Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 113

What's Libertarian About Betting?, by Bryan Caplan

I'm a libertarian and a betting man.  Is there any connection between the two?

The facile answer is that "Reality has a well-known libertarian bias."  On some level, I believe this.  But it's a subtle, long-run bias.  Confidently betting on libertarian stereotypes hardly strikes me as a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

The sound answer is far more complex.  It begins with a simple observation: Advocates of government action typically make extreme claims.  They make extreme claims about how awful things will be if government does nothing.  And they make extreme claims about how much better things will be if government heeds them.

Disagree?  Imagine a hawk advocating an invasion of Libya.  He could say, "Invading reduces the risk of disaster from 54% to 52%, so it passes a cost-benefit test."  But I've never heard a hawk make such an argument.  A typical defense is rather, "We can stand here, do nothing, and let Libya collapse into bloody chaos.  Or we can take a stand and set things right once and for all."

Or imagine a proponent of the minimum wage conceding, "There's a 30% chance that the minimum wage actually hurts the poor by increasing unemployment.  But there's a 70% chance that wage gains outweigh the disemployment effects, so we should totally throw the dice."  That's not how friends of the minimum wage talk.  Instead, they'll declare something like, "Every hard-working Americans deserves to earn a decent wage, and the minimum wage ensure that every hard-working American gets the decent wage he deserves."

Why are proponents of government action so prone to hyperbole?  Because it's rhetorically effective, of course.  You need wild claims and flowery words to whip up public enthusiasm for government action.  Sober weighing of probability, cost, and benefit damns with faint praise - and fails to overcome public apathy.

Now suppose my Betting Norm were universally accepted.  Any public figure who refuses to bet large sums on his literal statements is an instant laughingstock, a figure of fun.  What happens?  Political hyperbole ends for politicians and pundits alike.  Hysterical doom-saying and promises of utopia vanish from public discourse.  No one serious can afford them!  As a result, it becomes very rhetorically difficult to make the case for government to do anything - or at least anything new.  Without an inspiring case for government action, government sits still.

Utilitarians will swiftly protest, "As long as expected benefits exceed expected costs, government should act."  They may even add, "Nothing's more inspiring than passing each and every law with expected net benefits."  But this misses the point.  Most people aren't utilitarians.  They're not even close.  Honest, modest utilitarian arguments leave psychologically normal humans unmoved.  And without popular support, democracy lies dormant.  "Why bother?" kills "Yes we can!"

So what's libertarian about betting?  It stifles hyperbole, the fuel of Big Government.  Machiavellian non-libertarians will naturally conclude that honesty is overrated.  But this too is a bitter pill.  A few can cope with the admission that the policies they love rest on errors and thrive on lies.  But everyone else will at least wonder if they should give liberty a chance.

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Nobility Defined, by Bryan Caplan

I occasionally describe people as "noble."  What do I mean by it?  In slogan form: "He would rather be wronged than do wrong."  The noble, as I use the term, hold themselves to exemplary standards of thought, word, and deed.  Intellectually, they strive to be reasonable and fair at all times.  They don't seek excuses - like "My opponents did it first" - to be unreasonable or unfair.  They apply my recommended remedies for purges and schisms to one and all.  And on a deep level, they internalize my admonition against winning.  In short, the noble are the puritanically praiseworthy - i.e., people who merit praise given my admittedly unforgiving standards.

None of this requires that the noble substantively agree with me.  I have deep disagreements with several of the noblest people I know.  And needless to say, people who agree with me on substance disappoint me every day. 

The good news is that anyone can become noble.  Starting now.

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Innumeracy Illustrated, by Bryan Caplan

I've come across the world's funniest probability illustrations.  Talk about "it's funny because it's true."  Samples:




Read the whole thing.  And repent!

HT: The noble Vipul Naik

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Minimum Wage Debate: Meer versus Galbraith, by Bryan Caplan

Video of Jonathan Meer's debate with James Galbraith on the minimum wage is now up!  Enjoy.



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The Center Will Hold: I'll Give You 10:1, by Bryan Caplan

Since there appear to be zero takers for my latest bet, I hereby up the odds I'm offering to 10:1.  Thus, if you Paypal me $x, I will send you $11x if the bet goes in your favor.  This provides ample extra compensation for inflation, foregone interest, and my mortality risk. 

Remember, the bet resolves as soon as a civil war in Western Europe officially surpasses 10,000 fatalities.  So if you win, you will probably win well before 30 years have passed.  If you would have accepted 10:1 odds for a 20-year bet, you should absolutely accept my terms, because I'm giving you ten extra years to win for free.

P.S. I don't include Cyprus, which is often though not always classified as non-European.

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The Center Will Hold: I'll Bet on It, by Bryan Caplan

Last weekend, I got into a Twitter argument with a fellow who claims that Europe's immigration problem will "inevitably" lead to civil war:

@bryan_caplan As a human nature pessimist, I see ethno-cultural balkanization and civil war as inevitable on current trends.

-- Enoch Was Right (@TomStead1) September 18, 2015

My reaction, as usual, was to propose a bet.  And as usual, the person claiming "inevitability" refused to offer me favorable odds.  Instead, he asked me to offer him favorable odds!

@bryan_caplan Civil war in multiple countries, within 30 years, tens of thousands killed. 10/1 would be nice.

-- Enoch Was Right (@TomStead1) September 18, 2015

My bets are often of the form, "You're confident, I'm ignorant, so give me favorable odds and I'll bet you."  In this instance, however, I don't plead ignorance.  I am confident that civil war won't happen in Western Europe for any reason whatsoever.  So here's the bet I'm offering:

You pay me $x today.  If any European country that was not Communist in 1988 has a civil war leading to 10,000 or more fatalities between today and December 31, 2045, I will immediately pay you $7x.  Germany counts, Turkey doesn't.  Any front page story in The New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall St. Journal stating that a literal civil war in one of the specified nations has led to 10,000 or more fatalities in that nation ends the bet in my opponents' favor.  If I die before the bet resolves, the bet ends and my heirs keep the money.

I am willing to accept up to $500 on this wager, committing me to pay up to $3500 if I lose.  Per my current rules, I will bet anyone willing to pre-pay me via Paypal.  If there is any doubt about my reliability, note that (a) I frequently bet, and have never been accused of non-payment, (b) I am a public figure with reputation to lose, (c) I have a stable address, having been a GMU professor for 18 years, (d) I am 44 years old, so am quite likely to survive until 2045.  Multiple betting partners have accepted such terms in the past. 

You may accept these terms in the comments or via email.  The bet officially begins when I receive payment.


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Why I'm Homeschooling, by Bryan Caplan

I'm homeschooling my elder sons for middle school.  On the surface, this makes sense: Homeschooling has been in the libertarian penumbra for decades. If you know my books, however, you should be puzzled.

1. In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids , I argue that the power of nurture is vastly overrated.  Genetics, not upbringing, explains almost all of the observed similarity between parent and child.  It's not reasonable, then, for me to expect my efforts to durably boost my kids' IQs, educational success, income, or even their political views.

2. In The Case Against Education , I argue that signaling, not human capital, explains most of the effect of education on earnings.  Without an established school's seal of approval, learning has little selfish payoff.  So even if the Caplan Family School manages to build stellar cognitive skills, the Real World won't reward them. 

Of course, it would be deeply out of character for me to homeschool without replies to both objections.  Here they are:

1'. While the power of nurture to change kids' adult outcomes is indeed vastly overrated, it is well within my power to give my sons a better childhood.  My kids prefer a challenging academic curriculum.  I can give them that.  My kids hate music, dance, art, and group projects.  I can spare them these indignities.  My kids don't want to wake up at 5:45 AM every morning.  In the Caplan Family School, we start at a civilized hour.  Homeschooling gives my sons plenty of time for math, reading, and history, but leaves them ample free time for hobbies and travel. 

More speculative: I suspect - though I'm far from sure - that the Caplan Family School is such an exceptional experience that ordinary twin and adoption evidence isn't relevant.  For example, my sons are plausibly the only 12-year-olds in the nation taking a college class in labor economics.  Perhaps it really will forever rock their worlds.  More obviously, their peer group now includes Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Garett Jones, and Nathaniel Bechhofer.  That's plausibly four standard deviations above whatever peer group they'd have in a conventional middle school.

2'. While education is mostly signaling, there are cracks in the system.  As far as I can tell, the Real World pays zero attention to what students do in middle school.  The Caplan Family School won't keep my kids out of good high schools; they can re-enter Fairfax County Public School in 9th grade.  It won't keep my kids out of good colleges; colleges don't know what applicants did in middle school.  And it won't keep my kids from getting good jobs; there probably isn't an employer in the country who asks how applicants did in 7th grade.  So while homeschooling feels risky for high school, our next two years look like clear sailing.

If my reasoning sounds familiar, it should.  I'm a strategic non-conformist.  When I can bend stupid rules with impunity, I bend them.

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The Power of Distributed Practice, by Bryan Caplan

If highlighting doesn't help students learn, what does?   According to Dunlosky et al.'s "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques" (Psychological Science, 2013), one of the most effective pedagogical techniques is distributed practice.  Description:

To-be-learned material is often encountered on more than one occasion, such as when students review their notes and then later use flashcards to restudy the materials, or when a topic is covered in class and then later studied in a textbook. Even so, students mass much of their study prior to tests and believe that this popular cramming strategy is effective. Although cramming is better than not studying at all in the short term, given the same amount of time for study, would students be better off spreading out their study of content? The answer to this question is a resounding "yes." The term distributed practice
effect refers to the finding that distributing learning over time (either within a single study session or across sessions) typically benefits long-term retention more than does massing learning opportunities back-to-back or in relatively close succession.

Some typical results:

To illustrate the issues involved, we begin with a description of a classic experiment on distributed practice, in which students learned translations of Spanish words to criterion in an original session (Bahrick, 1979). Students then participated in six additional sessions in which they had the chance to retrieve and relearn the translations (feedback was provided). Figure 10 presents results from this study. In the zero-spacing condition (represented by the circles in Fig. 10), the learning sessions were back-to-back, and learning was rapid across the six massed sessions. In the 1-day condition (represented by the squares in Fig. 10), learning sessions were spaced 1 day apart, resulting in slightly more forgetting across sessions (i.e., lower performance on the initial test in each session) than in the zero-spacing condition, but students in the 1-day condition still obtained almost perfect accuracy by the sixth session. In contrast, when learning sessions were separated by 30 days, forgetting was much greater across sessions, and initial test performance did not reach the level observed in the other two conditions, even after six sessions (see triangles in Fig. 10). The key point for our present purposes is that the pattern reversed on the final test 30 days later, such that the best retention of the translations was observed in the condition in which relearning sessions had been separated by 30 days. That is, the condition with the most intersession forgetting yielded the greatest long-term retention. Spaced practice (1 day or 30 days) was superior to massed practice (0 days), and the benefit was greater following a longer lag (30 days)
than a shorter lag (1 day).

Graphically:

Overall:

On the basis of the available evidence, we rate distributed practice as having high utility: It works across students of different ages, with a wide variety of materials, on the majority of standard laboratory measures, and over long delays. It is easy to implement (although it may require some training) and has been used successfully in a number of classroom studies. Although less research has examined distributed-practice effects using complex materials, the existing classroom studies have suggested that distributed practice should work for complex materials as well.

Distributed practice also plausibly explains the lifelong retention of mathematical knowledge.  Who remembers algebra?  Students who continued on to calculus.  Everyone else rapidly forgets.  The distributed practice explanation is that calculus students repeatedly practice their algebra skills over the course of many years.  Students who quit math after algebra, in contrast, cram for the final, then forget.

P.S. For a summary of all of Dunlosky et al.'s findings, click here.

HT: Nathaniel Bechhofer

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Media, Misanthropy, Murder, and Misery, by Bryan Caplan

Scott Alexander elegantly bridges two of my pet peeves: media and misanthropy.

There are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is
a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to
appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as "Here's one
example I heard of where the out-group does something bad," and then you
correct it with "But we can't generalize about an entire group just
from one example!" It's less obvious that you may be able to provide
literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have
it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task
and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months
doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese - and still
have absolutely no point.

If we're really concerned about media bias, we need to think about
Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media's strongest weapons. There
are lots of people - 300 million in America alone. No matter what point
the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No
matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never
have to stop covering it if they don't want to.

More:

I feel this way about a lot of things. The media is always giving us
stories of how tech nerds are sexist in some way or another. But we may
suspect they want to push that line regardless of whether it's true. How
many tech nerds are there? A million? Ten million? How many lurid
stories about harassment in Silicon Valley have you heard? Do we know if
this is higher or lower than the base rate for similar industries?
Whether it's going up or down? What it would look like if we actually
had access to the per person rates?

Which reminds me.  Suppose you hear about a shocking murder on the news.  Or even a shocking mass murder.  Assuming you have no personally connection to the victims, how should you react?  Well, there are roughly 400,000 murders on Earth per year.  That averages out to more than 1000 per day.  To me, that leaves two attitudinal choices: Either be endlessly miserable until the carnage ends, or consciously refuse to let 1000 daily murders ruin your day.  Social Desirability Bias notwithstanding, I choose the latter course.

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Somin on the Backlash to Desegregation, by Bryan Caplan

Ilya Somin emailed me this response to my post on the backlash to desegregation.  Reprinted with his permission.

As you know, I rarely disagree with you about immigration
issues. But I think the backlash against desegregation was a much bigger deal
than you suggest.

First, it's worth noting that the first effort at
desegregation during the 1860s and 70s created a big enough backlash that
blacks were horribly oppressed for decades thereafter. It is debatable whether
the federal government could have managed things better or could have broken
the resistance if they tried harder. But it's a sobering precedent, at the very
least.

Second, during the 1950s and 60s, although desegregation was ultimately
successful  there was considerable
violence and extensive "massive resistance" of other kinds.
Ultimately, the resistance failed because, among other things, the federal
effort to break it commanded widespread support everywhere but among white
southerners, and even a significant minority of them had lost faith in Jim Crow
by the 50s. Had it been attempted earlier, when resistance was stronger and
will to break it weaker, the result might well have been different. On balance,
I think the effort to expand black rights during Reconstruction still did
more good than harm, but the issue is
debatable, and the experience with Jim Crow suggests it took a long time before
public opinion evolved to  the point
where a large-scale effort to break down Jim Crow could succeed.

The lessons
for immigration policy are not exactly straightforward and unequivocal. If I
had to compare the two, I would say that current public opinion on immigration
is roughly where opinion on race relations was in the 1930s and 40s, or -
perhaps even somewhat earlier than that. There is growing doubt about the
justice of immigration restrictions, but as yet only a relatively small
minority supports the complete dismantling of the segregation system (even
though many more people are willing to countenance more moderate reforms).

Me again:

I agree on the backlash in the 1860s and 1870s, though we
should think of that primarily as the backlash to abolition of slavery.  And the net positive value of that change
seems clear-cut to me.

For desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, though, resistance seems feeble indeed relative to the magnitude of the change.  Every murder listed here was tragic, but desegregation cost fewer lives than 1% of a tiny civil war.

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