Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 598
February 24, 2011
Assorted links
1. How precocious was Homo Sapiens?
2. There is no Great Stagnation, cartoon version.
3. Carl Shapiro to join the CEA.
4. Wild Things.
5. Are "locked-in" patients happy? Maybe they are enjoying the thought of their children!
7. Dale and Krueger respond to Hanson, Hanson adds more.
How to think about refugee policy
Dave Bieler, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I see that you've provided some commentary on Marginal Revolution about refugee situations, but I'm curious to know what you think about refugee policies - i.e. what is the role of government? What is the role of private insitutions? How can different types of institutions and organizations improve or make worse various situations? Do you have any thoughts or links to articles or books? I think it would make for an interesting blog post!
This question may be more relevant soon, although Muslim refugees from the Middle East do not have the best chances of getting into America. I have read that one small town in Sweden has taken in more Iraqi refugees than has the entire United States. Here is Wikipedia on refugees. I hold a few views:
1. Refugees are deserving of migration toleration when possible, but they are not more deserving than equally destitute non-refugees.
2. Refugees nonetheless capture the imagination of the public to some extent, albeit for a very limited period of time. Their beleaguered status provides a useful means of framing, to boost migration for humanitarian reasons. When it comes to private institutions, refugee issues may be a useful way of raising funds, again for humanitarian aid, although again refugees should not be privileged per se, relative to other needy victims.
3. Legal treatment of refugees is inevitably arbitrary and unfair. There is not and will not be a clear set of rational standards for who gets in and who doesn't. There are better and worse standards at the extreme points, but don't expect this to ever get rigorous, not even at the level of ideal theory.
4. There always exists some pool of refugees who will help the migration-accepting country, even if you do not believe that about all pools of refugees. Let's take in some Egyptian Copts, who possibly are in danger now. Some groups of African migrants have done quite well in the United States and we can take in more oppressed women from north Africa. In other words, "immigration skepticism" may redirect the direction of refugee acceptance, but it need not discriminate against the idea of taking in refugees.
5. Optimal refugee policy is most of all an exercise in public relations, as ruled by the idea of the optimal extraction of sympathy. Explicit sympathy from the public cannot be expected to last very long. In the best case scenario, sympathy for the refugees is replaced by fruitful indifference, so as to avoid "refugee fatigue."
See my earlier remarks on sovereignty. Here is an argument against admitting refugees; I don't agree with it.
The Pippi Longstocking essay and gay adoption in Sweden
Thanks to Jayme Lemke, it has fallen into my clutches; the previous summary reference was here. The essay by Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, is interesting throughout. It has useful insights on Sweden, statism, how collectivism and individualism interact, what architecture reflects, and why many things are not always as they seem. Here is one good passage with a different slant than what I already covered:
While it is obviously true that gay marriage remains a highly controversial issue in the US, what is often over-looked is that adoption of children by gays is not prohibited but indeed rather common. In Sweden the opposite is true: gay marriage or partnership is today relatively uncontroversial (although an opposition of course exists there as well), where the adoption of children by single or couples gays remains a problematic issue.
One way of understanding this difference is to see that while in the US marriage is a highly public matter, and the family a sacred institution, children are by and large seen as a kind of private property, or something to which every adult individual has a right. In Sweden, on the other hand, the family is a private matter, while it is the child who is the public matter.
Can Swede readers attest to this? This short BBC bit seems to confirm. Gay adoption was legalized in Sweden in 2002, but in 2000 16 children were put up for adoption in Sweden. As in the Netherlands, it seems that Swedish gays are not always encouraged to adopt abroad, given that the source countries often object. There is now a Swedish film comedy about gay adoption.
You can find the essay in this unorthodox and stimulating book.
February 23, 2011
Genetic Factors and the Religious Life
It's getting late but for the record you can find a good study of genetics and religion in Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Siblings. PSYDIR offers a good summary:
It's a fairly standard twin study. They took a sample of around 600 identical and non-identical twins from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), and looked at a number of religious characteristics.
Basically, their analysis allows them to tease out the variations that are shared by identical twins but not by non-identical ones (genetic factors), by non-identical twins (family factors or shared environment), and that differed even among non-identical twins. This last factor was put down to the effects of external environment (i.e. things that happen in you life that aren't shared by your twin).
I've put the results in the graph. First off, look at childhood religiosity. The biggest factor is your family, and not your genetics. It's not until adulthood that the effects of genetics really start to shine through. No surprises there!
The 'salience', or importance of religion in your life is about one-quarter defined by genetics, as is your spirituality. The most important factor here, however, is the external environment. You get similar results for religious attendance.
When you get to more personal beliefs, the patterns start to shift. There are three factors that are about 40% driven by genetics, with your family upbringing having hardly any effect. These factors are: how often you turn to religion for guidance, whether or not you take the bible literally, and whether people should stick to one faith, or experiment with others (exclusivist beliefs).
It is true that there are tricky statistical issues with twin research and it is certainly possible that results like these will be overturned in the future. If that happens, however, it will be because of better twin/adoption and direct genetic studies. The type of evidence that Tyler cites is simply not capable of answering the fundamental questions that are being asked by this type of research. It is also true that these results are conditional on an environment, that is a time and place. (But that is the relevant measure for parenting today.)
I would also note that if you think the statistics get the numbers wrong you also have to deal with the fact that the patterns make sense. Parents have the biggest influence on childhood religiosity, non-shared environment has the biggest influence on attendance, genetics has the biggest influence on being "born-again." (Even the word suggests nature.) Bryan's book reviews a number of studies like this which are broadly similar.
Response to Alex on parenting and religion, and a bunch of other points on twin studies
Aargh! The rest goes under the fold...
Labor history bleg
C.R., a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I'm writing with a small favor, I was wondering if you could recommend (or ask for recommendations on MR) for a good history of labor unions in the US. I know a lot has been written especially from the left labor economists, but I don't have the knowledge to sort out the good from the bad. I'm interested in it from a historical perspective (origins and accomplishments) and a current political analysis perspective (what are reasonable claims about the costs&benefits of modern union membership). The case in Wisconsin has really grabbed my attention and I'm curious about unions as a case study of the creation, growth and changes of institutions.
I know where to go for the standard economics of labor unions, if you wish start with the surveys in Journal of Economic Perspectives (on-line and free) and then go to the Handbook of Labor Economics. But what about labor history? What is the best way to approach this often controversial topic?
Parenting: Anecdotes and Data
Tyler's post, What Can Parents Influence (below), uses anecdotes from his own family to try to rebut some findings from behavioural genetics. I don't think the rebuttal is successful. Moreover, Tyler's anecdotes are selective. A fuller description suggests a more balanced accounting of nurture and nature.
Yes, Yana speaks Russian which she learned from her mother. Yana also speaks French, German, Spanish and I believe several other languages. Tyler tells me that Yana has a gift for languages. Tyler also does not mention that his wonderful wife, Natasha, doesn't simply speak Russian she is an accomplished translator. Perhaps the gift runs in families?
But enough of anecdotes. On religion, I don't think Tyler has fully confronted the evidence from genetic studies. Of course, a child born to Orthodox parents is more likely to practice and be Orthodox. EVERYONE agrees with this. So how can Bryan say parents "have little long-run effect on intrinsic religiosity or observance"? Parents with blue eyes often have children with blue eyes but parents don't have much influence on whether their children have blue eyes.
More fundamentally, what Bryan is asking is how much does parenting influence religiosity? To answer this question we have to distinguish parenting from parents. How do we do this? Adoption and separated twin studies. What adoption and separated twin studies show is that once you have controlled for parents, parenting has very little influence on adult religiosity. Contra Tyler, stamping your feet is not good enough on this issue because what we naturally observe (primarily parents raising their biological children) is not what we need to know to answer the fundamental question.
I could say more but instead let me say this, buy Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. It's a remarkable book. I place it alongside Guns, Germs, Steel and The Selfish Gene as one of those books that, whether one agrees with the conclusions or not, everyone owes it to themselves to read in order to be informed, educated, and part of the conversation.
What can parents influence?
I had been meaning to pen a longer response to Bryan Caplan (he is the one with "a theory of everything" in this area, not I, his theory just happens to have few variables), but I'll focus on two of his claims, as they are indicative of the larger disagreement:
Parents strongly affect what you say your religion is, but have little long-run effect on your intrinsic religiosity or observance. I don't discuss language, but it's pretty clear how a twin or adoption study would play out: You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.
Both claims are false, at least at many commonly available margins.
Take Jews. If a group of children are born to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or liberal parents, their later religious observance will be predicted by both peers and parental upbringing. (Perhaps genes are a factor too.) An Orthodox Jewish boy, with Orthodox parents, growing up in an otherwise non-Orthodox Jewish community of peers, is more likely to stay Orthodox than a Reform Jew from the same community is likely to become Orthodox. And that of course correlates with levels of observance. I have no formal study to cite, but can I just stamp my feet and scream this is true? Because it is. You can imagine numerous variants on this tale, even if it isn't true for all religious denominations.
Bryan has a tendency to concede environmental factors by noting something like "Of course parents can lock a kid in the closet and affect him that way." He is less likely to admit that a lot of less extreme influences can matter too and that those influences are missed by twin adoption studies, for whatever reason.
Or take language. Yana speaks Russian. She learned Russian from Natasha (her mother, and it wasn't hard for her to speak Russian at home), and note that Yana left Moscow before she was two years old. This is again a common pattern. The parents matter, even though in most American families you won't see enough cross-sectional variation (most people speak English at home) to always pick this up. Travel around India for more examples of this phenomenon.
Presumably the twin studies have in their data sets Jews and possibly some Russian immigrants as well. And yet the twin studies, with their ultimately macro orientation, miss micro mechanisms such as these. Parents can matter more than the studies suggest.
By treating those studies as an epistemic trump card, Bryan is led to make claims which are indefensible on the face of it. I stick by my earlier points. The evidence Bryan is citing for twin adoption studies is simply...the studies themselves. Where is consilience when you need it?
Why do millionaires love New Jersey?
Erik Brynjolfsson looks at the data and asks: why do millionaires love New Jersey? My answer: because it's really, really nice!
Especially if you are old. You don't have to live in New York or Philadelphia, and yet you have access to at least one of those cities, possibly both if you buy in Edison. You can have a splendid house in a nice, leafy neighborhood with reasonable public services, a socially excessive amount of parking, and good restaurants.
For smart young people, however, the nice parts of New Jersey are very much a net exporter. The young ones can't afford the nice homes, they want the sex and excitement of the big city, or they want a higher standard of living in some less crowded part of the country. That in turn makes the nice parts quite "mature", which in turn attracts more old people; have you ever visited Montclair or Upper Saddle River or the nice parts near Princeton? These towns are perfect for 59-year-old, slightly boring millionaires (NB: I am not saying that Krugman is boring).
I left New Jersey at age seventeen, never to return, not to live that is.
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