 02, 2004
Sauce for the Gander
"Guys Gone Wild" is now a reality. Call me crazy, but I'm betting it won't sell as well as "Girls Gone Wild." Interestingly, the marketers admit that they expect sales to come from two main sources: women buying them as gag gifts for friends, and gay men.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
In Defense of the Wal-Mart Model
At Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies explains why Wal-Mart’s much-vaunted contributions to economic productivity might not be so great after all. I agree with Davies’s fundamental points, which I understand to be (a) that productivity is notoriously different to measure, and (b) that the productivity gains attributed to Wal-Mart have probably been exaggerated. But if the Wal-Mart boosters sometimes overstate their case in its favor, I think Davies overstates the case against. Even his own examples show how Wal-Mart has created value. Let’s take them one at a time:
1. Lower value added retailing = higher productivity! … The issue being that, if the boutiques on King’s Road were to get rid of the dolly assistants, free coffee and assorted perks and bijouterie, and move to a model where they piled the Prada high in fluorescent-lit barns, then they would presumably be able to shift more units at a lower price, at the expense of taking all the joy out of shopping for the Sex-in-the-City crowd. As Brad[1] pointed out in a critical comment on the Kay article, the national statistical agencies try their damndest to make sure that the productivity statistics don’t pick up a decrease in the value-added component of retailing as an increase in productivity, but it’s an intrinsically difficult task.Granted, it’s a much less pleasant experience to shop at Wal-Mart than to shop in a boutique. If you want an accurate measure of the value added by switching to the warehouse model, you must remember to subtract out the value associated with the forgone ambience. That said, we should notice that lots of people still have the option of shopping at boutiques and choose to shop at Wal-Mart instead. That’s pretty strong evidence of value added for those people, since they could choose to patronize the boutiques if they didn’t perceive a net gain from shopping at Wal-Mart. Simply put, there are some people who are unwilling to pay for the additional amenities of the smaller stores; before Wal-Mart came along, they had to pay for them anyway.
2. Outsourcing distribution costs - to you! … I would contend that there is one particular, systematic mistake [identified by behavioral finance] that people make which is probably of macroeconomics. And it’s a hole in popular psychology which WalMart drives through in a coach-and-four.Again, there’s a large grain of truth here. There is a cost, in both time and inconvenience, involved in going to a big-box store on the outskirts of town. That cost ought to be taken into account in assessing Wal-Mart’s value added. But once again, the revealed preferences of actual consumers argue strongly in favor of the notion that, on net, lots of people still prefer the big-box store. Many of Wal-Mart’s customers have lower incomes, and that makes perfect sense: people who earn less per hour have a lower opportunity cost of their time, so they will naturally substitute time expenditures for money expenditures when they can.
That particular psychological quirk is the tendency of people in industrial societies to: a) put an irrationally low valuation on their leisure time, and b) believe that they have more spare time than they actually do. … In any case, as John pointed out a while ago, if you’re spending your “leisure” time driving to an out-of-town megastore, then it’s not leisure in any meaningful sense. If you end up doing more of this than you would, in a fully informed and reflective state, want to, then WalMart has successfully outsourced a proportion of its cost base to you, and the national income statistics and the McKinsey Global Institute will happily collaborate in helping you to fool yourself.
Davies resists the revealed preference argument on grounds of behavioral psychology: people’s choices are sometimes afflicted by persistent biases that are inconsistent with pure rational choice. As a result, it is possible that their choices don’t reflect their true preferences. Now, it’s certainly true that people are subject to these biases in certain types of situation, but attributing such biases willy-nilly to any old situation, as Davies does here, is precisely the danger of people taking the behavioral results too seriously. What seems like a bias will sometimes turn out to be a (quasi) rational means of correcting other cognitive biases or dealing with a facet of the situation not apprehended by the observer.
So what countervailing biases might be involved here? One of the most common biases is placing too much value on the present relative to the future. A person with this bias might buy something at the expensive-but-local store, instead of sacrificing a little time now to save money for the future. I do this all the time, when I buy food at the corner market instead of driving an extra 5 minutes to the grocery store. Which bias is dominant in the Wal-Mart situation? Focusing on the undervaluation-of-leisure bias leads to Davies’s implied conclusion: people shop at Wal-Mart too much. Focusing exclusively on the overvaluation-of-the-present bias leads to the conclusion that people don’t shop at Wal-Mart enough. I, for one, would defer to the judgment of the people who have the greatest incentive to correct their biases and get the outcome right: the consumers. Choices may not reveal preferences perfectly, but they’re the best sign we’ve got.
Davies makes a third point, but this post is already way too long, so I’ll respond to that point in a later post.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Terrorist Jokes
I’ve heard very few terrorist jokes since 9/11. I don’t mean that comics and humorists are unwilling to joke about the terrorism; the national funny-bone moratorium ended a couple of months after 9/11, and there’s been plenty of good humor about terrorism since. What I mean is that I’ve heard very few terrorist joke jokes, in the sense of funny stories with punchlines that get passed around mostly by word of mouth, like blonde jokes or lawyer jokes.
But I did hear some terrorist jokes in the late 1970s, during the first wave of Islamic terrorism. I can only remember two of them now. Both of them involved “Aggie terrorists” – you see, I grew up in Texas, and Aggies (Texas A&M students) are the butt of all jokes in Texas. In other parts of the country, it was probably Pollacks, morons, or some other group. What was the first group you heard it took five of to screw in a lightbulb, one to hold the bulb and four to turn the ladder? For me, it was Aggies.
Anyway, here they are. I’m replacing Aggies with morons to achieve more universal appeal:
Q: Did you hear about the moron terrorist who tried to blow up a bus?Ah, the good old days, when hijackers actually wanted to go somewhere instead of destroy something. It’s almost quaint.
A: He burned his lips on the exhaust pipe.
Q: Did you hear about the moron hijacker?
A: Yeah, he tried to hijack a train to Cuba.
Fetal Voters, Redux
This post by Amy and these two by Eugene caused me to go back and read more carefully the article that claimed legal abortion may have cost Democrats elections by shrinking their numbers. I commented on the article here, after skimming it and finding the argument superficially plausible. (In my defense, I did say that I hadn’t checked the numerical analysis carefully!) It turns out, on closer inspection, that there are a number of flaws.
First, a lot of the figures about who has had abortions come from survey data, which is notoriously unreliable on questions about personal and potentially embarrassing matters.
Second, the question asked (“As far as you know, has anyone close to you had an abortion?”) doesn’t capture the relevant information even if answered truthfully. In order for the answers to tell us anything about how many Democrats and Republicans are having abortions, we’d have to know people’s propensity to feel “close” to someone of the opposite party.
Third, although it’s certainly true that people tend to “inherit” their political views from their parents, it’s not a 100% correlation. But the author implicitly treats all unborn children of Democrats as guaranteed Democrats, and all unborn children of Republicans as guaranteed Republicans. Taking into account the fact some children do not adopt their parents’ politics would shrink the size of the claimed effect (though not eliminate it).
Fourth, although the author claims to have taken the relatively low voting rates of 18-24 year olds into account, I don’t think he has. Working backward from his numbers, I figure he must have assumed a 47% voting rate for that age group, whereas the actual number (according to this site) is only about 42%. Again, that would tend to shrink the size of the effect (though not eliminate it). The author might respond, however, that it only delays the effect, since eventually the “missing voters” would reach the age ranges with higher voter turnout.
I still think the author’s argument has prima facie plausibility, because the crucial premises (that Democrats have abortions at higher frequency than do Republicans, and that children have a tendency to adopt their parents’ politics) are believable and, if true, lead in fairly straightforward fashion to the conclusion that legal abortion should reduce the number of future Democrats more than the number of future Republicans. But it would take much better statistical analysis to prove that conclusion with any degree of certainty.
Also, I stand by the final point made in my previous post: the phenomenon, if real, does not indict Democrats any more than Republicans. If Democrats diminish their electoral chances by supporting abortion, it follows that Republicans diminish their electoral chances by opposing it.
UPDATE: Alex Tabarrok points out that various factors may offset the alleged reduction in births due to abortion. First, the availability of abortion may just change the timing of births. Second, the abortion option probably increases the frequency of sex and decreases the use of birth control. Both factors would, again, tend to shrink the size of the "missing voter" effect. Alex suggests that, in theory, the effect could even go in the opposite direction.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Sex Discrimination
Justice Breyer’s dissent in the COPA case cites, once again, the famous Miller test for whether expression is “obscene” and thus unprotected by the Constitution. Material is considered obscene if:
”(a) … ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…;Isn’t it high time the Court finally dumped the Miller test altogether, instead of quibbling over the boundaries of its application? In her concurring opinion, Justice O’Connor nicely knocks down, or at least bends, prongs (a) and (b). She draws attention to the tyranny of applying local community standards to a global medium, and to the inevitable ambiguity of the term “offensive.” But what I’d most like to see ditched is (c), the notion that protected speech should have “literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” – as though literature, art, politics, and science were the only valuable aspects of human life. Why not sexual value? Is not sex one of the most significant, and most sought after, components of the good life, at least for a huge chunk of humanity? “Religious value” is also missing from the list; but fortunately, religion gets separate First Amendment billing, while sex does not.
(b) … the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
(c) … the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 24 (1973)
Turnabout Is Fair Play
David Sedaris cracks me up (registration required):
At the close of his reading to promote his latest book, the bestselling “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” [David Sedaris] informed the sold-out crowd of 1,800 at UCLA’s Royce Hall that he would offer priority signing – for smokers.Heh.
A pack of cigarettes would usher the bearer to the front of the line, which, if it was anything like it’s been around the country, could be at least a four-to-five-hour wait. “You nonsmokers are going to live longer than us anyway,” he explained.
A wave of dubious chuckles rose from the crowd. The laughter gathered steam as Sedaris, installed behind an imposing podium, continued to lay down the rules: “And for those of you smokers who will think about giving your packs to the nonsmokers, I think you should ask yourself: ‘Would he let me smoke in his home?’ The answer is no.”
Monday, June 28, 2004
Brazen Plug for Firefly Movie
Firefly fans, you're in luck: Serenity: The Official Movie Website is now operational.
Full disclosure: The link there is a referral link, through another website, that will earn me points that I can use to get cool Firefly stuff. If you wish to deny me that, you can click through directly here. On the other hand, if you want to help me out, click on these links as well: FireFlyFans.net and http://forums.prospero.com/foxfirefly/start. (Ask me for an invitation to join the Browncoats -- that'll get me points, too.)
Seriously, Firefly was an amazing TV show that Fox treated shabbily and then canceled before it had a chance. Go buy or rent the DVD of the first (and only) season.
Fetal Voters
First it turns out that legal abortion fights crime by reducing the number of future criminals.
Then it turns out that legal abortion reduces abortion (no, that’s not a typo) by reducing the number of future aborters.
And now it may turn out that legal abortion changes electoral outcomes by reducing the number of future Democrats.
This last is an article by a conservative (originally published in the American Spectator), so naturally the spin is that the Democrats are wrong on the abortion issue and paying for it at the ballot box. I don’t think the Democrats are wrong on abortion, but I think the numerical analysis makes a lot of sense (though I haven’t checked it carefully). If it seems like Democrats are making a strategic error by supporting abortion, notice that the very same argument shows a mirror-image error in Republican strategy. If the Republicans ever succeeded in banning abortion, they would be contributing to the ranks of the Democratic party.
UPDATE: Read my more careful analysis and partial recantation here.
Oil Dependency
Regarding my post on the Volokh Conspiracy about oil dependency, a reader emailed me the following question:
I was confused by the following excerpt from your guest blog at www.volokh.com:A good point, and I can see how my reader was confused. I believe I overstated my case. My essential point was this: that if the price of oil fell, the Middle Eastern producers would be responsible for a larger share of the remaining production, and they would get a larger share of the remaining profits. In that sense, we would be more “beholden” to them than we were before. That doesn’t mean, however, that their profits would actually be larger than before. It just means that the Middle Eastern producers’ profits would fall by less than would the profits of other oil producers.
"Suppose that our goal is to deprive Saudi Arabia and other terrorist-breeding states of oil profits. The proposed policy would decrease the total profits of the oil industry (because of the lower price), but Middle Eastern countries would sell a larger share of it. Put simply, the Middle East would get a larger slice of a smaller pie, with an ambiguous overall effect on profits (at least based on theory alone - better information could possibly allow a more precise prediction). Remember that the next time someone tells you that driving an SUV helps fund the terrorists."
Ok, so I'm almost certainly wrong here given that you are an economist and I haven't taken an economics course in four years, but this doesn't make sense to me. I'm confused by your claim that the effects of decreased demand on Middle Eastern profits would be "ambiguous." If the price were to fall, wouldn't each individual producer be willing to produce less at that given price? Consequently wouldn't every individual producer in the Middle East be producing less at a lower price? Wouldn't this imply lower profits?
The reader continues:
The first answer that pops into my mind is that your reasoning has something to do with the increased market power OPEC might have. I'm still a little confused about how this could work to increase profits given a lower oil price.I was indeed thinking about the increased market power of OPEC. As other producers left the market, OPEC members would have a larger share of the market and thus a greater ability to affect prices. Now, if OPEC held prices too high, then the competing producers would re-enter the market, which means there would still be a natural limit to OPEC’s power. But it could take a long time for alternative producers to reemerge, and in the meantime OPEC could reap short-term profits. Also, knowing that OPEC could let the price drop back down to bankruptcy levels (for the higher-cost producers) as soon as enough of them returned to the market would be a disincentive for them to do so. Higher-cost producers are unlikely to incur the start-up costs unless they think high prices are likely to persist.
Thus, OPEC’s ability to manipulate prices would increase if demand fell, but that would not necessarily translate into reliably higher profits.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Back at You
So I've returned to Agoraphilia from my guest stint at the VC, but Neal has decided to move on with his own blog. I've posted a link in the right column, and also in the blog roll. It's really been great having Neal as a co-blogger. I'm glad I can say I played a key role in sucking him into the blogosphere - especially since Ellen says she and Neal used to snicker about my being dorky enough to have my own blog! Someday soon, Ellen, someday soon...
Friday, June 25, 2004
Thanks, Glen
Thanks, Glen, for inviting (nay, encouraging) me to blog my linguistics-related thoughts at your place, and thanks, Agoraphilia readers, for your comments. I've had enough fun that I'm starting up a blog of my own: Literal-Minded ("linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally"). Stop by sometime!
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
We've Got to Ramble
Neal and I are guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy for the next three days. I’ve composed a haiku in honor of the occasion:
Nomads of the word
Find homes in many places
But return in time.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Bar Flight, Part 2
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.
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.