Against Christmas (sort of)

A friend of mine links to this article — a bit out of season — and says, “I know you’re mostly interested in seeing deadweight losses in the economy disappear, as we are all made better off then. Better start campaigning against Christmas.”

I think he overestimates how averse I am to such a campaign. I’ll go on record right now. Here it is: I’m against (the wasteful shallow materialistic overritualized overcommericalized overdramatized overhyped side of) Christmas!

I’ll put it another way. If the question is whether I would prefer to live in a world where my second Aunt Bernie*, whom I see precisely once a year, didn’t feel obliged to spend $20 on tube socks that I value at -$3 (negative because they take up space) and where I didn’t feel obliged to spend $20 on salad shooter accessories that she values at -$5 (because I got the cheap ones and they break), my answer is yes. I think that just might lessen the stress and help us focus on the part of Christmas that really matters.

But I don’t want to be a total Scrooge and we’re not going to get rid of gift giving any time soon, so let me take the economic framework my friend points out and try to pull a helpful thread out of it. Given that most gifts represent a deadweight loss (because if the recipient valued it at more than the price, he/she would already have bought it), what makes for a good, efficient gift? Three thoughts:

1. Things that a person can’t buy because they are not for sale — the sentimental, nostalgic, hand-made.
2. Things that can be bought, but the recipient doesn’t know exist. (E.g. a new CD that he/she hasn’t heard of.)
3. Things whose value the recipient underestimates. (E.g., I could afford a crock pot, but never would think to buy one. Now that my mom gave me one, I use it all the time. and, if it disappeared tomorrow, I’d probably buy another one.)

One quip with my friend’s statement. Eliminating the deadweight loss doesn’t make *everyone* better off. In this case, it would make the peddlers of tube socks, salad shooter accessories, and other crap we give each other around the holidays worse off.

More recent coverage of the deadweight idea is here.

*A stylized example, not a real person or pseudonym for a real person. I love my family and they give me totally sweet stuff.

Morality shmorality

From Gerald Gaus’s Order of Public Reason, which I am just sinking into:

My worry, which I try to show should be yours too, is that claims of social morality may be simply authoritarian. One demands that others must do as he instructs because he has access to the moral truth; another admits that she has no access to any moral truth, but nevertheless employs morality as a way to express… her own view of what others must do. But what if reasonable moral persons deny the purported truth or are unimpressed by the expressive act?

In other words, what if moral appeals are just tools a speaker uses to make others do what he wants them to do? There is actually a burgeoning literature in evolutionary psychology that argues something like this, and I’m becoming very interested in it.

This possibility is not inconsistent with the belief that moral truth exists. But it might make us think differently about political appeals premised on the notion that the speaker has special access to it. (Shot at the left; shot at the right; another shot at the left; for another shot at the right, Google anything about homosexuality being a sin.)

Right-wing conspiracy

Damn Koch brothers and their conspiracy to overthrow the PATRIOT Act! Also their nefarious support of Lincoln Center, the American Ballet Theater, MIT, the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Cornell Medical Center, PBS, the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and the National Museum of Natural History. What’s next?!

Public unions and public choice

About a week ago, I did a bad job trying to call some friends’ attention to some of the public choice problems that arise in public sector compensation. (They got mad at me.) A glutton for punishment, let me take another stab at it.

Imagine you want to sell your house. You put it on the market and, in short order, a nicely dressed buyer — let’s call him Sam — comes knocking. Your price is $90,000, but Sam makes you a counteroffer. “I’ll pay you $100,00,” he says, “as long as you are willing to take the money in installments.” He’ll pay you $10,000 every year for ten years, starting today. He seems like a trustworthy fellow and has the first payment of $10,000 on hand, so you take him up on his offer.

Unfortunately, over time, problems come up. In year five, Sam begins to have trouble making his payments. “It’s not that I don’t want to pay you,” he says, “I honestly don’t have the money in my bank account.” You ask a friend who runs the local bank if Sam is telling the truth and find out that he is — it seems Sam has been making promises he can’t keep all around town. You talk to a friend who is a psychiatrist and learn something else interesting. It seems that Sam has a rare mental disorder known as “temporal non-contiguity.” You see, Sam doesn’t see himself as a consistent person. In his twisted mind, his present self is at war with his future self. His present self is always trying to pass the buck on to his future self, never addressing today what he can put off until tomorrow.

Sam isn’t a bad person. Just ill. You even have some sympathy for him, despite his bilking you. But you’ll certainly be more careful in future negotiations with him, now that you know his nature. You still might strike a deal, but you’ll want to see payment up front.

Now think about the negotiation between public sector employees and the government. Sam is like Uncle Sam. Politicians have things they need and want, but some problems making commitments because the people in office today will not be in office tomorrow. In many respects, government has every incentive to kick the can down the road a few years if it solves a current problem. Some other dynamics make the situation even worse. For instance, unionization makes public sector employees sort of like a monopoly. (Think: Sam is homeless and you have the only house in town for sale.) For another, there are often strong political ties between unions and officeholders — union support is often necessary to get elected. (Think: while you and Sam are negotiating, you have a gun to his head.) Both of these factors are going to increase Sam’s proclivity to make promises he can’t keep.

Now step to New Jersey and see if this metaphor holds up. In a recent, very good NY Times profile, we learn the following:

• There is about a $1 trillion gap between what the states owe their workers and what they can pay. That’s a *lot* — more than 25% the annual federal budget.
• For precisely 17 of the last 17 years, (Republican governors; Democratic governors; you name it,) NJ failed to meet its obligatory payment to the state pension fund.
• The pension fund assumes an 8.25% annual rate of return. If a private investor got an average 8.25% return, he’d be very happy. The real average for the last ten years has been 2.6%.
• The state has set aside zero dollars to cover $3 billion in liabilities for health care premiums.

All smell like symptoms of temporal non-contiguity disorder.

The profile calls our attention to another vexing part of the problem. Consider this quote:

Leaders of the teachers’ union, meanwhile, are apoplectic about Christie’s proposed changes to their pension plan, which they say will penalize educators for the irresponsibility of politicians. After all, they point out, it wasn’t the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it’s their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut.

Yup! This is like saying it’s not fair for the teachers to bear the cost of Sam’s disorder. True enough. The problem is that Sam has been making promises he can’t keep all around town and one way or another, someone is going to feel some pain. For instance, I hear Sam also committed to make annual contributions to a hospital that helps adults and children with disabilities. The harsh question — one for which I do not have an answer — is, who is going to pay for Sam’s improvidence?

This brings me to why I think it is problematic to think of unions bargaining as a rights issue. At some future time, I’ll write about what I think are the problematic psychological roots of such moral language. But for now, I’ll just point out that, if collective bargaining is a right, there are probably others at play here. Do taxpayers have a right not to pay public sector employees more than they (the employees), as individuals, are willing to accept to do a job? (There are some zealots who would say that to do so is equivalent to making the taxpayer work for free.) Do the current and future beneficiaries of public programs such as the one linked above have a right to those funds? (Keep in mind that *something* has to give.)

A more pragmatic approach, in my humble opinion, is to think about the incentives at play and ask, “How are we going to structure things to help Sam with his problem?” Because Sam’s problem, unfortunately, is really our own.

Postscript

Notice that nothing above turns on an analysis of whether public workers are overcompensated relative to comparable private sector workers. My guess is that they are, but this appears to be a very muddy issue.

For more on this issue, an excellent analysis from National Affairs.

How to fail at persuasion

A friend directed my attention to this video, in which congressman Anthony Weiner of New York bangs on about abortion. Specifically, he says that a commitment to small government is inconsistent with a proposal that would make it harder to use federal money for abortions. (Currently, you are allowed to use federal money only if there was rape or incest. Some Republicans want to make the rule narrower, so it becomes forcible rape or incest. Not really sure what they mean by “forcible,” but anyway.)

I’m an instructor for a political psychology class on persuasion, and Weiner’s diatribe strikes me as a textbook example of doing just about everything wrong.

The big mistake is he utterly fails to understand his audience’s perspective and start from that point. Here is a thought experiment. Gather up whatever you believe about abortion and put it aside for a minute. Now, let’s take a moment and posit, just for the sake of argument, that a fetus is a human life. (This is what the people Weiner is speaking to believe, as well as roughly half the country. And there are thoughtful, if contested, reasons to believe it.)

If we do that, the issue is not at all about health care or regulation in the sense that Weiner means these terms. It’s a matter of natural rights. It a deeply moral issue about the protection of life and his whole line of reasoning becomes irrelevant. In the minds of the people he’s speaking to, he probably sounds aggressive, mean, and incoherent.

His approach is an effective strategy to fire up people who already share his beliefs (in truth, probably his intention), but from a practitioner’s perspective if he wants to be in the business of changing minds, he probably did more harm to his cause than good!

Stereotypes

The below passage from this chapter (word document) was like a breath of fresh air. Much of the stereotyping literature I’ve read tiptoes around the functional role they play and insinuates that any use of them is normatively bad. One you specify, as these authors do, a baseline cognizant of how stereotypes might be useful, the interesting stuff becomes the biases, distortions, and wrong inferences.

What about judgments about more socially charged attributes, such as intelligence, motivation, assertiveness, social skill, hostility, etc.? The same principles apply. If the stereotype is accurate and one only has a small bit of ambiguous information about an individual, using the stereotype as a basis for judging the person will likely enhance accuracy. For the statistically inclined, this is a very basic application of Bayes’ theorem (e.g., McCauley et al, 1980) and principles of regression (Jussim, 1991). Let’s assume for a moment that 30% of motorcycle gang members are arrested for violent behavior at some point in their lives, and .3% of ballerinas are arrested for violent behavior at some point in their lives. People who know this are being completely reasonable and rational if, on dark streets or at lonely train stations, they avoid the bikers more than ballerinas, in the absence of much other individuating information about them.

Also worth quoting:

In sum, accepting that stereotypes can sometimes be accurate provides the means to distinguish innocent errors from motivated bigotry, assess the efficacy of efforts to correct inaccurate stereotypes, and reach a more coherent scientific understanding of stereotypes. We believe that this proposition can advance the depth, scope, and validity of scientific research on stereotypes, and thereby help improve inter-group relations.

Psy Ops

Government’s favorite thing to do? Make itself bigger.

When is it ok to walk out?

A thought experiment.

Part of the rancor in Wisconsin revolves around whether it is acceptable for the Democrats to obstruct passage of the bargaining changes by leaving the state. Kosher? Are the Democrats shirking their responsibilities as paid legislators and doing violence to the rule of law? It seems to me that it boils down to which part of the political process you hold in greater esteem — majority rule or the quorum requirement. Is it acceptable to use the latter to serve a political end for which it was not designed? Come to a solid answer to that question before reading the next paragraph.

Now consider the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, which Democrats accused Republicans of using improperly throughout much of the last term (and, previously, vice-versa). Was this an acceptable exercise in obstructionism? Is this not a fairly parallel scenario? Were your answers to the two questions consistent? (Or is there an important difference between the quorum and the filibuster that I’m missing?)

Wisconsin phone tap

In the class I TA, the professor shows the students a picture of a brilliantly red wagon and then asks them what color it is. Once they respond, “red,” he darkens the image lighting to twilight level, and the wagon becomes gray. The point is that the same wagon can be experienced as any number of colors, depending on conditions. The broader point is that we all experience a given stimulus through the lens of our own motivations and biases. (Other pertinent metaphors include Lipset’s “pictures in our heads” and Plato’s cave allegory.)

The write-up of a recent phone tapping incident in Wisconsin, as well as some of the hysterics I have observed in the blogosphere, nicely illustrate this problem. It seems someone from an organization called Buffalo Beast got Scott Walker in the phone by presenting himself as David Koch, a billionaire who donated to Walker’s campaign.

To read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, you’d think somebody really caught the governor with his pants down. For instance, by covering Walker’s mention of Ronald Reagan in the *second sentence* of the article, it insinuates that he (Walker) had done something to really make a fool of himself. The rest of the article is full of insinuations that this is big news. (Or so I read it.)

To listen to the conversation, though, as I did, is to find that it falls somewhat differently on the ears of someone with a bit of sympathy for what the governor is doing. I thought Walker came across as fairly reasonable. Reports to the contrary, it does not seem like he proposes to lure Democrats back to Wisconsin under false pretenses. (Rather, in the exchange people are talking about, he proposes to lure them back under true pretenses.) He sort of chuckles at the caller’s objectionable jokes, but it’s not at all clear that he’s doing anything more than adhering to standard conversational norms. The most objectionable thing I can find is that, when the caller proposes to plant “troublemakers” in the crowd, Walker rejects the possibility more weakly than he might have. (He refers to something as the “only” problem, not one problem among many.) Again, this struck me as easily falling under the umbrella of conversational norms.

At the end of the conversation, Walker says, “We’re doing the just and right thing for the right reasons and it’s all about getting our freedoms back.” Agree or disagree with him, I take that to mean he genuinely believes what he’s doing is right. If we allow that he really does believe this, his detractors are left with two options: either he’s stupid, or there exist at least some thoughtful reasons one might support his policies.

If there is a psychology lesson here, I think it has to do with the caller. He caricatures David Koch as a unprincipled, mean-spirited, swearing, aristocrat. I can see how it would be easier to impugn your opponents if you thought of them that way.

Finally, a point of order about the MJS article. They refer to the phone tapping as a “prank call.” But this wasn’t a prank. A prank is something funny you do for a laugh. It was an attempt at a sort of entrapment. And I’m almost certain it’s illegal to tape someone on the phone without his or her knowledge — especially under false pretenses.