Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 93

Truman Bewley Comes to GMU, by Bryan Caplan

Today Truman Bewley comes to GMU.  I've been singing his praises for years; while Bill Dickens is the man who taught me to see to the grave evil of unemployment, Bewley's the man who taught me in great detail how this grave evil endures.  His psychologically- and sociologically-rich labor economics is a major inspiration to me, especially my forthcoming book on the economics of education.  Here's me channeling Bewley.  Here's what Bewley learned while writing his masterpiece, Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession .  Here's what anti-Keynesians must learn from Bewley.

Many economists, especially nowadays, will be baffled by Bewley's thoughtful employer interviews.  Where's the identification?  Where's the calibration?  The problem is theirs, not his.  Like every man of good sense, Bewley looks for his car keys where he dropped them.  His goal is to help us answer questions we care about, not convince us to care about whatever questions he can decisively answer.

As usual, I'll be live-tweeting Bewley's seminar under the hashtag #PCSem.



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Why I Don't Vote: The Honest Truth, by Bryan Caplan

I do not vote.  Since I'm an economist, the parsimonious explanation is that (a) I know the probability of voter decisiveness is astronomically low, and (b) I selfishly value my time.  But that's hardly adequate.  I spend my time on many quixotic missions, like promoting open borders.  So why not vote?

My honest answer begins with extreme disgust.  When I look at voters, I see human beings at their hysterical, innumerate worst.  When I look at politicians, I see mendacious, callous bullies.  Yes, some hysterical, innumerate people are more hysterical and innumerate than others.  Yes, some mendacious, callous bullies are more mendacious, callous, and bully-like than others.  But even a bare hint of any of these traits appalls me.  When someone gloats, "Politifact says Trump is pants-on-fire lying 18% of the time, versus just 2% for Hillary," I don't want to cheer Hillary.  I want to retreat into my Bubble, where people dutifully speak the truth or stay silent.

I know this seems an odd position for an economist.  Aren't we always advising people to choose their best option, even when their best option is bleak?  Sure, but abstention is totally an option.  And while politicians have a clear incentive to ignore we abstainers, only remaining aloof from our polity gives me inner peace.

You could respond, "Inner peace at what price?"  It is only at this point that I invoke the miniscule probability of voter decisiveness.  If I had a 5% chance of tipping an electoral outcome, I might hold my nose, scrupulously compare the leading candidates, and vote for the Lesser Evil.  Indeed, if, like von Stauffenberg, I had a 50/50 shot of saving millions of innocent lives by putting my own in grave danger, I'd consider it.  But I refuse to traumatize myself for a one-in-a-million chance of moderately improving the quality of American governance.  And one-in-a-million is grossly optimistic.

What about my children?  If I'm worried about their fate, I'll save more, put money offshore, or buy canned goods - all of which could plausibly actually help my children.  What about the victims of bad policies if the Greater Evil prevails?  If I had an effective way of helping them, I'd consider it.  (The same goes for the victims of bad policies if the Lesser Evil prevails).  But voting is a pathetically ineffective way of helping these victims.

I have fine friends who find my attitude dumbfounding.  My question for them: Suppose the Greater Evil wins - and offers you a job in his administration.  Will you take it?  If you need time to weigh your answer, you're more like me than you admit.  Even if you ultimately say Yes, your hesitation at my hypothetical shows that consorting with bad people hurts you deep inside.

Politics isn't utterly hopeless, but it's mostly hopeless.  The only way I know to escape this darkness is to focus on the tiny corner of the world in my control and make it beautiful and pure.  Call me anti-social if you must.  Unlike your candidates, at least I'm honest.

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From the Cutting Room Floor: The Case Against Education, by Bryan Caplan

When my books are nearly done, I strive to cut 10% of the remaining words.  Sometimes I end up cutting beloved passages that distract from the flow.  Here's one of my favorites from The Case Against Education, building on my earliest K-12 memory.

I still remember my first day of kindergarten like it was
yesterday.  Mrs. Sandefur opened the
classroom door, and stopped me when I tried to take a seat: "Oh, we don't sit
in the chairs.  We sit Indian-style by
the blackboard."  Amidst the
micro-management, no one explained the big picture: like Odysseus, I was
starting on a twenty-year journey, facing one obstacle after another.  Some proved useful: reading, writing, and
math have served me well.  Most did not:
P.E., art, music, poetry, Spanish, and general equilibrium theory were a waste
of time.  But useful or not, I had to pass everything to pursue my
career.  If I'd tempered my ambitions, I
could have left school at 18 or 22 instead of 26.  But unless I wanted to wash dishes or clean
toilets, over a decade of school was fated on my first day of kindergarten. 

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The Ultra-Selective Rationality of Politicians, by Bryan Caplan

Me back in 2003:

Politicians, just like other
people, may prefer some beliefs over others. But unlike average voters, politicians
often do have a significant probability of affecting outcomes, and their efforts have
direct repercussions. A politician who does not have rational expectations about the
impact of his policy stances on his career pays a high price, so in this area the standard
arguments for rationality (Muth 1961) are compelling. Politicians who systematically
misunderstand voters' feelings forego large opportunities for political profit. They have an
incentive to learn from mistakes and hire expect advice.

 

Systematic mistakes about
what the voters want also open a politician to takeover bids from more rational
challengers. In any case, people with rational expectations about voters' preferences
self-select into the political arena. Even if this is a small fraction of the population, it could
easily be large compared to the number of available offices. Other systematic mistakes
about their technology for producing votes are similarly unlikely: politicians cannot
afford to have irrational expectations about the number of votes the marginal value PAC
dollar buys, the probability the press will uncover skeletons in their closet,
or the likelihood that evidence of current indiscretions will leak out. Rationality about
expected compensation pays too: Politicians are unlikely to have irrational expectations
about their level of fringe benefits, or the extent to which political experience will ultimately
increase their market value in their post-political career.

 

However, it does not follow
that politicians will be rational about the actual
impact of the policies that they
implement. They merely need to gauge voters' reaction to their policies; if the voters have
irrational expectations about what policies will accomplish, a politician who rationally
second-guesses them gets little benefit. In fact, if it is indeed impossible to fool all of
the people all of the time, politicians who share the irrational assessments of their
constituents may actually be at a competitive advantage compared to rational politicians who cynically pander to the prejudices of the
electorate.

Alex Tabarrok in 2016:

More questions are being asked, more data is being collected and more
randomized experiments are being run in the effort to win the presidency
than will ever be used to choose policy by the presidency. Sad.

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Solve for This Equilibrium, by Bryan Caplan

Tyler Cowen's fond of admonishing us to "solve for the equilibrium."  His maxim came to mind while reading his Bloomberg column last month:

How's this for a simple rule: Open borders for the residents of any
democratic country with more generous transfer payments than Uncle
Sam's.

What would happen?  Many economists and perhaps laymen would expect democratic countries to ferociously jack up their transfer payments to exploit U.S. immigration policy.  But solving for this equilibrium is a lot harder than it looks. 

1. If voters were rational and selfish, the "transfer payments skyrocket" prediction makes sense.  Open immigration to the U.S. have great value - and if transfer payments induce high emigration, sending countries won't actually have to make good on many of their financial promises.

2. In the real world, however, voters are usually sociotropic but irrational.  A key component of this irrationality is what I call anti-foreign bias - the tendency to underestimate the social benefits of economic interaction with foreigners.  The upshot: Many voters around the world would see the new U.S. immigration policy as nefarious.  While they wouldn't adopt Soviet-type policies to keep their people from leaving, there would be little popular demand to game the U.S. rules.  Some countries might actually curtail transfer payments, especially if they're near the cutoff.

3. Would Tyler's proposal also spur democratization?  If you buy Acemoglu and Robinson, it should: When the benefits of democracy rise, elites who fail to appease the masses risk popular discontent.  But this is also far-fetched.  Even moderately savvy dictators could successful paint Tyler's reform as an attempt to "destroy our country" with dreaded Brain Drain. 

4. While the political effects of Tyler's proposal are messy, the economic effects are fairly clear.  Only rich countries can afford higher transfer payments than the U.S. offers, so there would be no flood of desperate Third World migrants.  Still, hassle-free green cards would still look great to millions of overtaxed, fluent English speakers throughout the First World.  Over the course of ten years, I predict 15 million extra immigrants would come - though perhaps only half would stay permanently.

5. This prediction relies on my stereotypes about which countries would qualify under Tyler's proposal.  I guess Canada, Britain, Australia, Germany, France, and all of Scandinavia fit the bill, but do they?  Any important country I'm missing?

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Betting Justice, by Bryan Caplan

My favorite Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, by far:

Chauncey
Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that
I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don't know
whether anything is necessary or not. I believe that we can bet on
the behavior of the universe in its contact with us. So I describe myself as a betabilitarian.

You may recall that Kant's atypically good on betting, too.

HT: David Coker

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Helicopter Parenting and Moral Causation, by Bryan Caplan

Condemnation is fun, but numbers are boring.  What are we supposed to do, then, when condemnation requires numbers?  Suppose you want to condemn a parent for putting his child in grave danger, but your knowledge of actual risks is hazy at best.  The simplest approach is to do what Kahneman calls "answering an easier question."  Leap to morally judge the parent, then pretend your moral judgment implies a risk assessment. 

Does anyone really use this silly shortcut?  Yes!   Thomas et al.'s "No Child Left Alone: Moral Judgments About Parents Affect Estimate of Risk to Children" (Collabra, 2016) runs a series of experiments to test for the presence of what I call "moral causation."  Background:

Research in other domains has shown that moral judgments do affect people's estimates of harm. For example, intentional actions that result in harm are seen as more harmful than unintentional actions with the same outcomes [17, 18]. Moral intuitions also affect judgments about cause: A driver who gets into an accident while speeding home to hide his cocaine is said to have 'caused' the accident more than a driver who was speeding home to hide his parents' anniversary gift [19]. People have also been shown to seek what is called 'moral coherence': they modify their factual beliefs to match their moral intuitions. For example, after reading an argument that capital punishment is morally wrong no matter the consequences, people are less likely to believe that capital punishment deters crime [20].

We hypothesize that a similar process may be at work when people imagine the harm likely to befall unsupervised children. That is, people may overestimate the danger to unsupervised children in order to justify their moral condemnation of the parents who allow the children to be alone.

The authors give subjects a series of vignettes, then experimental vary quantitatively irrelevant but morally pertinent details:

The vignettes differed only in the reason for the parent's absence. In the 'Unintentional' version of each vignette ('Unintentional' condition), the parent was involuntarily separated from the child by an accident. In the other four versions, the parent intentionally left the child in order to work ('Work' condition), volunteer for charity ('Volunteer' condition), relax ('Relax' condition), or meet an illicit lover ('Affair' condition). After reading each vignette, participants were asked to estimate (on a scale of 1 to 10) how much danger the child was in during the parent's absence.

Respondents inclined to blanket paranoia:

Estimates of risk were high overall. The mean estimate of risk across all situations (on a scale of 1-10) was 6.99 (SD = 2.63), and the modal estimate was 10.

Marginal effects, however, worked in the predicted directions:


































This makes no sense at all.

In reality of course, children who are left alone in circumstances approved by their parents are likely to be safer than children who find themselves alone by accident, because parents can take steps to ensure their child's well-being in their absence (e.g., making sure the baby is securely buckled into a car seat; that the car is parked in a shady spot; that an older child has a cell phone, knows when to expect the parent back, etc.) The fact that participants considered children left alone by accident safer than those left alone on purpose strongly suggests that participants' moral condemnation of parents skewed their risk estimates.

Thomas et al. consider an array of competing hypotheses, and find them all wanting.  Most notably:

In Experiment 4, we asked participants to make explicit moral judgments about the behavior of the mothers in the vignettes. This served as a manipulation check, confirming that subjects did consider leaving a child alone on purpose to be less morally acceptable than leaving a child alone by accident. Leaving to meet one's lover was also considered less acceptable than leaving to work or relax. A second reason for including the moral question was to allow participants to make separate evaluations of the risk to the child and the morality of the mother's actions. We thought that by giving participants a way to express their moral disapproval separately from their estimates of risk, they might produce less biased estimates of risk. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true: Risk estimates in Experiment 4 were more affected by moral judgments than in Experiments 1-3. It seems that the explicit moral question simply primed respondents to pay more attention to morality, producing even more exaggerated estimates of risk.

The straightforward explanation is best:

People don't only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. That is, people overestimate the actual danger to children who are left alone by their parents, in order to better support or justify their moral condemnation of parents who do so.

Aren't these results obvious?  They should be, but aren't.  They plainly aren't obvious to all the laymen who live and breathe this innumeracy.  And most experts are too eager to reinterpret laymen's ubiquitous irrationality as "rationality in disguise" to accept the straightforward explanation.

If the experts stopped making excuses for laymen's innumeracy, would laymen change their minds?  I don't know, but I'd like to find out.  Expert apologists, repent!

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The Math Myth, by Bryan Caplan

Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education.  Printed with his permission.

The Math Myth

The
math myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is
dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back
to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were going to surpass us because they
were better in math and science. It returned in the late 80's when the Germans
and Japanese were going to surpass us because they were better in math and
science. It's occurring again now because the Indians and Chinese are better
than us in math and science.

  

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade
level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and
programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and
had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an
actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade
level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function!
There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability
to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

  

Vivek Wadhwa has described how there's no shortage of scientists and engineers. I've been concerned with what skills those who are working as scientists and
engineers actually use. I find that the vast majority of scientists, engineers
and actuaries only use Excel and eighth grade level mathematics. This suggests
that most jobs that currently require advanced technical degrees are using that
requirement simply as a filter. In particular, I'm working on documenting the
following:

  

Math Myth Conjecture: If one restricts one's attention to the
hardest cases, namely, graduates of top engineering schools such as MIT,
 RPI,  Cal. Tech., Georgia Tech., etc., then the percent of such
individuals holding engineering as opposed to management, financial or other
positions, and using more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics
(arithmetic, a little bit of algebra, a little bit of statistics, and a little
bit of programming) is less than 25% and possibly less than 10%.

  

This is a conjecture that desperately needs resolving with solid statistics and
in-depth interviews.

 

Actually,  I'm already totally convinced of the veracity of the conjecture.
This conviction is based upon the numerous scientists, engineers, and
professors of science, engineering and math education that I've communicated
with. In particular, Prof. Warren Seering, an engineering professor at MIT, who
does surveys of their graduates, agreed with the conjecture. As did Prof. Julie
Gainsburg, an ethnographer of mathematics in the workplace, whose done on-site
work with structural engineers.



The following story also confirms the conjecture. Accenture, the former
consulting part of the now defunct Arthur Anderson, was recruiting at UGA for
math and computer science majors. I invited them-one professional recruiter and
three consultants-to give their spiel to my class Math for Computer Science.
After they finished, I asked the consultants: So, what mathematics do you
actually use? They sheepishly responded: None. So, I asked them: What
computer science do you actually use? Again the answer was: None.
They were only interested in math or computer science majors as a convenient
filter!

 

Acceptance of the conjecture should have revolutionary
educational implications . In particular, it undermines the legitimacy of
requiring higher mathematics of all students. Such mathematics is
actually needed by only a minute fraction of the workforce.

  

There are two counter-arguments. The first is that higher mathematics is
central to a serious higher education. This argument I agree with. Any Harvard
undergraduate majoring in philosophy would certainly want to be able to
understand Roger Penrose's book The Road to Reality. Unfortunately,
that type of student is only a minute fraction of higher education. It is both
unreasonable and unworkable to insist that all students get such training. Of
course, such training should be available to all who desire it.

  

The second argument is the one I always hear around the mathematics department:
mathematics helps you to think clearly. I have a very low opinion
of this self-serving nonsense. In sports there is the concept of the
specificity of skills: if you want to improve your racquetball game,
don't practice squash! I believe the same holds true for intellectual
skills. In any case, the case for transference of mathematical skills is
unsettled. Moreover, mathematics is of little use in most problems of ordinary
life. For example, mathematics could be of help in computing the costs of
having children; but is useless in computing the benefits!

 

In conclusion, it would be wonderful to be able to get all students competent
in Excel and arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and
programming. Higher mathematics should be offered and taken by those who need
it, or want it; but never required of all students.

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Animal Farm in Reverse, by Bryan Caplan

Orwell's Animal Farm parodies Soviet propaganda:

On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a
long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them
lists of figures proving that the production of every class of
foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred
per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The
animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could
no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like
before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when they
felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more
food.

The point: In a totalitarian state, there's a chasm between daily life and the media.  Daily life is awful, but the media trumpets the glory of the status quo.

The West now has a comparable chasm between daily life and the media, but it goes in the opposite direction.  Daily life is wonderful: Unless you actively hunt for outliers, you're surrounded by well-fed, healthy, safe, comfortable people enjoying a cornucopia of amusement.  The media, however, uses the vastness of the world to show us non-stop terror, hate, fear, brutality, and poverty - not just in the Third World, but right here at home. 

Why would the media strive to make audiences doubt their own two eyes?  In the Soviet Union, the explanation is obvious: The Party used its media monopoly to brainwash its citizens into accepting, if not relishing, their wretched existence. 

It's tempting to tell a mirror image story for the West: Hostile journalists seek to undermine a glorious world they hate.  But even if these cartoonish motives were operative, Western media is manifestly competitive, so you have to ask, "Why hasn't competition stopped the brainwashing?"  The only credible response is that media consumers like hearing about a world of terror, hate, fear, brutality, and poverty. 

I can't fathom why anyone would crave a daily dose of this intellectual poison, but see no other explanation for our Orwellian situation.

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Closing Comments on Captain Fantastic, by Bryan Caplan

[Warning: More spoilers!]

Two further comments on Captain Fantastic:

1. I know of no other movie that so powerfully captures the fun of large families.  Homeschooling one kid off the grid would feel lonely and dull for parent and child alike.  Homeschooling two kids off the grid sound livelier, but still comes off as "trying to hard."  Homeschooling six kids, however, feels like a beehive of activity - and the nucleus of a new society.

2. Captain Fantastic's survival training is genuinely and needlessly dangerous for children.  When his daughter falls off her grandparents' roof on a "rescue mission," Captain Fantastic accepts that he's been endangering his kids' lives.  But he never gets a comparable "wakeup call" that would plausible convince him that homeschooling has intellectually or socially stunted his children.  Nevertheless, when the story ends he's abandoned both hard-core survival training and homeschooling.  Why couldn't he keep homeschooling, but make it safer?  No reason, other than the need to pander to the prejudices of mainstream audiences who enjoy identifying with weirdos for two hours but can't accept the possibility that the weirdos are right to defy social conventions.

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