Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 73

Reply to Noah on Sheepskin Effects and Collegiate Consumption, by Bryan Caplan

Continuing our debate, Noah Smith defends on odd view on sheepskin effects.  Here's my reply.  He's in blockquotes; I'm not.

Bryan, and many
proponents of the signaling model, believe that sheepskin effects are
solid evidence that college is mostly about signaling. On the other
hand, I believe that sheepskin effects are strong evidence against the signaling model, and are consistent with the human capital model of education. 





Why sheepskin effects are evidence against the signaling model




First, why are sheepskin effects evidence against the signaling model? Simple: In the signaling model, the signal must be costly.
If signals are not costly, there can be no separating or hybrid
equilibrium. Without a separating (or hybrid) equilibrium, there is no
return to sending the signal. In the model, low-type agents choose not
to send the signal because doing so doesn't pass a cost-benefit test.




In other words, if completing the last semester of college is very hard,
it can serve as the type of costly signal that could explain the
college wage premium in the signaling model. But if completing one more
semester of college isn't very hard, then the signaling model can't
describe what's going on.




How hard is it to finish the last semester of college? For some people
it would be very very hard - but these people are unlikely to have
completed all the other semesters of college prior to the last one. For someone who just finished 7 or more semesters, one more semester probably is not that hard.

If you knew nothing about actual students on actual college campuses, Noah's argument would be highly plausible.  Since both of us have spent many years on such campuses, however, I'm puzzled.  Plenty of kids slog through two or three years of college, then get so distracted or disgruntled they fail to finish.  Their exasperated parents could reasonably say, "How hard can it possibly be to finish?!"  But social scientists should just work our way backwards from their failure to finish to the subjective difficulty of doing so.

By analogy, imagine you have a lonely friend.  He desperately wants a girlfriend, but never asks anyone out on a date.  You tell him: "It's easy.  Just walk up to her and ask her out.  End of story."  And what does he say?  "Sure, it's easy for someone like you..."  The difficulty of finishing a degree is much the same.

Also, if agents are even close to rational - as the signaling model
assumes them to be - then they wouldn't complete 7 semesters of college
only to balk at the finish line. That would be very very suboptimal
behavior - a waste of years of effort and years of foregone earnings,
not to mention tuition.

Noah's right that conventional signaling models assume everyone's rational.  But they don't need to.  As long as employers are roughly rational, students can act impulsively without changing the main lesson of the model: Education pays you for what you reveal about yourself, rather than what you actually learn along the way.  In fact, rationality is one of the traits students signal with their behavior!  The more rationally you act, the more rational you're likely to be.  

Caplan writes:

Noah fail[s] to look at school from the point of view of a weak
student.  One more semester may seem like nothing to those of us who
readily finish.  But for students who find classes boring and baffling,
even the thought of enduring even one more semester of academics is
agonizing.  

Agonizing, perhaps, but much more agonizing than the last 7 semesters?
It seems highly unlikely. And why would a rational agent endure 7
semesters of agony (and foregone earnings and sky-high tuition) for
practically no payoff?

Forget models and look at actual human beings.  Plenty of people will put up with something unpleasant for years, then snap.  This is especially true for people who are relatively non-conformist.  And as I've repeatedly said, conformity to social norms is one of the main things employers are looking for.

Therefore, sheepskin effects are not consistent with the signaling model.

I'm surprised by how unempirical Noah is here.  Check out his cv.  He has a B.S. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.  If he refused to comply with even one of Stanford's graduation requirements, U Mich never would have accepted him.  If he refused to show up for his dissertation defense, U Mich never would have given him his Ph.D.  His advisor, Miles Kimball, would undoubtedly have begged him to reconsider.  But if Noah stubbornly stuck to his guns, the labor market would have severely punished him.  Signaling explains all this.  Nothing else does.

Why sheepskin effects are consistent with the human capital model




How could the last semester of college be so much more important for the
building of human capital than the other 7 semesters combined? It
cannot. So how can sheepskin effects be consistent with the human
capital model of education? Here's how.




Education, in empirical research jargon, is a "treatment." In the human
capital model of college, that treatment has different effects on
different people - some study diligently and expand their perspectives
greatly and build their networks and learn with an open mind, while
others party and slack off and waste time on Twitter and fail to learn. 




Employers try to tell whether the treatment worked.

A strange motive to impute.  Sure, employers want to know if you have the Right Stuff.  But why should they care whether you acquired it via "treatment," or just had it all along?

[...]




Dropping out of school is one such clue. It could mean that you didn't
build human networks valuable enough to keep you hanging around. It
could mean that you have some emotional problem, and that college
therefore didn't give you the emotional maturity that it tends to give
most people. In other words, even if the treatment typically works,
dropping out - including dropping out right before the finish line -
could indicate that the treatment didn't work for you.

Key question: If Noah's subpar student make a last-ditch Herculean effort to finish, would he have a good chance of successfully fooling employers about his merits?  If not, why not?  If so, Noah doesn't really disagree with me. 

Sloppy use of the word "signaling"




"But wait, Noah," you may ask. "Aren't 'clue' and 'sign' just synonyms for 'signal'? Didn't you just describe signaling?"

Yes, this is exactly my view.

The confusion here is due to sloppy use of the word "signaling." Are we talking about the Spence signaling model,
or are we using "signal" to mean "any piece of information"? I believe
that if you want to use the fame and the imprimatur of the Spence
signaling model to support your view of college, you should stick to
that model.

There's no confusion on my part.  Yes, you can equate "signaling" with a literal interpretation of Spence's model.  But it's far more enlightening to treat the Spence model as a mathematical parable - then see how much of the real world the parable illuminates.  Anything that raises the conditional probability of X signals X.  If the world happens to reward X, this spurs people who lack X to send misleading signals of X in order to receive those rewards.  These are the Spencean insights that matter - not the details of any specific model. 

[...]



Sheepskin effects and the consumption/sorting model of college




I do not believe that 100% of the college wage premium reflects the
return to college - I believe some fraction of it represents ability
sorting. Nor do I believe that 100% of the price students pay to go to
college represents investment - I believe some fraction of it represents
consumption. College is fun. I believe that college does build some
human capital, but part of the institution represents super-smart kids
paying to party with each other at Harvard while pretty-smart kids pay
to party with each other at Ohio State.

Noah overstates.  Sure, college students have fun.  But so do yuppies.  When I searched the research literature, I found little evidence that college students are having more fun than yuppies.  And if college is really so delightful, why are students so eager to move off-campus? 

The main advantage of college partying over yuppie partying is that parents are far more willing to subsidize the former.  Indeed, imagine parents just handed their 18-year-olds four years worth of tuition.  How many would use the money to have great fun off-campus?  Plenty.  Nerds like Noah and myself may find paradise on a college campus, but for most students college is merely the funnest activity their parents will fund.




(9 COMMENTS)

Family, Pop Culture, and the Nurture Assumption, by Bryan Caplan

The central message of behavioral genetics is that modern human beings systematically overestimate the effects of upbringing and systematically underestimate the effects of heredity.  Judith Harris famously called this bias "the nurture assumption."  But why are people so predisposed to the nurture assumption?

I've previously argued that first-hand parenting experience is misleading, because the short-run effects of parenting far exceed the long-run effects.  Changing kids is easy; the hard thing is preventing them from changing back!  I also suspect Social Desirability Bias plays a major role: "You can do anything if you try!" sure sounds better than "It's in the genes."

But here's a totally different explanation for popular misconceptions about nature and nurture.  Throughout most of human history, if you knew someone, you usually knew his family as well.  When you grow up in a village, you make friends; and once you make friends, you regularly interact with their relatives.

In the modern world, in contrast, we are much less likely to meet the family.  You almost never meet your co-workers' families.  And you often barely know the families of your close friends.  Perhaps strangely, most of the families that we "know" well are the fictional families of popular culture.  The Pritchetts.  The Bluths.  The Whites.  The Sopranos.  I've spent more time with the Simpson family than every family besides the Caplan family.

So what?  Well, with rare exceptions, the actors who comprise t.v. families aren't even remotely related.  Do your ancestors come from the same continent?  Then by t.v. logic, you could be brothers - and we're conditioned not to find the fictional relationships ridiculous.  Furthermore, since drama rests heavily on conflict and contrast, every family member gets a distinctive personality and social niche.  What t.v. family has three studious kids - or three class clowns?  Even a show like Shameless blends full-blown degenerates with nice people to handle damage control.

The result: We have little first-hand familiarity with actual biological families.  But popular culture fosters that illusion that we do.  Most of the biological families that we "know" are in fact adopted all the way down.  The main exception being kids' roles where two twins play the same role to ease compliance with child labor laws!

(8 COMMENTS)

Reply to Noah on The Case Against Education, by Bryan Caplan

While I was away, Noah Smith replied to my recent Atlantic excerpt from The Case Against Education .  Here's my reply, point-by-point.  He's in blockquotes, I'm not.

But
Caplan misapplies the theory of signaling. First of all, he says that
it represents "wasted resources." In signaling models, the resources
that people spend proving themselves aren't wasted -- they're
an economically efficient way of overcoming the natural problem of
asymmetric information.

Signaling can be economically efficient under auspicious circumstances.  But even in an unregulated market, signaling has a clear negative externality: When you signal a little more, you make yourself look better without making the world any better.  So people naturally tend to over-do it, from a social point of view.  The same would hold if you looked at polluting industries: Yes, the pollution is a byproduct of useful production; but from a social point of view, there's still too much pollution.

Basic economic reasoning suggests that if there
were an easier, cheaper way to tell which employees would be good, at
least some companies would have discovered it by now. Yet degree
requirements remain ubiquitous. So if Caplan is right, the signaling
benefit of college is still a positive and necessary economic force.

The U.S. governments annually heaps about a trillion dollars worth of subsidies on the status quo.  So it's hardly surprising that other certification systems struggle to compete.  If anything, this is a massive condemnation of the status quo; if conventional education so great, why does it need such heavy government support?

Subsidies aside, I'm surprised by Noah's Panglossian attitude.  The fact that a more socially efficient approach exists hardly implies that it's profitable for any one company to adopt it.  Most obviously, if students are signaling conformity, it's easy to get lock-in, because signaling conformity in unconventional ways signals... non-conformity.

But Caplan probably isn't right. As evidence that college has
a large signaling component, he notes that people who drop out of
college just before graduation receive a much lower wage bump than
people who cross the finish line -- a phenomenon known as the sheepskin effect.
"Signaling is practically the only explanation" for this effect, Caplan
declares. But he's wrong. To be a useful signal, a task should be
difficult to accomplish or very costly -- that's why it separates good
workers from bad ones. But finishing that last semester of school is
neither difficult nor very costly, especially for someone who just
completed seven other semesters.

So say the parents of every college dropout!  But both parents and Noah fail to look at school from the point of view of a weak student.  One more semester may seem like nothing to those of us who readily finish.  But for students who find classes boring and baffling, even the thought of enduring even one more semester of academics is agonizing. 

So
the sheepskin effect can't be effective signaling -- it must be
something else. Probably, someone who finishes seven semesters and then
drops out without completing the eighth has some sort of emotional,
motivational or other personal issues that make them unattractive to
employers. But this isn't signaling, any more than it's signaling when
employers fire people who come to work with needle tracks on their arms.

An interesting analogy, because people with needle tracks on their arms often hide them - especially if they're interviewing for a job.  The same goes for students inclined to drop out after seven semesters.  They know that if they finish, they will partly conceal their "emotional, motivational, or other personal issues" - and profit as a result.  And many do precisely that.

Also, if college were largely signaling,
we would expect to see the return to college decline over time, as
companies learn which employees are smart, hardworking and conscientious
from observing them on the job.

Exactly wrong.  In order to be "largely signaling," the signaling component of education has to be long-lasting.  If companies quickly adjusted pay to match employee productivity, signaling wouldn't pay much in present value terms.

Research by Yale University economist
Fabian Lange has shown
that employers learn a lot about their workers after just three years.
So if two employees start out with very similar abilities, personalities
and other characteristics, we'd expect to see the benefit of signaling
be substantially reduced after a few years.

There's a whole "Employer Learning/Statistical Discrimination" literature on this.  I review and critically analyze it in great detail in the book.  Quick points:

1. While Noah's summary of Lange's work is accurate, several other major papers find slow learning - especially if you read the fine print.  Case in point: Arcidiacono, Bayer, and Hizmo's 2010 piece in the American Economic Journal.  While they find very quick employer learning for college graduates, they find slow learning for not only high school grads, but workers with "some college."  In other words, they find slow learning for about two-thirds of workers.  And to be part of the well-evaluated one-third, you have to graduate college.

2. Almost all of the work in this literature ignores non-cognitive ability.  So even papers that find fast learning really only cut against the naive "education signals IQ" view, not the reasonable "education signals a package of IQ, work ethic, and conformity" view.

It isn't. A recent paper
by economists Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan and Douglas Webber compares
students at Ohio four-year public universities who just barely make the
grade point average cutoff to stay in college with students who just
barely miss it and are forced to drop out. Since these groups of
students are, statistically speaking, almost exactly the same -- the
difference between them is almost entirely a matter of luck -- the
difference between them doesn't depend on who is willing and able to
send a good signal. Looking at the earnings of the two groups seven to
12 years after their initial college enrollment, Ost et al. find that
the lucky kids who managed to stay in school have considerably higher
earnings than those who were kicked out. If college's value were mostly
signaling, we'd expect to see this wage difference disappear over time,
as employers learned that these two groups of students were effectively
the same. But the gap persists, suggesting that the workers who managed
to stay in college derived something useful from the experience.

This is another good paper, but Noah's interpretation is only correct if employers rapidly discover and reward true worker productivity.  I say they don't.  Even when employers realize they have a bad worker, they routinely (a) wait a long time to get rid of them, and (b) help foist their subpar workers on other employers when they finally do decide to get rid of them - allowing those subpar workers to continue to profit from their misleading credentials.

Caplan
cites psychological research to claim that students don't remember what
they learn in their college classes, as well as some studies claiming
that college graduates tend to lack basic competence in logical
reasoning and domain knowledge. But more systematic reviews of the
evidence show otherwise. Since 1991, researchers Ernest Pascarella and
Patrick Terenzini have been keeping track of studies on the question of
how college affects students, publishing summaries of the literature in a
series of three volumes. Overall, they find
that going to college has large and positive effects on students'
cognitive, quantitative and verbal skills, as well as their personal
development.

I've read Pascarella and Terenzini cover to cover.  Once again, you have to read the fine print.  By the authors' own admission, much of the research they review naively compares freshman and seniors, and attributes the full gain to collegiate learning.  Many don't even bother to correct for attrition! 

On Twitter, Noah cites markedly better evidence:

42 papers. 600,000 people. All quasi-experimental research designs. Huge effect of education on intelligence.

Bryan Caplan and the other education skeptics are going to need to revise their beliefs a bit, eh? https://t.co/M8Zr6Dx7kr

-- Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) December 10, 2017

I have revised my beliefs, but only slightly.  Why?  Because my book already heavily relies on Steve Ceci's earlier literature review of the causal effect of education on IQ.  Ceci concludes that a year of education raises IQ by 1-3 points; the study Noah cites says 1-5 points.  Not a huge difference.  How do I reconcile my position with these results?  Easily:

1. Standard estimates say one IQ point raises income by about 1%.  But standard estimates say a year of education raises income by far more than 3%, or even 5%.  So there's still plenty of payoff unexplained by cognitive improvement.

2. As Ceci originally explained, there are strong reasons to think a lot of these IQ gains stem from "teaching to the test," broadly construed.  School may make you a little smarter, but it mainly teaches you to give the kind of answers IQ test-makers are looking for. 

The last of these is, in my opinion, overlooked. Most
discussions of college focus on classroom material; very few discuss the
positive impacts of peers and of college life on students' goals,
motivation and perspective. But these are potentially of crucial importance
to students' lives. The time that students spend socializing or
partying is partly a form of consumption, but it's also cementing those
young people's identity and social relationships in ways that I suspect
will make them much more productive over their lifetime.

Noah presented this argument five years ago.  Here's my reply.

Last point: Noah opens his critique by discussing likely sympathizers:

Caplan's claim is sure to appeal to those who feel that their own higher education was wasted, or who dislike colleges because of liberal campus politics.

But for me, what's relaxing about this topic is that most people across the political spectrum respond positively.  Why?  Because they have years of personal experience with education - and my story fits their experience.  Indeed, virtually the only people who strenuously object to the signaling story are labor and education economists.  Given my strong presumption in favor of experts, this weighs on me.  Which is why I spent years reading and writing this book.

(9 COMMENTS)

The Truth Hurts: Public Choice and Liberty, by Bryan Caplan

Reagan was worried that Americans were losing their love of liberty.  Here's my depressing talk arguing that Americans love liberty as a vague platitude, but are deeply statist on almost all particulars.

I am only a messenger.

(2 COMMENTS)

My Excerpt in The Atlantic, by Bryan Caplan

I'm on vacation, but I'm delighted to announce that an excerpt from The Case Against Education has just appeared in the latest issue of The Atlantic.  Enjoy!

(1 COMMENTS)

The Shining City on a Hill: Commentary on Reagan, by Bryan Caplan

While wrapping up my graphic novel, I wound up reading Ronald Reagan's famous Farewell Address - his "Shining City on a Hill" speech.  Given my broader views, I obviously have some objections.  But I was amazed to read an actual presidential speech where I agreed with entire paragraphs.  Here's the abridged speech, with my commentary.  Reagan's in blockquotes, I'm not.

My fellow Americans:

This is the 34th time I'll speak to you
from the Oval Office and the last. We've been together 8 years now, and soon
it'll be time for me to go. But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts,
some of which I've been saving for a long time.

[...]

You know, down the hall and up the
stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the President and
his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like
to stand and look out of early in the morning...

I've been thinking a bit at that window.
I've been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the
image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one--a small story about a
big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at
the height of the boat people... As the refugees made their way through the choppy
seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He
yelled, "Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man."

Notice that Reagan is reflexively pro-refugee.  He doesn't wonder if the
refugee is a Communist spy, warn that he's likely to go on welfare, or fret about a "clash of civilizations." 

A small moment with a big meaning, a
moment the sailor, who wrote it in a letter, couldn't get out of his mind. And,
when I saw it, neither could I. Because that's what it was to be an American in
the 1980's. We stood, again, for freedom. I know we always have, but in the
past few years the world again--and in a way, we ourselves--rediscovered it.

If you're inclined to treat Reagan's praise of "freedom" as platitudinous, read on.

It's been quite a journey this decade,
and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are
reaching our destination.

The fact is, from Grenada to the
Washington and Moscow summits, from the recession of '81 to '82, to the
expansion that began in late '82 and continues to this day, we've made a
difference. The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that
I'm proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America
created--and filled--19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our
morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.

[...]

Well, back in 1980, when I was running
for President, it was all so different. Some pundits said our programs would
result in catastrophe. Our views on foreign affairs would cause war. Our plans
for the economy would cause inflation to soar and bring about economic
collapse. I even remember one highly respected economist saying, back in 1982,
that "The engines of economic growth have shut down here, and they're likely
to stay that way for years to come." Well, he and the other opinion
leaders were wrong. The fact is, what they called "radical" was
really "right." What they called "dangerous" was just
"desperately needed."

On the economy: It's always good to see the "This time, the recession is permanent" crowd served a good helping of crow. 

On foreign policy: Growing up in the 80s, many people took Reagan's warmonger status for granted.  But it's striking how few people the U.S. military killed on his watch.  Perhaps he moved the world a lot closer to nuclear war, but got lucky with Gorbachev; I honestly don't know.

And in all of that time I won a
nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my
style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content... They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept
that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery
of our values and our common sense.

Common sense told us that when you put a
big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the
people's tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before... We're exporting more
than ever because American industry became more competitive and at the same
time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad
instead of erecting them at home.

Reagan conveniently overlooks the general fact that U.S. recessions always end, whether taxes happen to be high or low.  At the time, many economists lamented his betrayal of free trade principles for the auto industry, but perhaps Reagan's general picture is still accurate.

Common sense also told us that to preserve
the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and
confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new
peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to
reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons--and hope for even more progress is
bright--but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to
cease. The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone. The Soviets are leaving
Afghanistan. The Vietnamese are preparing to pull out of Cambodia, and an
American-mediated accord will soon send 50,000 Cuban troops home from Angola.

What common sense really says is that military buildups are a big gamble.  Maybe you'll scare your enemies into submission.  Maybe you're provoke them into war.  But later in the speech, Reagan seems to admit that he got really lucky.

The lesson of all this was, of course,
that because we're a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always
be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in
ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once
you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to
change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Countries across the globe are turning
to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the
past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980's has been that, lo and
behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy,
the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.

Long-run Economic Freedom of the World scores bear Reagan out on economic freedom.  I'm pretty sure the same goes for global free speech, but I can't readily find measures that go back to the 80s. 

[...]

Ours was the first revolution in the
history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three
little words: "We the People." "We the People" tell the
government what to do; it doesn't tell us. "We the People" are the
driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by
what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in
which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution
is a document in which "We the People" tell the government what it is
allowed to do. "We the People" are free. This belief has been the
underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past 8 years.

But back in the 1960's, when I began, it
seemed to me that we'd begun reversing the order of things--that through more
and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was
taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom. I went
into politics in part to put up my hand and say, "Stop." I was a
citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.

I think we have stopped a lot of what
needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not
free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that
is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty
contracts.

Reagan indulges in the standard American conflation of freedom and democracy, but he errs in the right direction, slighting democracy to the profit of freedom.

Nothing is less free than pure
communism-and yet we have, the past few years, forged a satisfying new
closeness with the Soviet Union. I've been asked if this isn't a gamble, and my
answer is no because we're basing our actions not on words but deeds. The
detente of the 1970's was based not on actions but promises. They'd promise to
treat their own people and the people of the world better. But the gulag was
still the gulag, and the state was still expansionist, and they still waged
proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Well, this time, so far, it's different.
President Gorbachev has brought about some internal democratic reforms and
begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has also freed prisoners whose names
I've given him every time we've met.

[...]

We must keep up our guard, but we must
also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust. My
view is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I
think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix
them. We wish him well. And we'll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet
Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one. What
it all boils down to is this: I want the new closeness to continue. And it
will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way
as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don't, at
first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It's still trust but
verify. It's still play, but cut the cards. It's still watch closely. And don't
be afraid to see what you see.

Notice that Reagan doesn't even
claim that he somehow induced the Soviets to put a reformer in charge. 
They just happened to do so on Reagan's watch.  And once Gorbachev was in power, what difference did
Reagan's military buildup really make?  Indeed, one of the few things
that might have stalled Gorbachev's reforms is if Reagan failed to gamble on peace.

[...]

Finally, there is a great tradition of
warnings in Presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for
some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in
the past 8 years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new
patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it
won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want.
And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and
what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over
35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very
directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air,
a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions..

But now, we're about to enter the
nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an
unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern
children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded
patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't
reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that
America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of
enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs production
[protection].

[...]

And let me offer lesson number one about
America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow
night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents
haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and
nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

I'm tempted to say, "America's children clearly failed."  But from all the data I've seen, Reagan was just romanticizing earlier generations of Americans.  Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of enterprise have long enjoyed widespread lip service.  But the more specific the question, the more statist Americans look.

And that's about all I have to say
tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window
upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The
phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he
imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an
early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden
boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be
free.

Bad though poetic example.  In fact, the Pilgrims established a brutal theocracy in Plymouth Colony: "There were several crimes that carried the death penalty: treason, murder, witchcraft, arson, sodomy, rape, bestiality, adultery, and cursing or smiting one's parents." 

I've spoken of the shining city all my
political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I
said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than
oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in
harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and
creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the
doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I
saw it, and see it still.

Amazingly, this passage all but demands open borders.  "And if there had to be city walls..." strongly suggest a longing for no walls at all.  Doors "open to anyone with the will and heart to get here" is hard to interpret as anything but support for migrational laissez-faire.  And the phrase "teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace" reveals tremendous optimism about the likely effects of even extreme cultural and ethnic diversity.

And how stands the city on this winter
night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But
more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and
true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.
And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all
the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness,
toward home.

Or in modern parlance, #RefugeesWelcome.

Back in 1993, one of my friends opined, "Reagan talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk."  Given public opinion, I'm shocked that he even talked the talk.  Indeed, I'm amazed that any politician with such a non-Neurotic persona was even able to beat Carter or Mondale.

P.S. Reagan's Farewell Address was written by Peggy Noonan, whom I've criticized elsewhere.






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The Unbearable Arbitrariness of Deploring, by Bryan Caplan

As a self-identified non-Neurotic man, I'm not surprised by the social ubiquity of anger, sadness, and fear.  When something bad happens, my instinctive reaction is to say, "Calm down, it's OK" - especially if it doesn't personally affect me.  But I recognize that I'm odd.  When something bad happens, a psychologically normal person's instinctive reaction is to say, "Oh my God, that's terrible!" - whether it personally affects them or not. 

At this point in my life, I'm almost inured to the anger, sadness, and fear that normal people chronically express.  They're clearly just built differently than I am.  While I suspect they could markedly improve their outlook if they wanted to, they don't want to.  Pride, I guess.  But while I've grown to accept their general negativity, I'm still astounded by what people choose to be negative about.  To my eyes, the specific items that people deplore look deeply arbitrary.

Let's start with the latest scandal.  People all over the country - indeed, the world - have recently discovered that many celebrities are habitual sexual harassers.  Each new expose leads to public outrage and professional ostracism.  Why does this confuse me?  Because many celebrities do many comparably bad things other than sexual harassment, and virtually no one cares. 

Suppose, for example, that a major celebrity is extremely emotionally abusive to all his subordinates.  He screams at them all the time.  He calls them the cruelest names he can devise.  He habitually makes impossible demands.  He threatens to fire them out of sheer sadistic pleasure.  But the abuse is never sexual (or ethnic); the celebrity limits himself to attacking subordinates' intelligence, character, pride, and hope for the future.  I daresay the average employee would far prefer to work for a boss who occasionally pressured them for a date.  But if the tabloids ran a negative profile on the Asexual Boss from Hell, the public wouldn't get very mad and Hollywood almost certainly wouldn't ostracize the offender. 

A similar point holds for celebrity gropers.  When exposed, lots of people proclaim it "unforgivable."  But if a celebrity repeatedly got into same-sex bar brawls, there would be no outcry.  Even if the celebrity received probation after paralyzing an innocent stranger for life, he could probably keep working in show business. 

Or to take a far more gruesome case: When the Syrian government last used poison gas, killing roughly a hundred people, the U.S. angrily deployed retaliatory bombers, to bipartisan acclaim.  But when the Syrian government murdered vastly more with conventional weapons, the U.S. government and its citizenry barely peeped.  The unbearable arbitrariness of deploring!

In the past, I've made similar observations about Jim Crow versus immigration laws, and My Lai versus Hiroshima.  In each case, I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about both evils.  I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about neither.  I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the greater evil, but not the lesser evil.  But I can't understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the lesser evil, but care little about the greater evil.  Or why they would have strong negative feelings about one evil, but yawn in the face of a comparable evil.

Well, I'm not at a total loss.  Perhaps strangely, I can explain what I cannot accept.  When I witness the unbearable arbitrariness of deploring, two unsympathetic types of explanations come to mind. 

First, people's negative emotions depend far more on the vividness of the evil than its badness.  A hundred stories about celebrity harassers would upset the world far more than ironclad statistical proof that 10% of celebrities harass.  Indeed, it's likely that one detail-rich story about a celebrity harasser would upset the world more than the best statistical study ever performed.

Second, people's negative emotions are intensely social.  People don't want to rage alone.  They want to get mad with their friends and countrymen.  So when a new round of ugly stories pop up, almost no one asks, "Is this really the best target of our collective anger?"  Instead, they jump on the bandwagon.  Who cares where we're going, as long as we're united in negativity?

You could insist that my ranking of the seriousness of various offenses is wrong - or at least no more judicious than the broader public's.  But even if I'm wrong on the specifics, am I really wrong about the underlying psychology of anger, sadness, and fear?  Whatever vexes you, it's hard to deny that vividness and herding - not intrinsic badness - provide the standard targeting system for human negativity.  And if you want to be upset about what really matters, you must start by deploring vividness and herding, the eternal deceivers of mankind.

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The Flynn Effect vs. the Greatest Minds in History, by Bryan Caplan

Measured intelligence (IQ) rose markedly over the 20th century, a robust result widely dubbed the "the Flynn effect."  But what do these rising IQs mean?  The straightforward conclusion is unbridled optimism: just as human beings are taller than they used to be, they're also smarter than they used to be.  Flynn himself is reluctant to draw this inference, but perhaps he's too cautious.

How could IQ go up while genuine intelligence stagnates?  The simplest story is that modern societies somehow "teach to the test," leading to "hollow gains."  People score higher today because they've been prepped better, even though they're no smarter than before.  Flynn's moderately optimistic account is that today's humans are genuinely better at a narrow but important range of cognitive tasks.  We're no smarter than we used to be, but we're much better at abstract and hypothetical reasoning. 

What do rising IQs really show?  I remain undecided, but here's an argument that strongly inclines me to pessimism.  To wit: When I read the smartest thinkers from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, they seem roughly as smart as the smartest thinkers from the 20th century.  In fact, the same goes for the smartest Greeks from the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.  What 20th-century thinkers credibly exceed the sheer intellectual firepower of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Descartes, or Gauss?  Note: I'm not naively comparing the best living thinkers to the totality of earlier thinkers.*  I'm comparing the best in the last century to the best in individual earlier centuries.

The high relative quality of the top minds of the past is especially glaring when you consider two weighty factors that misleadingly tip the scales in favor of modernity:

1. Population is much larger than in earlier eras.  So you'd expect the extreme tail of today's intelligence distribution to outshine the extreme tail of the past even if mean intelligence stayed the same.

2. Modern thinkers build on the shoulders of past giants, making it easy for them to exceed the knowledge and avoid the errors of earlier generations.  This in turn fosters the illusion that moderns are genuinely smarter, rather than advantageously positioned in time.

3. Women in earlier centuries would have had little opportunity to impress the world with their intellects.  So the past is playing with only half its team.

My claim: Even if you don't bother correcting for these three confounds, the top thinkers of the past still seem every bit as brilliant as the most brilliant modern minds.  And if you did run suitable corrections, you might well conclude that the smartest people since 1900 are decidedly inferior to their predecessors.

In light of international adoption research, the most promising way to resolve my puzzle is to attribute the Flynn effect to the gradual elimination of absolute poverty.  Nutrition is the most obvious mechanism: Since history's greatest minds generally came from well-fed privileged classes, their intellectual development was barely stunted, leaving them mentally in the same league as today's top minds.  The rest of mankind, however, has enjoyed massive cognitive gains due to massive growth in food availability. As Flynn explains the story: 

The major argument for nutrition as a post-1950 factor rests not on
dietary trends, but on the pattern of IQ gains. It is assumed that the
more affluent had an adequate diet in 1950 and that dietary deficiencies
were concentrated mainly in the bottom half of the population. This has
been stated as a hypothesis about class: Over the last say 60 years,
the nutritional gap between the upper and lower classes has diminished;
therefore, the IQ gap between the classes should have diminished as
well; therefore gains should be larger in the bottom than in the top
half of the IQ curve.

But Flynn goes on to present strong evidence against not only the nutrition story, but any story that appeals to the decline of absolute poverty (references omitted):

There are seven nations for which we have the whole IQ distribution
from top to bottom: France from 1949 to 1974; The Netherlands from 1952
to 1982; Denmark from 1958 to 1987; the US from 1948 to 1989; Spain from
1970 to 1999; Norway from 1957 to 2002; Britain from 1938 to 2008.
Denmark, Spain, and Norway show gains either larger or almost wholly in
the bottom half of the curve, but France, the Netherlands, and the US
show uniform gains over the whole curve. Britain is a special case, which I will save for detailed analysis.

Where
we do not have the full distribution, a sign that gains might be
concentrated in the lower half would be that the range or variance (the
S.D.) of IQ scores has lessened over time. If the lower half has gained,
and the upper half has not, clearly the bottom scores will come closer
to the top scores. A survey of the better data sets shows that Belgium,
Argentina, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and Estonia have no pattern of
declining variance. In Israel, males show no decline but females do;
however, the female data are inferior in quality and it is hardly
plausible that the latter had a worse diet than the former.

Therefore,
as far as we know, nutrition is viable as a causal factor in only three
nations post-1950. Even in those nations, it has merely escaped
falsification.

You could maintain that pre-1950 Flynn gains were driven by nutrition; the data's probably not good enough to rule it out.  But then I could just restate my puzzle by comparing earlier half-centuries to the 1950-2000 era.

My whole case admittedly rests on my personal impression of the intelligence of top thinkers, past and present.  But my stance here is hardly eccentric.  You're free to flatly insist that the sages of the past are, by modern standards, mediocre minds.  But can you really bite that bullet in good conscience? 

* Even that comparison makes the past look quite good, if you remember that, due to illiteracy, the vast majority of pre-modern human beings would have been unable to leave any lasting proof of their intellectual prowess.





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Me in Switzerland and Germany, by Bryan Caplan

I'm speaking in Zurich, Switzerland this Friday at 6 PM on The Case Against Education .  Hope you can make it!

P.S. I'll also be in Freiburg, Germany on December 14-16.  I'll be busy all day and evening, but might be available very late to meet up.  Email me if you're interested.

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Hartmann-Sauer ITT, by Bryan Caplan

Back in June, progressive radio personality Thom Hartmann and Market Institute president Charles Sauer tried a version of my Ideological Turing Test on the air.  Sauer channels FDR; Hartmann channels Reagan.  Or at least they try.  Here's the result!



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