Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 139

Against Winning, by Bryan Caplan

When I was a child, adults taught us to look down on bad winners.  The maxim: "It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game."  The implicit model was something like: Yes, winning is better than losing, all else equal.  And yes, there's a trade-off between winning and common decency.  But losing with common decency is better than winning without it.  If you face a choice between losing and foul play, you should choose to lose.

I'm usually skeptical of narratives about the Good Old Days.  But when I look at the modern world, the ethic of noble defeat that I vividly remember from my youth seems virtually extinct.  When was the last time you witnessed the public shaming of a dishonorable winner?  Nary an example comes to my mind.  In everything from politics to reality t.v., our bottom line is "Who won?," not "Who deserved to win?"

The evils of overrating winning are most obvious in violent conflict.  During the 20th-century, every major power embraced blatant war crimes in the name of victory - even though it's unclear whether these war crimes even helped.  The exemplars of Sore Winner's Syndrome, though, are terrorists.  They're too weak to win by any conventional means, yet too proud to compromise or submit, so they murder innocents and cross their fingers.

It's tempting to accuse the proponents of honorable defeat of bad faith.  "This is just an attempt to bolster the status quo by guilting its opponents into ineffectual strategies - or quietism."  But when you're all alone with your conscience, the duty to gracefully lose is hard to deny. 

I say these words as a perennial political loser.  I have little hope that any of my favorite causes will prevail in the foreseeable future.  For example, I don't expect to see anything like open borders in my lifetime.  I'm happy to try my luck by writing, speaking, and organizing on behalf of freedom of movement.  I unabashedly advocate Huemerian civil disobedience to these unjust laws.  But if these tactics fail to open the borders, as they almost surely will, I won't resort to anything scarier. 

Pragmatically, of course, scarier tactics would probably fail or backfire.  But my objection is fundamental: "Victory by any means necessary" is the slogan of a political criminal, and I will have no part in it.  Neither should you.

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Meteorological Impossibilities, by Bryan Caplan

The Weather Channel's daily and hourly forecasts often seem logically incompatible.  Consider Oakton, VA's forecast for today.  The current daily prediction says "60% chance of rain."  But several evening hours individually have the same probability of 60%.  Unless I'm missing something, this is only possible if those probabilities are perfectly dependent (if rain happens, it happens during every hour) or negatively independent (if rain happens one hour, it doesn't happen during other hours). 

These extreme cases seems unlikely.  The ironclad puzzle, though, is that the current forecast for 7 PM is a 70% chance of rain.  How can an hour have 70% when the whole day only has 60%?  Nor is this a fluke case; in my experience, hourly rain probabilities slightly above the daily probabilities pop up every few days.

I'm tempted to dismiss my own puzzlement by quoting The Simpsons:

Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy
was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the
Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.


Bart: Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?


Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.


Bart: For what? They're giving you thousands of hours of
entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything,
you owe them.


Comic Book Guy: ...Worst episode ever.

Fair point, but is there anything I'm missing? 

Update: Minutes after writing this post, I realized that the problem is more severe than I thought.  The daily and multiple hourly forecasts can indeed be equal if the probabilities are perfectly dependent (or nearly perfectly dependent, with a slight rounding error).  But the "negative dependence" loophole I suggested is completely confused.  If there is a 60% chance at 6 PM and 7 PM, and rain doesn't happen at 6 PM, then any lingering positive probability of rain at 7 PM implies that the probability of rain for the day initially exceeded 60%.  This is true for partial dependence, independence, and negative dependence.

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Why Do Government Enterprises Work So Well?, by Bryan Caplan

When I was in high school, Murray Rothbard's analysis of government ownership was a revelation.  Why was my high school a den of waste, incompetence, and stagnation?  Because it was a government enterprise!

On the free market, in short, the consumer is king, and any business firm that wants to make profits and avoid losses tries its best to serve the consumer as efficiently and at as low a cost as possible. In a government operation, in contrast, everything changes. Inherent in all government operation is a grave and fatal split between service and payment, between the providing of a service and the payment for receiving it. The government bureau does not get its income as does the private firm, from serving the consumer well or from consumer purchases of its products exceeding its costs of operation. No, the government bureau acquires its income from mulcting the long-suffering taxpayer. Its operations therefore become inefficient, and costs zoom, since government bureaus need not worry about losses or bankruptcy; they can make up their losses by additional extractions from the public till. Furthermore, the consumer, instead of being courted and wooed for his favor, becomes a mere annoyance to the government someone who is "wasting" the government's scarce resources. In government operations, the consumer is treated like an unwelcome intruder, an interference in the quiet enjoyment by the bureaucrat of his steady income.

Twenty five years and a Ph.D. in economics later, Rothbard's words still sound like a revelation.  They handily explain everything wrong in government enterprises.  There's just one problem: Rothbard's words explain far too much.  Since graduating high school, I've seen a lot more government enterprises.  I've paid more attention to the ones I already knew.  And I've worked in a government enterprise for seventeen years.  Their performance is almost always disappointing.  But contrary to Rothbard's story, their performance is rarely disastrous.  The U.S. Post Office almost always delivers my letters in three days or less.  One hurricane aside, I always have clean tap water for pennies a gallon.  And most public school teachers put on a smile every morning and try to share some knowledge with their students.

What's going on?  Consider the following stories.

1. Rothbard mischaracterizes government employees' incentives.  Somewhat, but he's not far off.  In the public sector, the connection between pay and performance is truly weak.  Public universities, for example, are satisfied with professors' teaching as long as they demonstrate "high competence."  In plain English, that's the top 95% of the distribution, or even the top 98%.  Universities hold research to higher standards, but one lame article a year in A Refereed Journal usually suffices for tenure.

2. Elected politicians compete to make government work.  There's definitely something to this, but status quo bias is pervasive.  Voters may throw politicians out if there's a sudden decline in the performance of government enterprises.  But voters yawn in the face of eternal mediocrity.

3. Government employees take pride in their work.  In many parts of government, workers would feel bad about themselves if they fully exploited the system.  This is obvious for teachers, most of whom clearly like children.  But even most mailmen seem to care about doing a decent job. 

4. Government employees care about their co-workers' esteem. Government employees, like most human beings, don't want people around them to hold them in contempt.  As a result, a solid core of motivated government employees can use peer pressure to squeeze effort out of their careerist co-workers.  Some professors, for example, love teaching - and therefore look down on professors who teach poorly.  Fear of this down-looking impels conformist professors to do a better job. 

Am I damning with faint praise?  Sure.  Even the best government enterprises are slow to cut costs.  They're bad at innovation.  And they're almost uniformly terrible at putting aside Social Desirability Bias to answer every enterprise's most fundamental question: Is this worth doing at all?  Yet the anomaly remains: Simple economics implies that government enterprises should be far worse than they really are.

Unfortunately, I doubt the economics profession will ever take this anomaly seriously.  Left-leaning economists don't want to grant the obvious case against government enterprise - and market-leaning economists would rather reiterate the obvious case against government enterprise than calmly test it against the facts.



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Look-Alikes Don't Look Like Identical Twins, by Bryan Caplan

Read this neat NYT write-up of new research by Nancy Segal and co-authors.  Segal, famous for her work on twins, got an idea when she encountered the oeuvre of Francois Brunelle, "a photographer in Montreal who takes pictures of pairs of people who look alike but are not twins":

When [Segal] saw the photographs, she realized
that the unrelated look-alikes would be ideal study subjects: She could
compare their similarities and differences to those of actual twins.

[...]

For Dr. Segal's initial study,
she asked Mr. Brunelle to send questionnaires to some of his subjects,
and she received completed forms from 23 pairs of unrelated look-alikes.
The questionnaires yield a score based on five personality measures:
stability, openness, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
The participants also took the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale...

[...]

For a second study,
she teamed with a skeptic, Ulrich Ettinger, a psychologist at the
University of Bonn in Germany who had heard about the look-alike project
during a postdoctorate at the University of Montreal.

"I
thought that if two people looked alike, they would have similar
personality traits because people would treat them the same," he said.
"For example, I thought men who looked alike and were tall and handsome
would probably be extroverts."

Their
analysis was consistent with the findings of Dr. Segal's first study:
Personality traits do not appear to be influenced by the way people are
treated because of appearance.

Typical personality correlations for identical twins are .5.  Here are the combined results from both studies of Unrelated Look-Alikes, reported in Segal, Graham, and Ettinger (Personality and Individual Differences, 2013):



Though fascinating, this approach isn't quite as convincing as studies of socially mis-identified twins.  Whatever you think, don't miss Brunelle's pictures; they boggle the mind.

HT: Nathaniel Bechhofer

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Mencken's Appeasement, by Bryan Caplan

I just learned that the great H.L. Mencken's Prejudices contains an eloquent plea for appeasement.  From Mencken's "Martyrs":
[I]t seems to me sheer vanity for any man to hold his religious views too firmly,
or to submit to any inconvenience on account of them. It is far better, if they
happen to offend, to conceal them discreetly, or to change them amiably as the
delusions of the majority change. My own views in this department, being wholly
skeptical and tolerant, are obnoxious to the subscribers to practically all
other views; even atheists sometimes denounce me. At the moment, by an accident
of American political history, these dissenters from my theology are forbidden
to punish me for not agreeing with them. But at any succeeding moment some
group or other among them may seize such power and proceed against me in the
immemorial manner. If it ever happens, I give notice here and now that I shall
get converted to their nonsense instantly, and so retire to safety with my
right thumb laid against my nose and my fingers waving like wheat in the wind.
I'd do it even to-day, if there were any practical advantage in it. Offer me a
case of Rauenthaler 1903, and I engage to submit to baptism by any rite ever
heard of, provided it does not expose my gothic nakedness. Make it ten cases,
and I'll agree to be both baptized and confirmed. In such matters I am broad-minded.
What, after all, is one more lie?

Notice: In a sense, Mencken's candor precludes him from undiluted appeasement.  If he ever recanted this essay in the face of persecution, he would be entirely true to its theme.  Fortunately, most persecutors are too illogical to grasp the absurdity.

HT: The excellent Shanu Athiparambath

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The Sweet Spot of Freedom, by Bryan Caplan

No one needs a political philosophy to tell them how to treat people they personally know.  Once human beings forge personal bonds, they understand what to expect from each other.  The main point of political philosophy is to tell people how to treat strangers. 

In practice, unfortunately, the way we treat strangers has more to do with our personal feelings about strangers than abstract philosophy.  Or to be more precise, the political philosophies we're willing to entertain heavily depend on our default emotions about people we've never met.

Which leads to a libertarian question: Which of these default emotions are most consistent with a free society? 

Obviously, default emotions like hatred and disgust bode poorly for a free society.  If you hate strangers, you're likely to favor government action to make them suffer.  But default emotions like love and devotion are also inimical to human freedom.  If you love every stranger like your own child, the idea of respecting their freedom to make their own mistakes is hard to stomach.  You'll want to give strangers what they need, regardless of what they want.  This yearning makes both paternalism and the welfare state quite enticing. 

If neither hate nor love cohere well with a free society, what does?  Indifference sounds promising.  Imagine trying to sell government persecution or government salvation to an society where the predominant emotion toward strangers is, "Meh.  That's got nothin' to do with me."  But sheer indifference is not ideal.  Free societies generate obvious benefits for your fellow man: prosperity, peace, and choice.  So you'd expect someone who viewed strangers with moderate benevolence to support a free society more enthusiastically than someone who lacked these feelings.

What then is the sweet spot of freedom?  "Moderate benevolence," a friendly cosmopolitan tolerance, is my tentative answer.  If you seek a free society, you should want people to smile upon mankind.  But that's about it.  Stronger feelings - including heartfelt love - turn human beings into demanding busybodies.  And if demanding busybodies predominate in a free society, it won't remain free for long.



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The Veil of Implausibility, by Bryan Caplan

The veil of ignorance is arguably 20th-century political philosophy's most successful new meme.  On one level, it's easy to see the appeal.  Political philosophy seems morally deadlocked.  The veil of ignorance provides a meta-norm to break this deadlock: We should all follow whatever first-order norms we would accept if each of us were ignorant of his personal - and potentially biasing - characteristics.

Most debates about the veil of ignorance focus on what this meta-norm truly implies.  Harsanyi argued that it implies average utilitarianism; Rawls argued it implies his difference principle plus some other stuff.  In my view, these debates dodge the interesting question: Is the veil of ignorance a remotely plausible meta-norm?

Not really.  Sure, if you were ignorant of a bunch of obvious facts, you would probably want very different things, leading you to make very different choices.  But so what?  It is hard to see why wants and actions grounded on the world as it is are morally inferior to wants and actions grounded on the world as it is not.  In fact, the opposite is true.  "You should keep the agreements you actually made" has some moral force.  "You should keep the agreements you never made, but would have made if you were ignorant of obvious facts about yourself" has none.

You could reply, "Wants and actions grounded on morally objectionable circumstances are morally inferior to wants and actions not grounded on morally objectionable circumstances."  Fair enough.  But then you have to identify "morally objectionable circumstances" before you can apply the veil of ignorance, leaving it useless as a meta-norm for breaking prior moral deadlocks.  If an egalitarian considers inequality a morally objectionable circumstance, and a libertarian considers forced equality a morally objectionable circumstance, no veil will bridge their worldviews.

There are worse meta-norms than the veil.  Slavery, for example, is hard to defend behind a veil of ignorance.  But again, so what?  Almost every moral theory implies the wrongness of slavery.  The fact that the veil is anti-slavery is no more than a reason against summarily dismissing the theory.

If the veil is as intellectually lame as I say, why does is it have so many smart fanboys and fangirls?  Because even the smartest people tend to "look for their keys under the streetlight because it's brighter there."  The veil of ignorance gives smart people something abstruse to discuss.  While the veil doesn't break prior moral deadlocks, it opens up new avenues for conversation and research.  It is, in short, a massive philosophical make-work project that helps smart people forget their failure to make progress on moral questions that actually matter. 

HT: Nathaniel Bechhofer, the smartest fanboy of the veil I know.

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Education Bet Update, by Bryan Caplan

In 2011, my co-blogger David and I bet on the future of higher education.  The terms:

I propose that we use the official numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics' Table 212. 
2009 is the latest available year of data.  29.6% of 18-24 year-olds
were enrolled in 4-year institutions.  I bet that in 2019, that percent
will be no more than 10% lower.  Rounding in your favor, I win if the
number is 26.7% or more.  If the number is lower, you win.  If the data
series is discontinued, the bet is canceled.  Stakes: $100 at even odds.

Three more years of data are now in.  Education bubble pundits notwithstanding, nothing much has happened.  In 2010, the enrollment rate fell to 28.2%.  In 2011, it rebounded to an all-time high of 30.0%. In 2012, the rate fell back to 28.3%. 

What if we'd bet on enrollment rates of recent high school completers rather 18-24 year-olds?  2009 was an all-time high of 70.1%.  This fell back to 68.1% in 2010, stayed at 68.2% in 2011, and sharply dropped to 66.2% in 2012.

If current trends continue, I will lose this bet.  I wouldn't be surprised if I did; after all, I bet at even odds.  But the point of the bet was never to deny that college enrollments may modestly decline, or that today's start-ups will find their niche.  The point, rather, was to scoff at the notion that any of today's start-ups - our the industry as a whole - will be the Napster of education.  Not gonna happen.

"There are seven more years to go!," you protest?  I'm still happy to bet on the original terms. 

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What's the Use of Crying Over Spilled Blood?, by Bryan Caplan

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, you may recall, was dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Eleven years and over 100,000 civilian deaths later, the name is dark comedy.  The replacement Shiite-dominated government is a close ally of the Iranian theocracy, and is now immersed in a new civil war against a would-be Sunni caliphate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. 

When the original supporters of Operation Iraq Freedom urge further military action, it's rhetorically easy to mock them for their past failures.  But is it reasonable?  Sure, mistakes were made.  But shouldn't arguments about additional military action rest exclusively on the world we actually face right now?  In economic terms, harping about past failures sounds like the sunk cost fallacy writ large.  What's the use of crying over spilled blood?

Here's the use: Past failures predict future failures.  Most Americans thought Operation Iraq Freedom was a good idea at the time.  American hawks were especially hopeful.  Both groups' predictions turned out to be deeply mistaken.  For starters, their failures remind us that human beings are bad at predicting wars' long-run consequences.  More importantly, though, hawks' greater failures remind us that contemporary hawks are especially bad at predicting wars' long-run consequences. 

You could say, "We should focus on experts' arguments, not their track record."  But this is the height of naivete.  No one has time to thoughtfully evaluate experts' arguments on more than a handful of issues.  And even if you did have years of free time on your hands, the truism remains: past failures predict future failures.  Discounting experts with bad track records is as reasonable as deleting spam emails unread.

If we held every proponent of every war to these unforgiving standards, we'd fight very few wars.  Some wars work out well, but singling out such wars in advance is extraordinarily difficult.  Hawks may take this as a reductio ad absurdum of my position, but they're the ones being absurd.  If you can't calmly say, "We can be extremely confident that killing lots of innocents in the short-run will vastly improve the world in the long-run," you shouldn't kill lots of innocents.  And killing lots of innocents is what every modern war entails.



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Practical Guidance for Prudent Students, by Bryan Caplan

The Case Against Education's chapter on the selfish return to education runs over sixty pages.  Since I suspect that even eager readers may skim all the tables, I end with practical advice in plain English.  Note: Nothing in this section hinges on signaling, because signaling reduces education's social return but not its selfish (or "private") return.

Practical Guidance for
Prudent Students

Teachers hate when students groan, "Can't you just tell us
the answer?"  For academics, a short,
sweet solution is indecent unless clothed in a thorough explanation.  For educational decisions, however, the
stakes are so high that I'm willing to be indecent. 

But first, a caveat.  Since
my calculations include non-monetary
values, my advice is stronger than it sounds. 
If I opine, "Type X students shouldn't go to college," I'm not saying
that "Type X students shouldn't go to college unless they really like school."  I'm saying "Type X students shouldn't go to
college even if they do really like
school."  Buying a beach house on the
verge of collapse is ill-advised, even if you love the ocean and can't afford
better. 

Broad-stroke advice rubs many people the wrong way.  The world is full of chance, and every
individual is unique.  Still, using these
banal facts to avoid giving definite counsel is a cop-out.  Although no strategy is foolproof, and every
generalization has exceptions,  some educational
strategies really are better than others. 
Here they are.

Go to high school
unless you're a terrible student.  High school is a
good deal for students of almost every description.  On the first day of high school, Excellent,
Good, Fair, and even Poor Students can count on a Degree Return of at least 5%.  Since Poor Students by definition fit the
profile of the typical dropout, the decision to drop out is typically a
mistake.  The key insight:
Uncredentialed, inexperienced, full-time workers earn low salaries, so teens
can afford to bet on their own academic success even if they usually fail.

The high school payoff remains healthy even in bleak
scenarios.  While school is less fruitful
for confirmed bachelors, Poor Students, and people who hate sitting in class, a
male Poor Student who rules out marriage and hates school has a Degree Return
of 4%.  Should anyone skip high school in
favor of a low-skilled job?  Yes.  Almost a quarter of us are worse than Poor Students.  If you're in the bottom 10-15% of the academic
pecking order, your graduation odds are so slim that you should quit school and
start work.  And whatever you do, don't
bother with a GED.  It may sound like a
good middle way, but in practice, its main function is to tell employers, "I
have the brains but not the grit to finish high school."

Go to college only if
you're a strong student or special case.  College is a a good
deal for Excellent and Good Students who follow two simple rules.  First, pick a "real" major.  STEM is obviously "real"; so are economics, business,
and even political science.  Second, go
to a respected public school.  It
probably won't charge list price, and even if it does, you usually get your
money's worth.  If you stray far from
these rules, you're likely to get burned. 
Even Excellent Students should think twice before paying list price for private school or pursuing a fine arts
degree. 
Does Gothic architecture or a career in the arts really mean the world
to you? 

For weaker students, college is normally a bad deal.  If
you're a Fair Student, go only if you're a special case.  Will you major in something like
engineering?  Did an elite school
miraculously offer you a cushy scholarship? 
Are you a women who firmly plans to marry?  Then despite your spotty academic record,
college may be for you.  Otherwise, skip
college and get a job.  Poor Students,
finally, should not go to college, period. 
Filling their heads with hope because a Nobelist once got a bad grade is
irresponsible.  Statistically speaking, the
"easy" majors Poor Students have a prayer of surviving aren't worth the seven odd
years they need to finish. 

Don't get a master
degree unless the stars align.  On the day they start a master's
degree, even Excellent Students can expect a lousy Degree Return of 2.6%.  You should enroll, then, only if you have a
great reason - or several good reasons - to believe you'll beat the odds.  

For starters, your academic ability needs to be better than Excellent.  Failure in graduate programs is so prevalent
that only the top 5-10% of the population can confidently expect to cross the
finish line.  Field also matters
enormously.  While data on graduate
earnings by subject are scarce, there can be little doubt that engineering,
computer science, and economics have far higher returns than fine arts,
education, and anthropology.  The latter
degrees only make sense if compared to
your fellow masters students, you're a gushing fan of your subject.   For women, finally, marital plans are also
crucial.  As long as she's an Excellent
Student, the master's is very good deal for the woman who marries, but a lousy
deal for the woman who stays single. 

My counsel rubs many the wrong way.  Some dismiss it as "elitist," "philistine,"
or "sexist."  The correct label is candid. 
It's not my fault the rewards of education hinge on
graduation.  It's not my fault graduation
hinges on past academic performance. 
It's not my fault fine arts degrees pay so poorly.  It's not my fault married women profit far
more from education than single women.  I
am only a messenger.  My job is to
honestly report the facts, especially unwelcome facts of great practical
importance.

The most common visceral reaction to my advice, however, is
to accuse me of hypocrisy.  "Sure, he
advises other people's kids to think twice before they go to college.  But he'd never say that to his own
kids."  They don't know me.  I advise my kids the same way I advise anyone
else: Tailoring my message to the student.  I learn their academic track record,
motivation, intended field of study, gender, marital plans, and so on.  Then I tell them how various educational
paths typically pan out for people who fit their profile.  This is no reason to shoot the messenger - or
the messenger's children.  My first two
sons are outstanding students interested in economics, so of course I'll urge
college.  My younger two have yet to
start school, so the jury is still out.  If
either turns out to be a C student, I will gently but emphatically advise them
to find a job right after high school. 

Finally, none of my recommendations assumes that human
beings base their educational decisions on careful calculations of the return
to education.  Quite the opposite.  If human beings based their educational
decisions on careful calculations of the return to education, they wouldn't
need my advice because they'd already be following it!  My assumption, rather, is that our
educational decisions are deeply corrupted by ignorance, inexperience,
conformity, and pride.  My goal is save
readers time, money, and grief by rooting out - or at least curbing - this pervasive
corruption.

Update: Implied urban legend about Einstein's academic record fixed.  Thanks!



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