Monthly Archives: July 2009

Beware Missing Signals

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2009 10:45 pm · Comments (12)

AshleyMadison.com, a personals site designed to facilitate extramarital affairs … enjoyed another big boost this week, following Father’s Day, when CEO Noel Biderman says men often feel underappreciated. Traffic to the site tripled on Monday. (Biderman says there’s a similar boost in interest from neglected wives and girlfriends after Valentine’s Day.)

That is from Time.  It is interesting that it is Father’s day when men feel unappreciated.  Although Valentines Day is officially “for lovers” we all know it is far more for men to signal to women than vice versa.  So on what day do kidless men feel most underappreciated?

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How Exceptional Is Gelman?

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2009 12:00 pm · Comments (12)

In response to my saying:

Academia is primarily an institution for credentialling folks as intellectually impressive, so that others can affiliate with them.

Andrew Gelman penned “Another reason I’m glad I’m not an economist“:

That [Robin] would write such an extreme statement without even feeling the need to justify it (and, no, I don’t think it’s true, at least not in the “academia” that I know about) . . . that I see as a product of being in an economics department.

I responded:

I have posted many times here on [this]. … The standard idealistic [story] is that academics know useful and important things, things which students want to learn, media want to report, consulting clients want to apply, … These idealistic theories … have [these listed] detailed problems. … It seems far simpler to me to just postulate that people care primarily about affiliating with others who have been certified as prestigious.

Andrew answered: Continue reading "How Exceptional Is Gelman?" »

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You Are A Character

By Robin Hanson · July 15, 2009 1:45 am · Comments (23)

Far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you’re a 10-year-old boy, in which case it’s only the greatest movie ever made. Village Voice on Dragonball Evolution.

Dragonball Evolution is not a great film.  It can be fun if you mentally “squint” and ignore the obvious implausibilities, cliches and blatant manipulations to get you to side with the good characters against the bad, and to be caught up in their concerns.   Ten-year-olds may not know enough to recognize these manipulations, in which case they may love the movie.

“Good” movies are nearly as manipulative; they just do a better job of hiding it.  Those who make movies simply must manipulate us if they are to entertain us; we are quite clearly bored by most of the reality around us, and usually even by detailed truthful tellings of the most dramatic real events around.  But since we do not enjoy a story when we are too clearly aware of its manipulations, movies must be crafted so as to not force us to notice them.  We usually cooperate to “suspend judgment”, so that manipulations can be visible on the periphery of our awareness.

Let me suggest that humans are much like story characters.   Since others like us better if the story of our lives seems to fit with standard human ideals, we try to appear to so fit.   But since it is expensive to actually fit these ideals in great detail, we instead manipulate our cheap surface words and acts to give a loose appearance of a fit.  The expensive details of our lives, however, instead better fit the non-ideal necessities of who we really are.   None of this works if our hypocrisy is too obvious, but thankfully we tend to cooperate to squint and avoid seeing each others’ non-ideal realities.

You are a character in the story of your life.  Evolution has formed you so that you, mostly unconsciously, craft the character you project to be likable and interesting.  The crafting of this image is done via manipulations that are just good enough to not force most folks to notice them.   Perceptive folk may notice them more, but usually also know they will not be rewarded for calling our mutual charade.

Even so, I choose to try to see through our deceptions, to the less ideal, dramatic, and sympathetic people we really are.  And I hope to live to tell about it.

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Conditional Love

By Robin Hanson · July 14, 2009 12:15 am · Comments (35)

In the traditional stereotype, a mother’s love is unconditional, while a father’s love is conditional.  Mom loves you no matter what, but dad loves you because you live up to his standards.  Moms who resist disciplining their kids, but instead say “wait until your father gets home,” seem to want it this way.

Women apparently initiate most divorces, and in my experience also most breakups.  I feel tender toward every woman I’ve ever been involved with, and would be happy to talk to any of them, but many of them do not reciprocate such feelings.  On average women’s love for men seems more conditional that men’s love for women.  Which helps explain why men seem to signal more to women than women do to men.

So when a mother and a wife compete for a man’s affection, the mom has the advantage of offering the less conditional love.  A husband competing with with his wife’s father has a similar advantage.  What else follows from this gender role flip?

P.S.  We’ve passed the 3 million visits mark!

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Language Drives Art

By Robin Hanson · July 12, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (10)

Lera Boroditsky at The Edge:

How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

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Virtues of Policy Delay

By Robin Hanson · July 11, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (8)

I disagreed here with Will Wilkinson on which harms to consider in government policy: I said to use the usual economists’ efficiency criteria, while Will seemed willing to just embrace common opinions on which activities are praise or blameworthy:

Robin complains that I share Miller’s and Frank’s reliance on intuitions about things we happen to dislike because I’m arguing with them from within what I see to be their prior liberal moral commitments, which I share. We’re all liberals, which means we dislike many of the same things.

Recently Will told me in person that a key issue was that we shouldn’t count things as harms if others might plausibly persuade us to change our minds on what is really a harm.  For example, if we are still arguing about whether stay-at-home moms give working moms a bad image, or vice versa, we shouldn’t count either effect as a harm.

Will and I just had an IM conversation to get to the bottom of this.  I think we agreed on the following:

  1. There can be administrative costs to having government policy encourage or discourage anything; so if the harm or benefit is low, it can make sense to not bother to add a new process to deal with it.
  2. Opening up a new area as fair game for encouraging or discouraging may induce stronger efforts to lobby to get favorable treatment.  If the harms or benefits are mind, gains from better addressing them can be overwhelmed by lobbying losses, and so it can make sense to not open new areas up for taxes and subsidizes.
  3. If opinion is likely to change substantially soon, and if there are large fixed costs to change a policy, it can make sense to wait to see if opinions will change soon before paying the fixed costs of making or changing policy.
  4. If envisioned policies to encourage or discourage something would result in less experimentation than status quo policies, that gives an added reason for delay.  Continued experimentation, in private spheres or in relatively local governments, may be preferable.

All of these considerations are understandable within the standard policy efficiency framework. It seems that Will and I don’t disagree as much as I’d feared.

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Academia’s Function

By Robin Hanson · July 10, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (78)

Art fans often say art makes people more creative and peaceful, and sport fans often say sport makes people healthier and better at teamwork.  Some claim that these idealistic reasons are not only why art and sport should be subsidized, but why in fact donors actually give to art and sport charities.  I find it far more plausible that donors prefer to affiliate with other donors and with prestigious artists and athletes, and that citizens subsidize such things to make themselves look good as a group. The idea that cities build statues to mainly promote world peace and creativity, or that nations subsidize Olympic teams mainly to promote teamwork and exercise, seem a bit hard to swallow.

In a post titled “Another reason I’m glad I’m not an economist” Andrew Gelman took issue with my saying “academia is primarily an institution for credentialling folks as intellectually impressive”:

Granted, Robin is far from a typical economist. Nonetheless, that he would write such an extreme statement without even feeling the need to justify it (and, no, I don’t think it’s true, at least not in the “academia” that I know about) . . . that I see as a product of being in an economics department.

Now I have posted many times here on my view that academia functions mainly to signal, much like art and sport. (See here here here here here here here here here.).  But for Andrew’s sake, let’s lay out the argument more systematically. Continue reading "Academia’s Function" »

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Who Cares About Unsexy Men?

By Robin Hanson · July 9, 2009 6:00 pm · Comments (58)

The 40% of moms unwed statistic I quoted yesterday jolted me into thinking more about something I knew was important, but had thought little about.  I don’t yet have much of an opinion on whether to embrace or resist the new low-marriage mating equilibrium we seem to be heading toward, something between US ghettos and Sweden today, relative to a high-marriage equilibrium we might instead choose, perhaps like Japan or Utah today.

While an awful lot isn’t clear here, two effects of low-marriage seem robust to me:

  1. Kids will spend less time with dads, and
  2. Men will have more unequal intimate sex.

This first effect is much noted, and with great concern.  Kids spending less time with dads suggests men less caring for kids, which suggests moms get less kid help unless strong alimony or subsidies compensate.  This effect seems to increase inequality among kids and moms, and is much noted and lamented.  As that over-the-top Time quote said:

It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.

Time didn’t discuss the other effect, however, nor do most main-stream media mentions.  It is hinted at in this quote Tyler found: Continue reading "Who Cares About Unsexy Men?" »

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40% of US Moms Unwed

By Robin Hanson · July 8, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (66)

I was stunned to read this from Time Magazine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.  How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.

I checked it out at the CDC; it isn’t a typo:

The trend in unmarried childbearing was fairly stable from the mid-1990s to 2002, but has shown a steep increase between 2002 and 2007. Between 1980 and 2007, the proportion of births to unmarried women in the United States has more than doubled, from 18 percent to 40 percent.

Iceland (66 percent), Sweden (55 percent), Norway (54 percent), France (50 percent), Denmark (46 percent) and the United Kingdom (44 percent) all have higher proportions of births to unmarried mothers than the United States.  Ireland (33 percent), Germany and Canada (30 percent), Spain (28 percent), Italy (21 percent) and Japan (2 percent) have lower percentages than the United States.

Another tidbit:

The highest rates of out of wedlock births are in D.C. (59%) and Mississippi (54%) and the lowest rate is in Utah (20%).

The new equilibrium we are moving toward seems a very different world.  Women free to pick a dad without expecting him to stay as a long term helper probably pick sexier men.  This should create more inequality in male access to women for sex and kids, and give men more free time to compete to be the few super-sexy super-dads.

Women would get to have kids fathered by sexier men, but at the expense of raising those kids with less male help.  More men would be sex-failures with more free time to pursue long-shot plans to reverse their fortunes, and without wives to moderate them.  How many of those plans will be peaceful?

I guess this helps somewhat to explain the explicitly sex-aggressive men I see more of these days.  When I wrote:

If you don’t signal your continued love she may well conclude that your love has in fact changed.

“Master Dogen” responded:

Hanson … seems to be thoroughly trained in thinking that the best way to long-term health in a relationship with a woman is to signal “caring more than everyone else” and “giving gifts,” etc.  This, of course, is the constant position of a supplicant. … I advocate a very different way of dealing with a woman … So let’s assume you are an alpha, and you’ve trained your woman to supplicate you rather than the other way around. … You must continue signaling your dominance: gently pull her hair when you go in for a kiss, raise you voice sternly when she steps out of line, flirt shamelessly with other women in public.

I might not like it, but I can’t argue that the future doesn’t hold a lot more of this.

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How To Pop Bubbles

By Robin Hanson · July 7, 2009 1:00 pm · Comments (31)

The Fed’s view has been that bubbles can be identified only in hindsight, and that all the central bank can do is prepare to clean up after they burst. The current crisis shows that policy is mistaken, [New York Fed Chief] Dudley said.  “Asset bubbles may not be that hard to identify,” he said. “This crisis has demonstrated that the cost of waiting to clean up asset bubbles after they burst can be very high.” Dudley did not specify what tools the Fed should use. Analysts have suggested that central bankers might raise reserve requirements or amp up restrictions on margin lending.

That is from the Post.  My problem with such approaches is that they aren’t very accountable; i.e., they don’t let us see very easily if past regulator actions helped or hurt on net.  Two years ago I suggested a more accountable way for regulators to reduce bubbles:

Congress could give some well-regarded “best and brightest” regulators a big pile of cash, say $100 billion, and have them correct prices by trading, buying when they think prices should rise and selling when they think prices should fall.  If regulators really do know how to choose good price pushes, then not only will they correct “biased” stock prices, they will increase their pile of cash, and we won’t need to give them any more.

I’m still game; are they?  My approach could also allow a more accountable correction of “excess volatility.”  The Post reports today:

The [US CFTC] will consider new measures to curb speculation in the markets for energy and other commodities … The move aims to reduce the volatility of prices but faces resistance from top Wall Street firms, which fear the efforts could cut into profits.  Regulators and lawmakers increasingly worry that these firms have used their size and power to inflate the prices of commodities, booking profits in the process. … Firms have introduced new ways to speculate on rising or falling values of commodities by betting on batches of futures known as indexes. … The CFTC is planning to announce today that it will consider … limiting the size of an investment any single firm could make in a particular commodity.

It regulators think they know when commodity prices are too volatile, they should just buy low and sell high; if they are right they’ll reduce volatility and make a profit in the process.  And if they are wrong, we’d hear about their losses. So why aren’t regulators interested in more accountable regulation?   The obvious explanation:  they expect their accounts wouldn’t look very good.

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