Monthly Archives: May 2009

Luxury Fever

By Robin Hanson · May 17, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (18)

I'll start discussing Geoffrey Miller's new book Spent soon.  But first let me review its main predecessor: Robert Frank's book Luxury Fever, from 2000. Miller on Frank:

I owe Gad Saad and Robert Frank a great debt for their groundbreaking work. … Frank's reasoning, like mine, is that many purchases function as positional goods that display one's wealth, status, or personality traits rather than yielding true happiness benefits or fitness payoffs to the purchaser. … All my arguments are highly supportive of Robert Frank's proposal for a progressive consumption tax. (p27,312)

Frank begins Luxury Fever complaining about $5000 barbecue grills, whose main purpose he presumes is to show off how much money its owners can spend.  Frank wants to discourage "conspicuous" rather than "inconspicuous" consumption: 

If we all lived in smaller houses, or drove less expensive cars, we could all take more weeks of vacation each year. … Vacations offer the opportunity to see new places, visit with distant relatives and friends, take up a new sport, read books, lie on a beach, hike in the wilderness. ….

The degree to which workers enjoy autonomy and choice with respect to which tasks they do and the manner in which they perform them. … Workers tend to find greater satisfaction in jobs that provide greater opportunities to make use of their skills. … Job satisfaction increases with the variety of tasks workers are called on to perform. … If pay were the same, people would choose safe jobs over risky ones, quiet jobs over noisy ones; jobs with convenient parking over those without; jobs with security over those without; and so on.

What … I call "inconspicuous consumption" – freedom from traffic congestion, time with family and friends, vacation time, and a variety of favorable job characteristics.  In each of the examples discussed, the evidence suggests that subjective well-being will be higher in the society with a greater balance of inconspicuous consumption. 

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Capitas Vs. Per Capita

By Robin Hanson · May 16, 2009 8:30 am · Comments (34)

From a recent Science:

Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting. They pooled data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, and gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns. They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. …

The team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago through Europe and the Mediterranean … The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far.

The longest term trends we can see clearly forecast growth in the total capacity and power of humanity and its descendants. But this does not imply growth in the quality of individual lives.  While individual lives may have improved on average over the last two hundred years, over longer timescales we have seen sustained and substantial declines. 

Looking to the future, we can have far more confidence in a continued growth in total capacity than in improved quality of individual lives.  If, like me, you count the vast increase in the number of lives worth living as a grand and glorious thing, you'll think the future a better place even if individual lives get somewhat worse.  If, like many others, you care little about creatures who do not yet exist, you can reasonably think the future will be a worse place. 

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Animal Morality

By Robin Hanson · May 15, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (28)

A New Scientist book review:

Wild Justice makes a compelling argument for open-mindedness regarding non-human animals. It also argues that social behaviours such as cooperation provide evidence for a sophisticated animal consciousness. In particular, the authors propose that other animal species possess empathy, compassion and a sense of justice – in other words, a moral code not unlike our own. … They believe such codes are necessarily species-specific and warn against, for instance, judging wolf morals by the standards of monkeys, dolphins or humans. …

Bekoff and Pierce make their case by calling on a wide range of animal studies, from field biology to the laboratory and from the anecdotal to the statistical. … [In an] experiment, rats refused to push a lever for food when they realised their action meant another animal got an electric shock.

Some possible responses:

  1. Apparent animal "morality" isn't real morality, because it lacks human factor X.
  2. To the extent animal morality differs from human, animals are just wrong.
  3. Each species only intuitively knows what it is moral for that species to do.
  4. Creature have preferences and social norms; there is no further "morality."
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Near Far In Science Fiction

By Robin Hanson · May 14, 2009 7:30 am · Comments (18)

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In their recent Science article reviewing near-far findings (which I discussed here), Liberman and Trope illustrated their concepts with Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:

[An] intriguing mixture of high-level, abstract features, and low-level, concrete features. … In this painting, the ploughman witnesses the fall of Icarus. However, as he is immersed in the details of his immediate chore, he is oblivious to the significance of the event.

AudenPainting

Like many others I enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, even if I don’t especially respect myself for that, and recently just rewatched Star Wars episodes II,III.  And the most compelling visuals and scenes in those movies were similar, in that they combined familiar and emotionally-true foregrounds with dramatic symbolically-meaningful backgrounds which often made little sense if you thought much about them.  For example, in Star Trek isolated crowded shipyards are shown scattered in simple farmland, wildly violating economies of agglomeration:

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Econ Neglects Licensing

By Robin Hanson · May 13, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (9)

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Labor economics is economists studying work and employment.  The latest Econ Journal Watch has an article suggesting distorted priorities in labor econ texts.  In the U.S. now, less than 3% of workers earn the minimum wage, about 12% are in unions, and about 29% are required to hold a state-issued license to do their work.  But here are the priorities of “five undergraduate labor economics textbooks currently in print. … All but one have been published in four or more editions”:

LaborEconTexts

Here is my relevant theory paper, here are some sample licensed jobs,

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Desert Errors

By Robin Hanson · May 12, 2009 7:30 am · Comments (33)

A story worth pondering:

In the summer of 1942 [Edward] Adolph, a physiologist at the University of Rochester in New York state, wanted to find out how people could live and work efficiently in the desert and how to get the best out of them. …

Adolph was the first to test the presumptions most people still have about what to do if forced to make any sort of effort in extreme heat. Most, he discovered, were myths. Stripping to T-shirt and shorts, for instance, is not the best way to cope with dehydrating conditions. Long sleeves and long trousers may feel hotter, but they'll slow the loss of water. Nor is there any point in rationing water when supplies are low. Putting off drinking it merely makes you unhappier sooner. "It is better," wrote Adolph, "to have the water inside you than to carry it."

The most important of Adolph's findings was the simplest: drinking during exercise improves performance. Today, we take this for granted, but generations of coaches and distance runners were taught that drinking during exercise was for wimps. …

Adolph tested the old assumptions by splitting his soldiers into two groups. Both marched through the desert for up to 8 hours during the time of year when the average afternoon high was 42°C. The soldiers in one group were allowed to drink as much water as they wanted and the others weren't allowed any. The results were clear: the drinkers outperformed the non-drinkers. …

His findings stayed secret until 1947, when he was allowed to publish his pioneering Physiology of Man in the Desert. It went almost entirely unnoticed. In the late 1960s, marathon runners were still advised not to drink during races and until 1977, runners in international competitions were banned from taking water in the first 11 kilometres and after that were allowed water only every 5 kilometres.

So not only were authorities dead wrong, but they were so confidently wrong that, in the name of helping runners, they paternalistically forced runners to do the exact worst thing!  How could authorities be so wrong for so long on something that was so easy to personally test, and with such huge consequences?  And how could they remain wrong for three decades after careful study had proved them wrong?

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Ignoring Betrayal

By Robin Hanson · May 10, 2009 7:30 pm · Comments (39)
Suspicious:  I suspect my long-time business partner of corrupting our venture's bylaws to give him lopsided gains from our joint efforts.  Confronting him might devastate our relation, but I have to know.  What should I do?

Business-Abby:  Give careful thought, please, to what you "have to" know.  Most who fear cheating are mistaken, and even if your bylaws are lopsided that could just be an honest mistake.  Even mentioning your suspicions to anyone might destroy your business, and could you really live with yourself if you destroyed your life's work, and betrayed employees, customers, and suppliers who rely on you?  If you wouldn't act on the info, why get it?  If you must do something, first consult with a lawyer about the consequences of even looking into this possibility. 

This would be odd business advice; I'd suggest first privately asking an accountant if your bylaws are lopsided.  Why get worked up over something you can cheaply check on?  But the above is pretty much what advice-columnist Carolyn Hax tells a man who suspects his wife's two year old daughter is not his:

Give careful thought, please, to what you "have to" know. When just seeking the truth could change your life in dramatic and irreversible ways, it's best to start not by actually doing something but by inviting each possible truth into your imagination as fact. … You need to … assume your wife did cheat … and then you need to decide whether you'd want to stay in the marriage or leave.

If the answer is to stay … then you need to ask yourself, is that outcome better served by not digging into the past? If the answer is to leave, are you ready to challenge your paternity — or have it challenged by your at-that-point-estranged wife? …  You can't entirely rule out the rarer than rare, yet not unprecedented, hospital error. …

If you decide you'd want this child no matter what, then the question becomes, again, why you'd want to risk everything to scratch even a torturous itch.  And finally: What if you started digging, wrecked your marriage and learned your daughter is "yours"? … If you're considering any action at all, have a lawyer vet it legally. Only then can you be confident whether truth-seeking serves your interests — and your family's — or smashes them to bits.

Is there any other common betrayal situation where neutral third parties would so strongly advise not looking to see if you've been betrayed?  I can't think of one.

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Tropes Are Treasures

By Robin Hanson · May 9, 2009 10:45 am · Comments (3)

I've blogged before on theories of the functions of fiction in our lives, and celebrated this seminal analysis of the personality and motives of Victorian novel characters.  After browsing the TV Tropes website, it occurs to me that these tropes might be a great data source for studying fiction's functions. 

A possible research plan:

  1. Identify tropes that describe common patterns of fiction which seem to deviate from patterns of reality.  Code these tropes by their degree of deviation, and by how confident we feel that this deviation is real.
  2. Code these tropes according to a wide range of other possibly relevant parameters. 
  3. Look for patterns among the tropes as so coded, and when possible check those patterns via formal statistical tests.
  4. Compare theories of fiction's functions to these trope patterns, seeing which theories best account for the set of observed patterns.

Any student in search of a research project, take note! :)   HT to Doug.

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Pretending To Be What You Are

By Robin Hanson · May 8, 2009 2:00 pm · Comments (9)

Which is harder: pretending to be what you are, or to pretending to be what you are not?   For example, imagine you are a news reporter, and want to, via your style and manners, convince typical folks that you are a) a reporter, or b) a stuntman.  Which task would be easier?   Which task would be easier for the stuntman?  We could ask such questions about not just reporters and stuntmen, but about a wide range of other roles.

The way to convince the public that you are an X is to act the way the public thinks that X folks act.  And the more vivid an image X folks have in the public mind, and the fewer real X the public know in person, the more the way X folks are will diverge from how the public thinks they are.  And so the more work it would be for X folks to convince the public, via their manner and style, that they are in fact X.

So while it is probably easier for a shoe salesman to convince folks that they sell shoes than that they are a private investigator, I'm guessing that it is harder for a P.I. to convince folks they are a P.I. than that they sell shoes. 

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The Growth Groove Game

By Robin Hanson · May 7, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (37)

My head is full of big history questions after spending two days at a related workshop.

How did humanity become so influential and powerful?  Apparently we found a growth groove that let us keep on accumulating power-enhancing innovations.  But what key features make this growth groove possible?

A great many features get mentioned, including brains, language, culture, fire, tools, large tribes, mind-reading, trade, specialization, domestication, trust, capital, machines, artificial power, cities, science, writing, printing, leisure, property, law, marriage, patents, and signaling.  They can all seem like plausible candidates, at least for some places and times.  But which features were how important?

It turns out that we just don't know.  But we do have some strong clues.  So a fun armchair game is to guess which were the key features.  But before you play, remember the game's key rule: your story must fit history as we know it.  So let's review that history.

A good measure of humanity's overall influence/power is "world product," and history is reasonably well summarized as:

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