Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 407
January 13, 2013
The Army of Economists
In a wide-ranging and interesting conversation Daniel Dennett reflects on hypocrisy and whether it may sometimes be optimal:
Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.
Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.
It would be astounding if there were never a situation in which a lie was effective in producing a good result, i.e. a noble lie. But is a rule of noble lies effective? In a long sequence of calls to war, how many have been just and wise and how many have been driven by vainglorious leaders and foolish pride–so which army do you want? I prefer the silver.
Note also that Dennett mixes narrow self interest and rationality in his description of “economists.” But one can be fully rational without being narrowly self-interested. Dennett, for example, cheats a bit with his puzzle. The premise is some “horrific, terrible enemy” but then later the economists ask “am I so sure this cause is just”, to which the answer should be, given the premise, yes. In which case fighting is a rational response.
Hat tip: Brian Donohue.
January 12, 2013
Interesting papers on higher education
As recommended by the excellent Kevin Lewis, find them here, a round-up of recent research.
For the pointer I thank Rob Raffety.
Hollywood markets in everything
The Quality Cafe doesn’t even function as a real diner anymore. It stopped serving meals in 2006, but it’s been doing pretty well for itself as a film location over the past few decades … So now you know: If you ever get the feeling that all the diners used in Hollywood movies look the same, that’s because they probably are.
There is more here. And from elsewhere, here is a market in a feline lap surrogate. And here is how to keep your kid’s gaming down.
How Japan does gun control
Call this optimistic or pessimistic, either way:
“In Japan, no civilian is allowed to have a gun,” he stated simply. “In order to prevent atrocious crimes using firearms, possession of small arms was banned in 1965, with strict penalties for violations of the law. As time has gone on the penalties have increased and every year we try to drive down the number of people owning guns.”
Japan does allow the possession of hunting rifles and air guns (for sporting use), but the restrictions and checks are extremely strict.
And there is this:
Under current laws, if a low-level yakuza is caught with a gun and bullets that match, he’ll be charged with aggravated possession of firearms and will then face an average seven-year prison term. Simply firing a gun carries a penalty of three years to life. And for the “accomplice” reasons above, a yakuza boss may decide a death sentence is more appropriate if his thug miraculously gets released on bail before going to jail.
One mid-level yakuza boss told me, “Having a gun now is like having a time bomb. Do you think any sane person wants to keep one around the house?”
The police are not given a free hand in using guns either. Internal controls make it very difficult for a gun or even a single bullet to fall into the hands of criminals.
“When we go to the firing range, we get an allotted number of bullets, Detective X said. “When we’re done firing, we collect the shells and return the gun. If one shell is missing, the police station goes into a panic.”
The full story is here, courtesy of the ever-excellent Wonkbook.
January 11, 2013
I had neglected to blog these
I read them a while ago, and both were excellent (and short!):
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
and
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star.
Assorted links
1. There is no great stagnation, toddler edition.
2. Michael Gibson is now blogging at Forbes, including on education and tech stagnation.
3. By Philip Wallach, what really to do about the debt ceiling.
4. Wade Davis reviews Jared Diamond.
6. Long and very good Economist piece on whether there is a great stagnation in technology.
A few James Buchanan reminiscences
Most of all I thought of him as a moralist and one of our best moralists. I don’t mean an ethical philosopher (though he did that too), but a personal moralist and a judge of all that was around him. His advocacy of a 100% inheritance tax is essential to understanding the man, as was his dislike of northeastern elites, a category to which he was never quite sure if I belonged. He was a dedicated romantic who, after an intellectually traumatic encounter with Frank Knight, was looking for new, non-religious foundations for some rather old-fashioned views, often of a regional nature (Buchanan was from Tennessee). He remains one of the least well understood and least accessible economics Nobel Laureates, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.
Woe to the man caught shirking by Buchanan. He was up every day, working at 6 a.m., and expected not much less from others.
He was not always easy to have as a colleague. He created a world around himself, intellectually, socially, and otherwise, and he lived in no other world but his own.
Betty Tillman was an essential ingredient behind his success, and over the years I grew to understand her managerial and advisory talent for Jim and for the Public Choice Center more generally.
His Better than Plowing is one of the underrated autobiographies of economics.
He favored titles with alliteration, such as The Calculus of Consent, The Limits of Liberty, and The Reason of Rules, three of his best books.
Jim was a splendid manager of collaborations and brought out in the best in Gordon Tullock, Geoff Brennan, Dick Wagner, Yong Yoon, and others. Institution-building was another important part of his legacy. Not just the Center for Study of Public Choice, but also Mont Pelerin, Atlas, Liberty Fund, and the Institute for Humane Studies were all important to him, among other groups.
Some of his key phrases were:
“the relatively absolute absolutes” (don’t ask)
“Don’t get it right, get it written”
and, most of all:
“Onward and upward”
He made us all better and I will always miss him.
New evidence on the middle income trap
From Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin:
We analyze the incidence and correlates of growth slowdowns in fast-growing middle-income countries, extending the analysis of an earlier paper (Eichengreen, Park and Shin 2012). We continue to find dispersion in the per capita income at which slowdowns occur. But in contrast to our earlier analysis which pointed to the existence of a single mode at which slowdowns occur in the neighborhood of $15,000-$16,000 2005 purchasing power parity dollars, new data point to two modes, one in the $10,000-$11,000 range and another at $15,000-$16,0000. A number of countries appear to have experienced two slowdowns, consistent with the existence of multiple modes. We conclude that high growth in middle-income countries may decelerate in steps rather than at a single point in time. This implies that a larger group of countries is at risk of a growth slowdown and that middle-income countries may find themselves slowing down at lower income levels than implied by our earlier estimates. We also find that slowdowns are less likely in countries where the population has a relatively high level of secondary and tertiary education and where high-technology products account for a relatively large share of exports, consistent with our earlier emphasis of the importance of moving up the technology ladder in order to avoid the middle-income trap.
The NBER version is here, does anyone know of an ungated version?
January 10, 2013
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