Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 146
May 27, 2014
Frank on Phony Credentials, by Bryan Caplan
Americans have figured out that universities exist in order to manAnd:
the gates of social class, and we pay our princely tuition rates in
order to obtain just one thing: the degree, the golden ticket, the
capital-C Credential...
The question that naturally follows is: Given the rigged, rotten nature
of the higher-ed game, why would self-interested actors continue to play
by the rules? The answer, to a surprising extent, is that they don't.
Earlier this year, the CEO of Yahoo! quit when it was discovered that his degree in computer science was bogus. In 2006, the CEO of RadioShack stepped down amid a similar scandal--he had exaggerated his accomplishments at a California Bible college. And in 2002, the CEO of Bausch + Lomb admittedSomewhere near the conclusion of The Case Against Education, I plan to place a section called "Doubts About Signaling." One of my chief doubts: "If employers value educational signals so much, why are they so willing to believe whatever candidates claim about their signals?" My least bad answer is that while telling an isolated lie comes easily to human beings, most human beings are bad at living a lie. If you fabricate credentials to get a job, doctoring your resume is the easy part. The challenge: You have to construct an alternate life history, and carefully segregate everyone you're lying to from everyone who knows better for the rest of your career. In short, you need the rare skills of a spy.
that the MBA attributed to him in a corporate press release was
nonexistent. (The company's share price plummeted on the dreadful news.)
Then there are examples from government, like the high-ranking former official in the Department of Homeland Security
who loved to make her underlings address her as "Doctor," in
recognition of the advanced degree she had acquired from a prominent
diploma mill. Her exposure led to a 2004 study by the General Accounting
Office that scoured federal agencies for the alumni of just three
diploma mills--three out of the hundreds of unaccredited Web-based
enterprises that will issue you a degree in recognition of what they
call "life experience." The GAO caught 463 offenders, more than half of them in the Defense Department.
One might assume that academia is practiced at sniffing out counterfeit
degrees. But if anything, prestigious universities seem even more prone
to dupery than other institutions. In April, the vice dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education was forced out after it was revealed that he had never earned the Ph.D. listed on his résumé. Last year, two top officials at Bishop State Community College in Alabama also turned out to have dubious doctorates. In 2010, a senior vice president at Texas A&M lost
his job for faking both a master's and a doctorate. (He also garnished
his CV with a fiction about having been a Navy SEAL.) And in what may be
the most satisfying irony to come our way in many years, the Dean of Admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-- the very person responsible for assessing academic credentials and, in fact, the author of a book of advice for college-bound students--confessed in 2007 that each of her advanced degrees was strictly imaginary.
Not satisfied? The standard human capital story suffers an analogous doubt: "If employers value academic skills so much, why are they so willing to believe whatever candidates tell them about their skills?" The world of work is weird, so no scrupulously mundane story is going to fit the facts.
(7 COMMENTS)
Lind's Challenge for Progressives, by Bryan Caplan
If progressives really believe that the U.S. should become the onlyA left-right open borders team-up isn't just a great idea; it would make a great comic book. Won't someone please draw me a cover?
sovereign country in the world that does not assert the right to
regulate entry to its territory and participation in its labor markets,
they should team up with the only other tiny sect in America that
believes in open borders: right-wing libertarians.
(6 COMMENTS)
May 26, 2014
Frankly Signaling, by Bryan Caplan
Outside economics, however, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely left-wing. Why? Because non-economists realize that this premise undermines the legitimacy of the status quo - which they think of as "capitalism."
For an excellent example, notice how much Thomas Frank's latest Salon piece on education sounds like me:
Perhaps those universities exist to educate, too. Perhaps professorsAgain:
here and there still concern themselves with whether students understand
epic poems and differential equations. But that stuff is incidental.
The university's real purpose, as just about every modern college
entrance guide will confirm, is to make graduates wealthy.
Not too many employers really care what you studied there, or how well
you did; they only care that you got in and that you got a diploma, our
society's one-and-only ticket into the middle class. Graduate from
college and you have a chance of joining life's officer corps. Quit
after high school and it doesn't matter how well you know your
Nietzsche; you will probably spend the rest of your days as a corporal.
...what those professors teach doesn't matter. This is also why people who fake their college degreesThe main difference between me and Frank: He never clearly addresses the question, "Would employers be more profitable if they ignored educational credentials?" My answer is no; while credentials do little to raise productivity, they genuinely signal it. Frank, in contrast, tries to straddle two conflicting positions. He's eager to ridicule college degrees for their classist humbug:
often lead long and successful corporate lives without being
detected--because the stuff you actually learn to get a liberal arts
degree isn't important in the corporate world. Only the diploma itself
has real meaning in the marketplace, and only the marketplace has real
meaning in America.
Just think of the salutary effect such "classism" warnings would have onAt the same time, though, Frank seems to take the greed of the business community for granted. But if "college-certified merit" is really a myth, replacing overpaid college graduates with equally able but vastly cheaper non-graduates is a no-brainer.
the elite colleges themselves, where students are in a frenzy of
self-love brought on by the success of certain very rich
graduates--success which everyone attributes to college-certified merit,
of course.
I am a sincere fan of Thomas Frank. His What's the Matter With Kansas? ably debunks the Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis. His writings on education ably debunk Human Capital Extremism. It's unfortunate, then, that Frank is so eager to lash out at economics:
Maybe we can take it a stepIf Frank studied economics more closely, he'd discover much common ground. Yes, most mainstream economists blithely equate "sitting in classrooms" with "acquiring job skills." But plenty of economists - including Nobel prize-winners Michael Spence and Kenneth Arrow - dissent from this Panglossian consensus. Even more surprisingly, though, the economists most likely to share Frank's doubts about modern education are the free-market economists he's most eager to condemn.
further and string yellow "classism" warning tape around the perimeter
of the economics department, which in many places exists in order to
prove that what's good for the wealthy is what's good for the world.
Left-leaning non-economists and right-leaning economists have never been close. But when such different groups look at education and see similar ills, it's time to calm down and listen to each other.
(4 COMMENTS)
May 25, 2014
Economism and Immigration, by Bryan Caplan
matter in any case."
But if immigrants have such baleful non-economic effects, why don't natives protect themselves by moving to low-immigration regions of the country? Mark suddenly sings a different tune: "Both natives and immigrants will go where the jobs are."
Reconciling Mark's two claims is not easy. If the non-economic effects of immigration are so important, why would natives primarily base their locational decisions on economic factors? Yes, you could say, "Public policy should be based on immigration's non-economic effects, even though private choices largely ignore these effects." But it's a bizarre position. When people can escape genuine social ills by moving, they usually move.
The intellectually cleanest objection is that all the important harm of immigration happens at the national level, so moving to another part of the country is useless. But this is silly. Whatever you think about the overall effects of immigration, these effects are clearly far more pronounced in California, New York, and Texas than they are in West Virginia, North Dakota, and Nebraska.
What's the logical inference? The absence of a native exodus to low-immigration states reveals some mixture of the following:
1. Natives don't actually care that much about immigrants' non-economic effects; their complaining is nationalist cheap talk driven by Social Desirability Bias.
2. The non-economic effects of immigration are neutral or good.
The beauty of locational decisions, moreover, is that you can make them unilaterally. If no one but anti-immigration activists appreciates the true value of unsullied American culture, they don't have to change multicultural minds to find a better life for themselves. The activists only have to change their own addresses. So why don't they? This is especially clear for activists who own homes in California, New York, or DC; they really can escape most of the horrors of immigration and miniaturize their mortgages in one fell swoop.
P.S. Good for you if you're already asking yourself, "If libertarian policies are so great, why don't people move to the freest states?" The quick answer is, "They do."
(9 COMMENTS)
May 23, 2014
Myth of the Rational Voter: The Animated Series, Part 4, by Bryan Caplan
(0 COMMENTS)
Talking More to Mark Krikorian, by Bryan Caplan
[Caplan's] argument was that
treating foreigners in any way
differently from Americans was invidious discrimination, morally identical to
"mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews." He seemed to confine
his comments to employment, but if not allowing a foreigner to take a job in
the United States is morally impermissible, then isn't denying him the vote
also impermissible? If welfare programs exist, how can he be barred merely
because he came here last week?
I didn't say that treating foreigners in any way differently from Americans is morally identical to mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews. I said that mandatory discrimination against foreigners is morally identical to mandatory discrimination against blacks, women, or Jews. I am appealing to the common moral intuition that the moral obligation to help others is subject to numerous caveats, but the moral obligation to leave others alone is subject to few caveats.
And
also I wish more people on his side of the debate would emulate him -- but they
would not be more influential
thereby. Caplan's honesty about his rejection of the American people's right to
limit access to their country is, in fact, what most of the high-immigration
Right and Left believe, but are not forthcoming enough to express publicly.
In the short-run, Mark's probably right. I'd be more persuasive to undecided Americans if I spent my time arguing for extra H-1Bs. In the long-run, though, principled rejection of the status quo often works. "Liberalize Jim Crow" failed; "End Jim Crow" triumphed. And even in the short-run, radicals like me make moderate reformers more palatable by moving the goalposts.
[Caplan] ends his post on a sour
note:
Though anti-immigrant, I
doubt Mark actively hates them. What I sense, rather, is strong yet
polite distaste for foreigners. He's like a husband who makes
nice with his mother-in-law, yet groans whenever he finds out she's
visiting. The key difference: Mark is hypersensitive. The husband
feels fine once his mother-in-law is out of his house, but Mark's distaste for
foreigners is so intense that he wants them out of his entire country.
This is one of those "when
did you stop beating your mother-in-law?" questions, so I'm not going to
protest my lack of "distaste" for foreigners. But it does highlight the
inability of open-borders folks to be able to appreciate how those who disagree
with them think.
Opposition to
immigration is not an exotic position I've only heard about in books. I
have spent my life around normal Americans with conventional views
about immigration. When they feel free to speak their minds, they routinely voice
distaste for foreigners. They voice distaste for foreigners' failure to
speak English, for their accents, for their distinctive clothing, for
their religions, for their customs. They voice distaste for foreigners'
failures and successes.
I don't know what drives Mark. But I know that what drives normal Americans to oppose immigration is distaste for foreigners. Normal Americans have told me so many times.
Ironically, on the immigration issue Caplan fails the very "ideological Turing
test" that he himself devised.
Questions for Mark: Does he doubt that white Southerners' distaste for blacks drove their support for Jim Crow? If Jim Crow proponents denied that such distaste motivated them, would Mark believe them?
Turning now to Mark's responses to my questions.
How much would open
borders have to raise living standards before you'd reconsider? Doubling
GDP clearly doesn't impress you. What about tripling? A ten-fold
increase?
How much less would gravity
have to be to enable me to win a marathon? Hypotheticals like this are
meaningless. And immigration policy isn't purely an economic matter in any
case.
Actually, hypotheticals are one of the most enlightening intellectual tools human beings have. The point of this particular hypothetical is to measure the intensity of Mark's opposition to immigration. Of course immigration isn't "purely an economic matter," but you'd still expect there to be some price where Mark would relent.
"Greater social and political harmony" seems awfully vague. And if Mark named specific countries that exemplify social and political harmony, many Americans would be unenthusiastic ("Wouldn't it be great if we were as harmonious as Canada?") or repulsed ("If only we could be as harmonious as Japan").Suppose the U.S. had a
lot more patriotic solidarity. In what specific ways would it be better to
live here?
Less animosity between
races, ethnic groups, classes leads to greater social and political harmony.
Aren't there any
practical ways you could unilaterally adopt to realize their benefits? Are
you using them?
I don't know what this
means. I'm not being cute; I just really don't understand the question.
I mean things like: Moving to a low-immigration state or gated community, or joining a selective church or club. Instead of complaining about immigrants, why not abandon politics and build a Bubble?
Jobs are one factor in locational decisions, but hardly the only factor. As Collier explains in his work on diaspora dynamics, immigrants have a strong tendency to move to places - even intrinsically unappealing places - full of co-nationals. That's why so many Arabs live in Michigan. Contrary to Mark, then, my question is relevant, and his lack of a confident answer is telling.Do you really think
low-immigration parts of the U.S. are nicer places to live? If so, why
aren't more natives going there? Why don't you?
Some are, some aren't, but
it misses the point. Both natives and immigrants will go where the jobs are.
Doesn't patriotic
solidarity often lead people to unify around bad ideas? Think about the
Vietnam War or Iraq War II. If so, why are you so confident that we need
more patriotic solidarity rather than less?
All good things can have
bad consequences. Love for your spouse may lead you to steal. Pride in your
children's accomplishments may lead you to be an insufferable jerk around other
people.
Right, so why are you so eager to increase patriotic solidarity above its current level? You don't seem to have any empirics showing that the marginal benefit of additional solidarity exceeds the marginal cost. Yet in our debate, you named national solidarity as a primary reason for tighter immigration restrictions.
By the way, Mark, what specific countries do you think have excessive patriotic solidarity, and do you advise these countries to increase immigration to solve their troubles?
So suppose white Americans had long ago officially declared that blacks aren't members of our "national community." Would Jim Crow have been OK then?
I'm sincerely
puzzled. How exactly is discriminating against blacks worse than
discriminating against foreigners?
Black Americans are our
fellow members of our national community and treating them differently because
of their race or ethnicity is to admit to different levels of membership,
something which is contrary to our ideal of a republic of equal citizens.
Foreigners are not members of our national community and thus are legitimately
treated differently. They have human
rights, but not civil rights.
And those human rights do not include moving into my house without my
permission.
No one's proposing that immigrants move into your house without your permission. But under the status quo, immigrants can't move into my house without the American government's permission. That's the heart of my case, and you still don't seem to appreciate it. At risk of failing my Ideological Turing Test, you seem to think that my house is actually the government's house.
Suppose you were
debating a white nationalist who said, "I agree completely with Mark, except I
value racial solidarity rather than patriotic solidarity." What would you
say to change his mind? Would you consider him evil if he didn't?
Many countries have an
ethno-racial basis for their nationhood, like Japan or Swaziland or Denmark.
They are, literally, extended biological families. American nationhood is more
like a family that grows through adoption, and thus is not limited to people of
a particular ethnic background.
The problem with white
nationalists, black nationalists, and Chicano nationalists, as well as with the
cosmopolitan who sees himself as a citizen of the world, is that they are all post-Americans. They may be evil as
people or not, but what matters politically is that they reject American
nationality. They are free, of course, to think what they want. But if they,
like their predecessors 150 years ago, act on their conception of post-American
nationality, then they should be punished by the duly constituted authorities.
Mark's answer, in short, seems to be: If white nationalism were our established national tradition, there would be nothing wrong with it. But we have a different established nation tradition, and it would be wrong to change it. Even the last clause, though, seems iffy for Mark. Suppose Americans amended the Constitution to strip non-whites of their citizenship. Would that be wrong?
Suppose you can either
save one American or x foreigners. How big does x have to be before
you save the foreigners?
Another meaningless
hypothetical.
Hardly. The hypothetical is designed to measure the intensity of Mark's preference for American strangers over foreign strangers. I fear he doesn't want to answer because (a) a big x makes him seem bigoted but (b) a small answer is inconsistent with his policy views.
If you could save either your child or x number of strangers, how
big does the x have to be before you save the strangers instead of your child?
For my child, x>all the strangers in the world. I would not however murder one stranger to save my child's life. See, hypotheticals are revealing.
In what sense is
letting an American employer hire a foreigner is an act of charity?
I'm not sure I get the
question. It's not so much that admitting foreigners to the United States is an
act of charity, though it might be. Rather, our basic disagreement is over
whether the American people, through their elected representatives have the right to limit access to the U.S. by
foreigners. I answer "yes," you answer "no".
The underlying premise is that people have a right to limit their charity to strangers, but don't have a right to stop strangers from trading with each other. Legalities aside, immigration laws look like the latter, not the former.
Interesting. I was expecting Mark to say something like, "Such a law would be morally wrong, but we would still be morally bound to obey it."Suppose the U.S.
decided to increase patriotic solidarity by refusing to admit Americans'
foreign spouses: "Americans should marry other Americans." Would that be
wrong?
No.
I would certainly be against such a policy, because the family unit is the
basic component of society, the first of the "little platoons," and I
think we should delegate to each other the right to bring in a spouse from
abroad. But if Congress passed such a measure (which will never happen, since
spouses of citizens were admitted without numerical limitation even after the
1921/24 acts, as they are now), and it were signed by the president (ditto), it
would be legitimate, so long as it applied prospectively.
(4 COMMENTS)
May 22, 2014
Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change: Rejoinder to Yoram Bauman, by Bryan Caplan
Here is my (delayed) rejoinder to Yoram's response to my review of his Cartoon Introduction
to Climate Change. He's in blockquotes, I'm not.
You should stop worrying, Yoram. I thought you did a good overall job, but due to the graphic format, my favorite parts were hard to describe in words alone. I wanted to scan a few of my favorite pages, but I was worried about copyright. If you get me permission from your publisher to post two or three of my favorite pages, I will.As with most academics,
Bryan keeps his words of praise to a minimum and instead focuses on criticisms.
I will do the same (!) but let's begin with what appears to be the good news:
Bryan says "there is much to like" in the book, that he
"genuinely liked" it, and that he was "entertained and
enlightened".On second thought, however,
this "good news" is remarkably vague, and I am worried that it is
intentionally so.
Like most bloggers and almost all journalists, I often discuss areas where I'm not qualified to write an academic literature review. Climate change is one such topic - and I think I've been forthcoming about my limitations. In normal English, "allI ask this because Bryan
exhibits all of the symptoms of a global-warming-related malady known as
Selective Scientific Ignorance...
Why do I call this
Selective Scientific Ignorance? Because it doesn't stop Bryan from pontificating
about other matters, like geoengineering, about which he writes elsewhere that "all
things considered, geoengineering looks far superior to other policy
options on the table." More on this below, but, gosh, is this person who
has considered all things really the same person who says that his
"understanding of natural science is very
weak"?
things considered" does not literally mean that the speaker has
"considered all things." It's much closer to "As best as I can
gather..." than "Given my encyclopedic knowledge..."
More on geoengineering below, but I for one am eager to hear
what Bryan has to say about ocean acidification, or about the impact of massive
atmospheric sulfur injections on global weather patterns.
The sum of what I ever knew: I spent a week reading about geoengineering four years ago. I set up a lunch for my closest hard science friend to cross-examine a leading geoengineering advocate. And I participated in a conference on the topic. My take-away: I'd given critics of geoengineering multiple opportunities to criticize the idea, and their complaints seemed weak. Yoram may ridicule my efforts, but it seems like an unusually diligent attempt to form an opinion about an issue I don't personally research.
One of the reasons I read Yoram's book, by the way, was to search out additional analysis of geoengineering. By my count, he's now missed two opportunities - his book and his response to my review - to expand my knowledge of the topic.
Like Bryan, I'm not a
natural scientist, and I'm not an epidemiologist either. But I'm comfortable
saying things like "smoking causes cancer" instead of dog-whistle
baloney statements like "some scientists say that smoking causes
cancer" or "nobody is making bets that smoking doesn't cause
cancer" or (holy cow, Bryan!) "Key question: Does smoking really
dominate if you regress lung cancer deaths over the past century with cigarette
consumption and also placebo
variables like church attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per
capita, etc.?" (More on this from Bryan here;
don't miss his "I wish experts would tell me" plea at the end that makes
me wonder if he needs Google Maps too.)
I find Google Scholar a better way to locate research than Google Maps. And I did search Google Scholar before posting my regression query. I found nothing directly on point, and as far as I recall none of the comments directed me to anything better.
I could go on, but I'll
just call the question. Bryan, you said that you were
"enlightened" by the book, so what exactly did you learn from it?
More importantly, what are you willing to publicly acknowledge about climate
science? Are you comfortable saying that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse
gas? That human emissions of carbon dioxide are raising atmospheric CO2
concentrations? That global temperatures have been increasing over the past
century? That humans are partly responsible for those increasing global
temperatures? That "it is extremely likely that
human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the
mid-20th century"?
The Cartoon
Introduction to Climate Change provides my answers to these
questions (Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and No I'm Not Comfortable Saying This But I Am
Comfortable Saying That The Vast Majority Of Scientists Are Convinced), so I'd
like to hear what you have to say about them, Bryan. Can you provide answers?
My answers on all counts are the same as your answers, Yoram: Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and No I'm Not Comfortable Saying This But I Am
Comfortable Saying That The Vast Majority Of Scientists Are Convinced.
Or are you just going to continue to tolerate in yourself a lazy acquiescence
that saves you the trouble of confronting your own views...
I'd think the "lazy" approach would be to uncritically embrace the expert consensus. Instead, I'm making an effort to reconcile several views in tension with one another. By default, I accept the scientific consensus. Two of my other defaults, however, are to mistrust environmentalists and doom-sayers generally. My tentative reconciliation of these views is that the standard story of climate change is qualitatively right, but quantitatively overblown.
Furthermore, the prudent Bayesian response to Yoram's book is to think the dangers are a little more overblown than I initially thought. Why? Because I expected more from Yoram.
1) "We can useI'd much rather learn about the best CBA on global warming, followed by some discussion of the weaknesses, than hear "it's harder than I think" or read blanket methodological objections. When you don't even try to present the best CBA, I raise my probability that the best CBA shows that climate change is not a big deal.
cost-benefit analysis [CBA] to put climate change in perspective."
It's much harder than you think, Bryan. For example, read Pindyck
2013, who argues that risks from climate change should be thought about as
similar to the Cold War risks of thermonuclear conflict between the US and the
Soviets.
(Would you advocate the use of CBA to "put the Cuban MissileCBA of the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been great, yes. I'm also a big fan of CBA of the War on Terror.
Crisis in perspective"?)
Moreover, there are four
independent reasons that the waters for CBA are muddy. Reason #1 is that CBA
has trouble dealing with uncertainty: if there's a (say) 1% chance that climate
change will be catastrophic and a 99% chance that it will be no big deal, how
do you account for that in CBA? I don't think anybody who knows the St
Petersburg Paradox (and Marty Weitzman's related work on "fat
tails") has a good answer here.
I'd probably start by putting in a 1% chance of GDP falling to zero forever, and see what that looks like. Or subtract 1% times expected deaths given a catastrophe times the usual value of life. Almost anything would be more convincing than pre-emptively giving up.
Reason #2 is that CBA has trouble
dealing with inter-generational issues involving the distant future. (More on
this below.) Reason #3 is that CBA has trouble dealing with intra-generational
issues, e.g., the likelihood that climate change will be harder for Bagladeshis
than for Americans. (And no, I'm not buying into any "hypothetical
compensation schemes".)
Then do standard CBA, and supplement it with a distributional breakdown. Furthermore, if you're willing to try to get the world to drastically curb impending carbon emissions, what's so quixotic about international compensation proposals - possibly in the form of more open immigration policy?
Most of your claims are subject to analogous caveats. You usually ably handled the problem by hitting the high points, then briefly acknowledging complexities. Why didn't you do the same for CBA?Reason #4 is that CBA has trouble dealing with
non-market valuation on the massive scale that we're talking about here; a good
rule of thumb is that CBA is good for engineering but less good for
geoengineering.Put those four reasons
together and it's clear to me that you're opening a can of worms for no good
reason. That's fine in a textbook---it's often the point of textbooks!---but in
a cartoon book there's no space.
3) "Insurance is
NOT a no-brainer." You're absolutely right that buying an extended
warranty for a toaster is a bad idea, but the cartoon book repeatedly
emphasizes low probability outcomes that are catastrophic, which is a
pretty good focal point for insurance.
No, it's a terrible focal point for insurance. Most people fail to insure against many low-probability catastrophic events - and you probably don't want to call them fools. Just one example: Costco.com sells a year's supply of dehydrated food for $1499.99. This product provides excellent insurance against a long list of natural and man-made disasters. Question: Have you bought it? If not, why not? The same goes for what you drive (probably not the safest car), where you live (probably not the safest neighborhood in your area, much less the country or world), where you travel, who you sleep with, and so on. Low-probability catastrophes lurk around every corner, but the standard response seems to be, "Until I see concrete dangers, I'll take my chances."
Of course, as you point out, the
attractiveness of insurance also depends on the cost. I agree with you that the
cartoon book lacks some subtlety on this point, and if I'd had twice as many
pages I would have done better. Instead we get what I think is a reasonable
summary given the space available: "If we give up a small piece of cake...
we can get peace of mind."
That's a deeply unreasonable summary of your own position! If the world capped carbon emissions at 150% of their current level, would Yoram Bauman really have "peace of mind" about the state of the planet in 2100? Do you really think you're going to get stricter cuts than that? And of course without CBA, it's very unclear whether we are paying "a small piece of cake," or delaying the modernization of the Third World by decades.
4) "Leading
techno-fixes really do look vastly cheaper than abatement." Ah yes,
here we are, back to Mr. All Things Considered. Unfortunately, I don't really
have any more fireworks to set off because I am no expert on geoengineering. I
certainly have nothing against considering it.
I can easily understand why this issue might not be worth your time... if you weren't an environmental economist writing a whole book about climate change. But if Yoram Bauman isn't qualified to weigh the cost-effectiveness of geoengineering relative to emissions reductions, who is? Call me old-fashioned, but where I come from reviewers request information and authors supply it, not the other way around.
5) "National
emissions regulations can have perverse global effects." Here I think
you're making a mountain out of a molehill. True, national efforts to reduce
(say) oil consumption would shift the global demand curve to the left, which
would lead to a new equilibrium and (provided the supply curve is not perfectly
elastic) a smaller drop in consumption than a naive analysis would suggest.
But... why is this perverse? (It just sounds like economics to me!) What is
perverse in my view is that you fail to note that the book emphasizes the
importance of international action, e.g., with the division of the world
population into "5 Chinas".
Maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe you're making a molehill out of a mountain. This is just the kind of issue an applied environmental economist such as yourself is trained to resolve. Yet I don't know any more about it than I did before I started your book.
6) "Expressive
voting is a big deal." I know this is one of your hobby-horses, Bryan,
but I'm afraid you haven't convinced me that this is a big deal. Look at the
climate legislation that's out there: the British
Columbia carbon tax, the (failed to clear the Senate) Waxman-Markey
bill, California's AB 32 cap-and-trade system, etc. It all looks pretty
substantive to me. Do we really need to get into the psychology of voting,
whether from greens who obsess about recycling or from free-market folks who
obsess about the hockey-stick illusion?
I'm hardly the only person worried that "feel-good" attitudes make environmental policy more costly and less effective. Check out Alan Blinder's chapter on tradeable pollution permits in Hard Heads, Soft Hearts. You've taught environmental economics. Have you really failed to encounter non-economists - including environmental activists - who reject the whole economic approach as offensive?
I admire Yoram's urge to convert people who don't already fully agree with him. After all, "Never preach to the choir" is one of my seven guidelines for writing worthy non-fiction. False modesty aside, though, I'm one of the best partially unconverted readers Yoram is likely to find. We're both economists, we both respect scientific consensus, and we both love the graphic format. Patiently address my specific doubts, and I will listen.
Myth of the Rational Voter: The Animated Series, Part 3, by Bryan Caplan
(2 COMMENTS)
May 18, 2014
How People Get Good at Their Jobs, by Bryan Caplan
How People Get Good At
Their Jobs
If schools teach few job skills, transfer of learning is mostly
wishful thinking, and the effect of education on intelligence is largely
hollow, how on earth do human beings get good at their jobs? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice. People learn by doing specific tasks over and
over. To get better at piloting, you fly
planes; to get better at obstetrics, you deliver babies; to get better at
carpentry, you build houses.
For the unskilled, progress is easy. Given common-sense conditions, it's almost
guaranteed. In the words of K. Anders
Ericsson, the world's leading expert on expertise, novices improve as long as
they are, "1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve,
3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for
repetition and gradual refinements of their performance." Before long, though, the benefit of mere
practice plateaus. To really get good at
their jobs, people must advance to deliberate
practice. To keep learning, they
must exit their comfort zone - raise the bar, struggle to surmount it, repeat. As Ericsson and co-authors explain:
You need a particular kind ofAttaining world-class expertise in chess, music, math,
practice - deliberate practice - to
develop expertise. When most people
practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and
sustained efforts to do something you can't
do well - or even at all.
tennis, swimming, and long-distance running requires roughly ten years of
deliberate practice. Even champions only deliberately practice for
two or three hours a day, so ten years roughly equals ten thousand hours. Malcolm Gladwell famously dubbed this the "Ten
Thousand Hour Rule." Reaching the pinnacle of achievement in
writing and science takes even longer.
Fortunately, the labor market offers plenty of sub-pinnacle
opportunities. A few thousand hours of
deliberate practice won't make you a superstar, but is ample time to get good in
most occupations. What really counts, of course, is not the
mere passage of time, but the amount of practice.
The Ten Thousand Hour Rule is widely seen as an intellectual
victory for effort over talent. This is
a serious misinterpretation. The Ten
Thousand Hour Rule doesn't say that anyone
can become a master if he tries hard and long enough. What the Rule says, rather, is that even the best and brightest must spend
years practicing their craft to reach the top.
People don't become skilled workers by dabbling in a dozen different
school subjects. They become skilled
workers by devoting years to their chosen vocation - by doing their job and
striving to do it better.
Ericsson, 2008.
"Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance," Academic Emergency Medicine, p.991.
Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely, 2007. "The Making of an Expert," Harvard Business Review, p.3
Ericsson et al. 1993, p.366.
Ericsson et al. 1993, p.391-2.
Gladwell, 2008. Outliers.
McDaniel, Schmidt, and Hunter. 1988. "Job Experience Correlates of Job
Performance," Journal of Applied
Psychology finds that the effect of job experience on job performance is
especially strong for workers with under three years of experience. For more experienced samples, the effect
substantially shrinks, suggesting that most workers approach their peak
performance after a few years of practice.
Quiñones, Ford, and Teachout. 1995.
"The Relationship Between Work Experience and Job Performance: A
Conceptual and Meta-Analytic Review." Personnel Psychology find that all
measures of work experience predict job performance, but direct measures of the
amount of practice are markedly more predictive than time on the job.
See Ericsson, 2012.
"Training History, Deliberate Practise and Elite Sports Performance."
(1 COMMENTS)
May 15, 2014
Bauman Responds on The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, by Bryan Caplan
Here's Yoram:
Response to Bryan
Caplan's review of Cartoon Climate Change
Thanks to Bryan Caplan for
his review
of my Cartoon Introduction
to Climate Change, and double thanks if he cross-posts this response on
his blog (although it may mean I have to tweak my jokes about how I've been banned
by a libertarian blog).
As with most academics,
Bryan keeps his words of praise to a minimum and instead focuses on criticisms.
I will do the same (!) but let's begin with what appears to be the good news:
Bryan says "there is much to like" in the book, that he
"genuinely liked" it, and that he was "entertained and
enlightened".
On second thought, however,
this "good news" is remarkably vague, and I am worried that it is
intentionally so. It is this worry---and not narcissism---that leads me to ask:
What exactly did Bryan like in the book? What was he enlightened about? And is
he hiding something that he doesn't want to tell his readers, or perhaps even
something that he doesn't want to admit to himself?
I ask this because Bryan
exhibits all of the symptoms of a global-warming-related malady known as
Selective Scientific Ignorance. I did a Google search for statements that Bryan
has made about climate science, and the most encouraging things I was able to
come up with were (1) a post from 2007 about how he believes in "moderate
global warming" because
global warming skeptics aren't taking bets and (2) a reference
to a 2007 survey of climate scientists. (BTW, here's the 2013 survey update.)
But I also found his review
of Superfreakonomics, a review that calls out as a highlight the
book's "surprisingly skeptical look at global warming". (For a less
flattering view, see my
back-and-forth with Steve Levitt and/or this classic
post that ends with climatologist Raymond Pierrehumbert, Levitt's colleague
at the University of Chicago, giving Levitt the Google Map directions to his
office.) And I found his review
of my Cartoon Macro book, in which he somehow manages to focus on
the wonders of his hero, Julian Simon---"For whom my
son Simon Caplan is named"---while ignoring Simon's failed guess that
"global warming is likely to be simply another transient concern, barely
worthy of consideration ten years from now." (Simon wrote that in 1996).
Why do I call this
Selective Scientific Ignorance? Because it doesn't stop Bryan from pontificating
about other matters, like geoengineering, about which he writes elsewhere that "all
things considered, geoengineering looks far superior to other policy
options on the table." More on this below, but, gosh, is this person who
has considered all things really the same person who says that his
"understanding of natural science is very
weak"? More on geoengineering below, but I for one am eager to hear
what Bryan has to say about ocean acidification, or about the impact of massive
atmospheric sulfur injections on global weather patterns.
Like Bryan, I'm not a
natural scientist, and I'm not an epidemiologist either. But I'm comfortable
saying things like "smoking causes cancer" instead of dog-whistle
baloney statements like "some scientists say that smoking causes
cancer" or "nobody is making bets that smoking doesn't cause
cancer" or (holy cow, Bryan!) "Key question: Does smoking really
dominate if you regress lung cancer deaths over the past century with cigarette
consumption and also placebo
variables like church attendance per capita, the Dow Jones, televisions per
capita, etc.?" (More on this from Bryan here;
don't miss his "I wish experts would tell me" plea at the end that makes
me wonder if he needs Google Maps too.)
I could go on, but I'll
just call the question. Bryan, you said that you were
"enlightened" by the book, so what exactly did you learn from it?
More importantly, what are you willing to publicly acknowledge about climate
science? Are you comfortable saying that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse
gas? That human emissions of carbon dioxide are raising atmospheric CO2
concentrations? That global temperatures have been increasing over the past
century? That humans are partly responsible for those increasing global
temperatures? That "it is extremely likely that
human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the
mid-20th century"?
The Cartoon
Introduction to Climate Change provides my answers to these
questions (Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and No I'm Not Comfortable Saying This But I Am
Comfortable Saying That The Vast Majority Of Scientists Are Convinced), so I'd
like to hear what you have to say about them, Bryan. Can you provide answers?
Or are you just going to continue to tolerate in yourself a lazy acquiescence
that saves you the trouble of confronting your own views, of confronting
politicians like Marco
"our climate is always changing" Rubio, and of confronting fellow
economists like Steve Levitt who write misleading
baloney about how "When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the
agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global
carbon-dioxide emissions"? (Now that you've read my book you know why
that's misleading baloney, right?)
Okay, now that that's out
of the way, let's proceed to the numbered points of attack in Bryan's original
review. (And I hope that everyone will keep in mind that Bryan "genuinely
liked" the book!)
1) "We can use
cost-benefit analysis [CBA] to put climate change in perspective."
It's much harder than you think, Bryan. For example, read Pindyck
2013, who argues that risks from climate change should be thought about as
similar to the Cold War risks of thermonuclear conflict between the US and the
Soviets. (Would you advocate the use of CBA to "put the Cuban Missile
Crisis in perspective"?)
Moreover, there are four
independent reasons that the waters for CBA are muddy. Reason #1 is that CBA
has trouble dealing with uncertainty: if there's a (say) 1% chance that climate
change will be catastrophic and a 99% chance that it will be no big deal, how
do you account for that in CBA? I don't think anybody who knows the St
Petersburg Paradox (and Marty Weitzman's related work on "fat
tails") has a good answer here. Reason #2 is that CBA has trouble
dealing with inter-generational issues involving the distant future. (More on
this below.) Reason #3 is that CBA has trouble dealing with intra-generational
issues, e.g., the likelihood that climate change will be harder for Bagladeshis
than for Americans. (And no, I'm not buying into any "hypothetical
compensation schemes".) Reason #4 is that CBA has trouble dealing with
non-market valuation on the massive scale that we're talking about here; a good
rule of thumb is that CBA is good for engineering but less good for
geoengineering.
Put those four reasons
together and it's clear to me that you're opening a can of worms for no good
reason. That's fine in a textbook---it's often the point of textbooks!---but in
a cartoon book there's no space.
2) "Cost-benefit
analysis is sensitive to discount rates." See above, but more
importantly I think you're being too technical and (like most discount-rate
fetishists of all political persuasions) missing the real questions. The real
questions are about the wealth of future generations relative to the current
generation, and about their preferences. Unfortunately it's pretty hard to
answer these questions---especially, as we note in the book, about the distant
future---so when you ask the hypothetical Kaldor-Hicks question that underlies
discount rates (How much money would we have to set aside now to compensate
future generations for climate damages?) you end up in the can of worms again.
3) "Insurance is
NOT a no-brainer." You're absolutely right that buying an extended
warranty for a toaster is a bad idea, but the cartoon book repeatedly
emphasizes low probability outcomes that are catastrophic, which is a
pretty good focal point for insurance. Of course, as you point out, the
attractiveness of insurance also depends on the cost. I agree with you that the
cartoon book lacks some subtlety on this point, and if I'd had twice as many
pages I would have done better. Instead we get what I think is a reasonable
summary given the space available: "If we give up a small piece of cake...
we can get peace of mind."
4) "Leading
techno-fixes really do look vastly cheaper than abatement." Ah yes,
here we are, back to Mr. All Things Considered. Unfortunately, I don't really
have any more fireworks to set off because I am no expert on geoengineering. I
certainly have nothing against considering it. But I also know (and you should
too) that the "costs" of pumping SO2 into the upper atmosphere are
not limited to the dollar costs of pumping
the stuff up there. So I'm concerned that geoengineering is being
oversold by people like you who haven't thought it all the way through and have
a "What,
me worry?" approach to the risks of climate change. PS. At the very
least we should all be able to agree that Levitt and Dubner were way off in
claiming (in Superfreakonomics) that "perhaps the single best
objection" to their garden hose idea was that "it's too simple and
too cheap." Way off. Yes?
5) "National
emissions regulations can have perverse global effects." Here I think
you're making a mountain out of a molehill. True, national efforts to reduce
(say) oil consumption would shift the global demand curve to the left, which
would lead to a new equilibrium and (provided the supply curve is not perfectly
elastic) a smaller drop in consumption than a naive analysis would suggest.
But... why is this perverse? (It just sounds like economics to me!) What is
perverse in my view is that you fail to note that the book emphasizes the
importance of international action, e.g., with the division of the world
population into "5 Chinas".
6) "Expressive
voting is a big deal." I know this is one of your hobby-horses, Bryan,
but I'm afraid you haven't convinced me that this is a big deal. Look at the
climate legislation that's out there: the British
Columbia carbon tax, the (failed to clear the Senate) Waxman-Markey
bill, California's AB 32 cap-and-trade system, etc. It all looks pretty
substantive to me. Do we really need to get into the psychology of voting,
whether from greens who obsess about recycling or from free-market folks who
obsess about the hockey-stick illusion? The answer---or at least my answer,
especially in a cartoon book
that is supposed to cover the basics of climate change in 200 short pages---is
No.
(29 COMMENTS)
Bryan Caplan's Blog
- Bryan Caplan's profile
- 372 followers
