Sentences that blew my mind

From Tooby and Cosmides’ chapter and coalitions and the psychology of morality. Does this sound like politics?

The winning outcome in social negotiation is to get everyone to adopt your position as their own, so that they conform to it, effectively enforce it, and carry the costs of enforcement. Mental coordination is defeated to the extent that it is publicly recognized that there are differences of position. This is usually recast not as moral relativism, but as individual mistakes in perceiving what the moral position “really” or “truly” is. It is almost definitional of morality that people intuitively represent morality to be intrinsically good, and support its being seen as real and objective. We argue that this is an evolved circuit.

Good intentions…

are not enough. Felix Salmon has more on why the outpouring of charity that occurs after major disasters does less good than it could. Mailing socks to a country with a per capita GDP near $40,000 is to please (or worse, sate) our moral intuitions, but is not a very efficient channel for generosity.

Makes for good marketing, though. Red Cross actually allows you to earmark your donation for the Japan disaster. Although in fairness, they do have a disclaimer that says “when donations exceed American Red Cross expenses for a specific disaster, contributions are used to prepare for and serve victims of other disasters.” This might be coded language for, “If you are donating on a whim because this stuff has been in the news lately, we’ll oblige you, but we reserve the right to shift this money to where it might actually do some good.”

Everything I read about Doctors Without Borders is that it does aid the right way.

Snyder petition

If I had it in my mind to write a counter petition to this — not that such a thing would ever occur to me – it might look something like the following:

Whereas Rick Snyder was elected Governor of the state of Michigan in November of 2010, winning 58.1% of the popular vote, 

Whereas Rick Snyder has a deep and longstanding tie to the University of Michigan, holding three earned degrees and having served on the university faculty, 

Whereas Rick Snyder and his family are long time residents of Ann Arbor, 

Whereas the university community benefits from the open expression of diverse points of view, 

Whereas University President Mary Sue Coleman, on Nov. 8th, 2006 stated that diversity “is what makes us the great university we are,” 

Whereas former Governor Jennifer Granholm, in her 2003 University of Michigan commencement address beseeched students to “triumph in complexity,” noting that the memorable moments of college are the ones where students are “amazed by people whose backgrounds and views are emblematic of the differences that make this campus life — and life outside this campus — so rich” 

Whereas President Barack Obama, in his 2010 University of Michigan commencement address, spoke of the importance of civil discourse, encouraged students to seek challenging perspectives, and reminded that “we cannot expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it,” 

Be it resolved that we applaud the University’s decision to invite Governor Snyder to deliver remarks at commencement activities in April.

Symbolic politics

I started off liking this post because I think that many of the disagreements between classical liberals — at least liberals of a certain stripe — and progressive do boil down to empirically testable things. (One reason for the unintended consequences buzzer — we want the same things, but have a different view of whether rational design can bring them about.) He mucks it up, though. The whole post is about the absence of moral disagreements, but then he finishes:

for whatever is [sic] worth, I find symbolic behavior morally objectionable, because the speaker cares about the values he expresses more than about those persons he says he wants to help.

So our differences are “exclusively empirical,” but I’m going to morally condemn your behavior. Maybe not the best persuasion strategy.

This slightly older post from the same blog is thematically similar: how much would your political views change if you learned that the policies you like had different consequences than you expect? It gets at whether you support policies on principle (e.g. natural rights) or for instrumental reasons (e.g. they lead to prosperity). Some would use the answer to that question to draw the line between libertarians and classical liberals, with the former caring more about natural rights. Speaking for myself, if I found out I was wrong about consequences, my views would change a lot.

Of course it’s only fair to flip the question around and put it to progressives.

In other news, a friend of mine likes this post saying that the Wisconsin situation and others scapegoats public workers. Sure, certainly plenty of that rhetoric has been flying around. I’d say the dumb commentators scapegoat public workers. The smart ones scapegoat tragic incentives on both sides that lead to perverse long-run outcomes.

Quotes

1) Isaiah Berlin on why he left philosophy for history:

… because I found I had a strong desire to know more at the end of my life than I knew at the beginning.

(He’s not totally dumping on philosophy. He goes on to say that philosophy generates knowledge — but in the form of insight and self-knowledge, rather than knowledge about the world. Still funny.)

2) Bernd Matthias:

Everything that is true is very simple, once we understand it. It’s only complicated when we don’t.

3) Einstein, on the definition of science:

the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Dangerous ideas

This is excellent, especially for taking a moment to consider the counterpoint — and not just as a straw man. (See the “Dangerous to air dangerous ideas?” section.)

Sunday morning thoughts

1) Richard Freeman, asked what advice he would give Scott Walker, offers a counterpoint to some nonsense I wrote about public unions and public choice (not that Richard Freeman has ever heard of me):

I would say: consider what happened to John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia. When he gained control of both houses of parliament, he did what the governor of Wisconsin seems to want to do: he forced through the legislature (in which his party had a small majority) a policy to radically restrict union activity, with the goal of basically de-legitimising that institution in society. John Howard was thrown out of office in the next election; he even lost his own seat. If you push to undo an institution that is part of the fabric of society, one that many people believe should be available to workers who want it (whether or not they themselves want to be part of it), you might find yourself pushed aside.

Removing collective bargaining from the public sector and lodging all power with employers will not solve the economic problems of U.S. states and cities. It will just remove one mechanism for bringing workers and management in the public sector together to deal with the fiscal problem that neither of them caused.

The idea is that unions facilitate transactions, for instance by credibly (hopefully) aggregating the preferences of the workers. I’m not sure there is a solution to the public choice dilemma here, though.

2) Tyler Cowen has a good (but scary!) column on fiscal policy. In some ways the broader fiscal dilemma we face as a country is similar to the public choice problem that confronts public sector unions: how to keep the government from indulging its desire to sacrifice the long-term to serve the short-term. It’s easy to ramp up spending in bad times, as Keynes recommended. Maintaining a surplus in good times? Now that’s hard. (cf., the Bush Administration.)

The technocratic Keynesian recommendation was to run deficits in bad times and surpluses in good times. But except for one stretch during the Clinton administration, this notion has been broken since the early 1980s. In the United States, at least, Keynesian economics has failed to find the necessary political institutions to enact and sustain a wise version of the theory…

Fiscal austerity may sometimes sound like a dogmatic religion, but fixed principles often help us do the right thing, especially when temptation beckons. Professor Buchanan argued that the real choice was between a religion of budget balance and a rule of illusion. Seeking an optimal technocratic path is not on the menu.

3) Last night, I watched a good PBS documentary called Arguing the World (streaming on Netflix!) about how four public intellectuals — Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer — crossed paths as radical socialists attending City College in NYC in the late 1930s. All became prolific commentators, although their views evolved in markedly different ways. (Howe remained a socialist. Kristol became a neoconservative. The other two landed somewhere in between.) Three of them were involved in starting the Public Interest, the free archives of which are a good way to lose an afternoon.

4) Part of the NY Times Magazine shake-up, Randy Cohen is no longer the Ethicist! It remains to be seen whether Ariel Kaminer will be as successful in getting me worked up on Sunday mornings.

Mandating pollution

From Freakonomics, a good strong article to inaugurate the blog version of the unintended consequences buzzer. A law meant to save taxi drivers money actually costs them money. And the Clean Air Act results (in this context) in more pollution.

The Science Factory

In college, a friend of mine who studied philosophy used to joke that he wanted to work at the Philosophy Factory after he graduated. Maybe the idea is not as silly as it seems. I’m currently soliciting venture capital for a Science Factory. Consider some of the benefits.

In academia, social scientists are sort of like traveling salespeople. They are largely autonomous, each working on their own projects, sometimes with only passing notice of what their colleagues are up to.

At the Science Factory, everyone works as a team focused on one goal: the production of knowledge.

In academia, an individual scholar (or perhaps a small team) prosecutes a task from start to finish. She seizes an idea, secures the grant, designs the study, collects the data, conducts the analysis, writes the results, and presents everything to an audience. Oh, and she teaches.

At the Science Factory, we benefit from the division of labor. Up in the Ideas Department (which is on the top floor; it’s important) whole teams are dedicated to synthesizing vast literatures and noting inconsistencies — but that’s all. The most compelling ones, after some culling, are sent over to the Methodology Department, which generates a set of pluralistic approaches to get at each of them. Then over to the grant writing department, and so on. The people who do each of the tasks become very good at them, and they end up saving a lot of wasted transition time.

In academia, scholars arriving at different conclusions get attached to their ideas and defend them to the death. Progress becomes mired in deep personal animosities that endure for years and do the community as a whole little good.

At the Science Factory, when two or more of our scholars find it impossible to settle on something, we stick them in a room together and don’t let them out until they have jointly agreed on a test that, ex ante, will discriminate between their two perspectives. We then run these studies and let the chips fall where they may. Both scholars become authors on the ensuing report, with a hearty thanks and slap on the back for pushing the ball forward.

In academia, science is an art, and an ad hoc one at that. Nobody can quite say exactly where they get their ideas or what makes some and not others successful. Moreover, this intangible trait, more than breadth of individual knowledge or methodological know-how, is often what makes the difference between a successful career and a less successful one.

At the Science Factory, science is 10% art and 90% process. The set epistemological rationales for conducting a study is small and well-defined: an inconsistency between the predictions of existing theories, a new area in need of descriptive attention, a puzzling observation in need of explanation… and that might be it. We weight these by their normative importance* and feasibility, and the agenda thus becomes deterministic. Where academia is ad hoc, we are routinized.

In academia, individuals market themselves. Sometimes they market the quality of their product — the thought and rigor that went into producing it. Unfortunately, because some of the products’ buyers know what they want to hear, the conclusions and implications of research can also become pertinent criteria.

At the Science Factory, we market our brand, and we want our brand to stand for good, systematic research, not for advancing a pre-formed agenda. (Admittedly, such places exist.) Choosing our projects in a systematic way makes us relatively agnostic to outcomes. The failing of one employee would hurt us all, which is why we work to instill a healthy ethos throughout the operation. Truth is our passion, and transparency our mantra.

A pipe dream? A solution to problems that don’t exist (or that only exist in the social, as opposed to the hard sciences)? Something we already see in the form of think tanks? Think about it. And while you think about it, polish the ol’ CV, because we’ll be accepting applications soon.

*We often outsource this task to the Philosophy Factory across the street.

Math in the social sciences

I thought this was spot on. I think psychology would also benefit from more modeling.