Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 534
March 12, 2012
Jonathan Haidt's new book
The Righteous Mind: Why People are Divided by Religion and Politics.
Due out Tuesday. I haven't read it yet, but I have pre-ordered a copy for my Kindle while traveling. Haidt is one of the most important social scientists of our time, here are two relevant links.
For the pointer I thank Arnold Kling.
Here is Haidt on Twitter.
Walking Fast and Slow
In a famous paper psychologist John Bargh and collaborators gave students at NYU a test very similar to that described by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink:
In front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five-word sets. I want you to make a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as possible out of each set. It's called a scrambled-sentence test. Ready?
him was worried she always
are from Florida oranges temperature
ball the throw toss silently
shoes give replace old the
he observes occasionally people watches
be will sweat lonely they
sky the seamless gray is
should not withdraw forgetful we
us bingo sing play let
sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins
The students were then sent to do another test in an office down the hall. Unbeknownst to them, walking the hall was the real experiment. Scattered in the sentences above are words like "worried," "Florida," "old," "lonely," "gray," "bingo," and "wrinkle." Bargh reported that students who had been primed with these words took significantly longer to walk down the hall than those not primed with the "old" words.
In the original study there were only 60 participants and the subjects were timed with a stopwatch. A new paper doubles the sample size and uses more accurate infrared sensors. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the new paper fails to replicate the priming effect. As we know from Why Most Published Research Findings are False (also here), failure to replicate is common, especially when sample sizes are small. I haven't yet described the real surprise, however.
Doyen et al., the authors of the new paper, then took the experiment meta; they ran the experiment again but this time they told half the people supposedly "running" the experiment that they expected the participants to walk slower and the other half they told that they expected the participants to walk faster. (A confederate provided evidence for this effect.) In the second experiment they again used the infrared sensors but they also asked the nominal experimenters to use a stopwatch as the sensors were said to be new and sometimes unreliable.
In the second experiment Doyen et al. were able to replicate the Bargh results. Namely, when using the stopwatch, the nominal experimenters reported that the group primed to walk slow did walk slow and they reported that the group primed to walk fast did walk fast. The results, however, were not entirely due to subtle experimenter bias because in the slow prime case the infrared sensors also found that the slow-primed group walked slow. The infrared sensors, however, did not report an increase in speed when the nominal experimenters expected an increase in speed.
Thus, the old-slow priming results appear to be due to a subtle mix of experimenter bias and standard priming which is cued or amplified via experimenter signaling. Given what are still relatively small sample sizes (50-60) the last should also be taken provisionally.
Important Addendum: Bargh has written a nasty attack on the new paper, the journal that published the paper, and Ed Yong who blogged the new paper for Discover Magazine. Bargh's attack is a model of how not to respond to criticism new information. Ed Yong discusses Bargh's response here. Like Yong, I am dismayed that Bargh quotes the new paper inaccurately. In his attack, Bargh also says things such as the overuse of elderly-related items reduces the effect of the prime. Yet in the methods paper he cites (and wrote) he says more prime stimuli generally results in bigger effects (p.11, effects can vary if the subjects consciously recognize the prime, a factor that the new paper tests). Bargh also entirely glosses over the main point which is that the authors did find priming effects when the experimenter knew and expected the effect to occur. Note that given the subtlety of the effects any experimenter bias appears to be entirely unintentional and Doyen never argue otherwise.
All of postwar development economics in one exchange?
Check out the book Economic Development for Latin America, edited by Howard S. Ellis and Henry C. Wallich, circa 1961 and read Paul Rosenstein-Rodan's classic essay "Notes on the Theory of the "Big Push"".
In ten pages you get the essence of increasing returns arguments, though do see Paul Krugman's cautionary notes about this era and its lack of formal modeling.
After those ten pages, there is then Celso Furtado, that underrated and perhaps someday forgotten Brazilian economist, who in five pages tries to take PRR apart. The big push didn't work in Bolivia, and in conclusion
"The point is not, therefore, to show that there are indivisibilities in the production function. The main interest lies in demonstrating how processes can be modified so as to elude the effects of those indivisibilities."
The reader is then treated to three and a half pages of Ragnar Nurske, who shores up PRR.
There is then transcribed discussion, including remarks from Theodore Schulz (he rejects big push as an analytical tool), Albert Hirschman, Howard Ellis, Henry Wallich, more from Nurske, and Haberler, who wrote:
"…the lumpy factor could often be stretched to accommodate a varying amount of the co-operating factors. The big push was no substitute for normal piecemeal progress."
That was a popular point in those days. Hirschman also…
"doubted that as a general rule overhead facilities would create a demand for their services. This depended on the kind of entrepreneurship available. Certainly there was no fixed short-run relation between investment in overhead and other investment, since overhead could be stretched."
Nurske then fought back. Whew!
Reading those twenty pages exhausted me, and transported me to another and earlier era. It was like watching one of those taped 1980s NBA games, as they show them in Taiwan and some other countries, without the timeouts and breaks and besides they weren't playing much defense anyway.
Overall it raised my estimation of those economists.
March 11, 2012
Sentences to ponder
Richard H. Thaler, a former colleague at Cornell and another contributor to the Economic View column, once remarked about an unsuccessful candidate for a faculty position, "What his résumé lacked was five bad papers."
The rest is from Bob Frank.
*Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics*
Great book, Virginia Postrel tell us it is on Kindle for $3.99. Buy it! Here is my previous post on the book.
Syrian arbitrage markets in everything
…insurgent commanders say most of their weapons come from the very army they're fighting, either seized or purchased in a thriving illicit trade. Intermediaries such as a merchant known as Abu Hussein arrange arms deals between the two sides.
Abu Hussein described how the rebels will shoot a few times at a government checkpoint, giving soldiers the cover to fire off their weapons. If the troops expend 200 bullets, Abu Hussein said, they may tell their superiors that 400 bullets were fired. The remaining 200 bullets will be sold to the rebels, typically for 150 Syrian pounds (about $2.50) per bullet.
The full story is here, and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.
Microsoft Help
From my computer:
Why can't I get Help from this program?
The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows. However, you can download a program that will allow you to view Help created in the Windows Help format.
For more information, go to the Microsoft Help and Support website.
Is it any wonder that some people hate Microsoft?
My favorite things New Mexico
If I haven't done one of these in a while, it is because the processes which rule my life keep sending me back to the same states. Here is a new one, since my last visit predates blogging at MR:
1. Entrepreneur: Jeff Bezos, for $75 a year you can step into a new universe. This will go down as one of the most significant innovations of our time. Furthermore, Microsoft was founded in New Mexico and spent its first four years there.
2. Painter: Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O'Keefe are all strong contenders, though they do not hail from the state but rather moved there to work.
3. Museum: Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe. You can take this place as a stand-in for all the superb New Mexico visual arts of old, such as the santos and retablos.
4. Music: James Tenney, most of all his Postal Pieces.
5. Movie, set in: It is hard to think of anything other than Them!, though I suspect there are better candidates. Contact is a good movie.
What else? Cormac McCarthy I have never warmed to, and anyway he moved there later in life. Don't they have a bunch of astronauts? Is there any popular music from this state not including John Denver? You'll get a separate report on the food.
The bottom line: It's a state I'm fond of, and it has contributions in surprising areas.
March 10, 2012
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