Monthly Archives: October 2011

Trends Worth Tracking

By Robin Hanson · October 12, 2011 11:30 am · Comments (10)

Given our usual way of doing economic analysis, the question of which institutions will most increase economic welfare rarely depends much on the exact values of the sorts of parameters social scientists and the media track with such enthusiasm and concern. (more)

I’ve complained before about useless trend tracking, but I don’t mean to suggest that all trends are uninteresting. Some trends tell us about how well our institutions are functioning. For example:

Accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies. … The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation … from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis. The deviation … reached a peak in 1988 and then decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, not matching its 1988 level until … 2008.

Neither manufacturing nor IT showed the huge increase and decline of the deviation … that finance experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s, further validating the measure since neither industry experienced major fraud scandals during that period. The deviation for IT streaked up between 1998-2002 exactly during the dotcom bubble. (more; HT Tyler, Thoma)

Now that’s a trend to make me stand up and take notice! Similar parameters where I’d want to watch trends:

  • Marriage cheating and cuckoldry
  • Biased scientific papers, referee agreement
  • Wrongful convictions, faked evidence
  • Biased rulings by sports referees

These sort of trends track the health of specific institutions. When such an institution starts failing, we should be especially eager to reform it, using economic theory to suggest which reforms might be most effective.

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Causes Of Corruption

By Robin Hanson · October 11, 2011 11:00 pm · Comments (15)

At one level, corruption can be seen as a problem of multiple equilibria. When bribes are rare, someone who sees a bribe or bribe offer might reasonably expect to be supported for exposing it, and fear being exposed and punished for going along with it. But when bribes are common, one can expect to be punished more for trying to expose corruption.

At another level, however, many policies can reduce corruption. Bounties paid to any who expose corruption can encourage decentralized policing that central powers can find it hard to suppress. And eliminating government agencies whose social benefit is doubtful or moderate, even without corruption, can eliminate opportunities for corruption. I’m told many places are eliminating drivers licenses, to eliminate corrupt issuing of such licenses.

Since policies can discourage corruption, the deeper question is what makes politicians expect to not be rewarded for supporting such policies. Perhaps the people who benefit from corruption have more political information to know how to vote well, and more influence on other voters. In this case they might in effect have more votes, when votes are weighed by voter information and influence. I find this implausible, however.

Perhaps voters find it plausible that the above anti-corruption policies would work, but also find other ineffective anti-corruption policies similarly plausible. If ordinary voters are fooled by these ineffective policies, but those who benefit from corruption are not fooled, politicians may prefer to adopt such ineffective policies. By the time voters find out the policies didn’t work, the politicians may be long gone.

This raises the question: why do politicians have such short time horizons? Why don’t they expect to win by first implementing corruption-reducing policies, and then waiting for corruption to actually go down, before being rewarded by voters? The puzzle becomes more stark when one notices a usual way world-round to get long term project commitment: hire a multinational firm with a global reputation to protect. Yes, NGOs tend to prefer to hire local organizations to achieve charity aims. But they are often “surprised” to see the money stolen and nothing done. When folks really need something done, they hire long-lived multinational firms.

So the obvious solution to reducing corruption, and promoting good policy more generally, is for big multinationals with reputations to protect to run as candidates in local elections! They’d have a long term view that would make wary of making promises they could not keep. Of course upon hearing this suggestion you immediately know why this can “never be”: nationalism. Even voters of basket-case nations couldn’t stand the “humiliation” of publicly admitting they needed to hire foreigners to do something they couldn’t do for themselves.

And so let us admit that a big root cause of political corruption, and of inefficient policy more generally, is nationalism: the reluctance to hire organizations that seem to do the best worldwide in keeping reputations for effectiveness. Of course people do admit this daily in private, as they choose to use products made and distributed by multinational firms. But alas voting is a far fest of idealism, where the ideal of nationalism has more influence.

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Science Fiction Isn’t About Understanding The Future

By Robin Hanson · October 11, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (35)

Why do people read (or watch) science fiction? Yes, motives are mixed – they usually are. But what are the main motives?

Perhaps science fiction readers are eager to understand the future. After all, the future is extremely far, in a near-far sense, and science fiction offers a near-experience that can complement abstract far descriptions.

Consider, however, the extremely low demand for abstract analysis of the future. Not only are books devoted to future analysis in far less demand than science fiction books, it is possible to turn science fiction stories into abstract contributions, yet this is almost never done. Let me explain.

The main contribution of a science fiction story to our abstract understanding of the future is its setting – the situation in which its characters enact its plot. What techs are used how, what jobs and liesure activities are common, etc. Yet one could take most any science fiction story, and summarize its setting in a far shorter space, and with far less effort, than the author took for the story.  I’d guess that setting summaries could be read in ~5% of the time it takes to read the story, and written with even less than 5% of the effort.

Yet almost no such summaries are written, presumably because writers and publishers anticipate that almost no one wants to read them. So the fraction of folks who read science fiction primarily to better understand the future must be very small. Alas, because I would love to just read setting summaries, especially with compare and contrast commentary, and educated critiques of their plausibility.

Added 2p: I should also mention that most science fiction settings seem clearly to have compromised realism for story benefits. The fraction that can be considered mostly good faith efforts to forecast a future is quite small.

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Historical Heresy

By Robin Hanson · October 9, 2011 10:00 pm · Comments (19)

Famed Historian Angus Deaton:

It is sometimes supposed … that rich people have always lived healthier and longer lives than poor people. That this supposition is generally false is vividly shown by Harris who compares the life expectancies at birth of the general population in England with that of [rich] ducal families. From the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century, there was little obvious trend in general life expectancy. For the ducal families up to 1750, life expectancy was no higher than, and sometimes lower than, the life expectancy of the general population. However, during the century after 1750, the life prospects of the aristocrats pulled away from those of the general population, and by 1850–74, they had an advantage of about 20 years. After 1850, the modern increase in life expectancy became established in the general population. Johansson tells a similar story for the British royals compared to the general population, though the royals began with an even lower life expectancy at birth. …

Men die at higher rates than women at all ages after conception. Although women around the world report higher morbidity [= sickness] than men, their mortality [= death] rates are usually around half of those of men. … Women get sick and men get dead. … Biology cannot be the whole explanation. The female advantage in life expectancy in the US is now smaller than for many years, 5.3 years in 2008 compared with 7.8 years in 1979, and it has been argued that there was little or no differential in the preindustrial world. The contemporary decline in female advantage is largely driven by cigarette smoking; women were slower to start smoking than men, and have been slower to quit. (more)

This is a provocative hypothesis, but I don’t believe it. That is, I don’t believe that in general status and gender were unrelated to mortality until the industrial revolution. Chimp females live longer than chimp males, and I’ll bet that holds for foragers too. I’ll also bet that in both chimps and foragers high status tends to correlate with lower mortality.

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(Fem) Sex Is Selfish

By Robin Hanson · October 8, 2011 8:00 pm · Comments (24)

Based on a previous study … that elicited … personal accounts of sexual motivations … Meston, a sexual psychophysiologist, and Buss, an evolutionary psychologist compiled a list of 237 distinct [sex] motivations … In researching the [2009] book [Why Women Have Sex] they asked over one thousand women to give a description of actual sexual encounters associated with any of these 237 reasons, mostly via online survey. These reasons are discussed in relation to the underlying motivations they point to and the likely evolutionary benefits they gave our ancestral mothers.(more)

The book Why Women Have Sex has many fascinating tidbits, and provoked many thoughts in me. For example, I noticed that the vast majority of the female sex motives discussed in the book are selfish, i.e., primarily intended to benefit oneself, as opposed to one’s partner. For example, even pity sex seems mainly selfish:

Here is how one woman described sex as a way of boosting her self-confidence:

I had sex with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them. These guys were virgins and I felt bad that they had never had sex before so I had sex with them. I felt like I was doing them a big favor that no one else had over done. I felt power over them, like they were weaklings under me and I was in control. It boosted my confidence to be the teacher in the situation and made me feel more desirable.

The main altruistic sex motive is a part of “love”:

Of the more than two hundred reasons given for having sex, love [#5, to express my love, #9, I was in love] and emotional closeness [#12] were ranked in the top twelve for women. …

According to the well-known … “triangular theory of love,” love consists of the distinct components of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Intimacy is the experienced of warmth toward another person that arises from feelings of closeness and connectedness. It involves the desire to give and receive emotional support and to share one’s innermost thoughts and experiences. … Here is how one woman in our study experienced this [intimacy] dimension of love:

I fell that sex can be one of many physical expressions of love, though sex is not always an expression of love. When I make love with my husband, it is an intimacy, trust, and exposure of myself that I share only with him … because I love him. Sex can be a way of fulfilling my husband’s needs (physical, emotional, psychological) that can’t be achieved any other way and [it] lets him know that I love him and vice versa. …

Passion … refers to intense romantic feelings and sexual desire for another person, … “a hot intense emotion” characterized by an intense longing for union with another. …

Commitment … requires decision-making. … The long-term decision involves a willingness to maintain the relationship through thick and thin. Many women talked about how commitment was an essential component of love for them. In fact, some said that they used having sex as a way to try to ensure commitment from a partner they felt loved them.

So, out of the of 237 female reasons for sex, love is in #5,9. “Please my partner” is #11 (its #10 for men). On love, only one of its three parts, intimacy, has an clearly altruistic component. Six desired effects of intimacy are mentioned: experiencing warmth, giving support, receiving support, sharing experiences, showing love, and being shown love. Of these, only one, giving support or meeting needs, seems clearly altruistic (though even this could be selfish). So one of the six desired effects of one of the three parts of love, mentioned twice in the top ten reasons for sex, seems altruistic. Direct clear altruism is #11. Not nothing, but not a lot either.

People often complain that economists assume selfishness too often, and point to intense close relationships as clear evidence of altruism. But if even in this case our motives seem overwhelmingly selfish, economists’s usual approximation looks pretty good.

FYI, here are the top 15 female sex reasons, from that original survey:

1. I was attracted to the person
2. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure
3. It feels good
4. I wanted to show my affection to the person
5. I wanted to express my love for the person
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release
7. I was ‘‘horny’’
8. It’s fun
9. I realized I was in love
10. I was ‘‘in the heat of the moment’’
11. I wanted to please my partner
12. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy)
13. I wanted the pure pleasure
14. I wanted to achieve an orgasm
15. It’s exciting, adventurous

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Municipalize Drug Law

By Robin Hanson · October 8, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (27)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia isn’t a supporter of legalizing drugs. But he does believe that passing federal laws against them has done harm to the U.S. government. “It was a great mistake to put routine drug offenses into the federal courts,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. … Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained as far back as 1989 that the war on drugs was overwhelming the federal judiciary. (more; HT John Fast)

There’s no way the US will legalize drugs anytime soon, but if drug laws were up to cities or counties, a few places would legalize them, and then everyone else could see if that works out ok. And then maybe more places would legalize. Those of you who saw The Wire may recall that its successful experiment in local drug legalization was shut down by threats from feds.

Back in ’09 I suggested a similar solution on medicine. There’s no way we’ll substantially privatize medicine anytime soon, but if cities were in charge then places that let spending get out of control would decline relative to others that controlled costs more effectively. Losers would learn from winners, to all our benefit.

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We See Dominance

By Robin Hanson · October 7, 2011 10:00 pm · Comments (1)

Foragers might have spend a million years enforcing egalitarian rules against overt dominance, but our capacities for seeing dominance are still quite central to our nature:

We tested the hypothesis that social hierarchies are fluent social stimuli; that is, they are processed more easily and therefore liked better than less hierarchical stimuli. In Study 1, pairs of people in a hierarchy based on facial dominance were identified faster than pairs of people equal in their facial dominance. In Study 2, a diagram representing hierarchy was memorized more quickly than a diagram representing equality or a comparison diagram. This faster processing led the hierarchy diagram to be liked more than the equality diagram. In Study 3, participants were best able to learn a set of relationships that represented hierarchy (asymmetry of power)—compared to relationships in which there was asymmetry of friendliness, or compared to relationships in which there was symmetry—and this processing ease led them to like the hierarchy the most. In Study 4, participants found it easier to make decisions about a company that was more hierarchical and thus thought the hierarchical organization had more positive qualities. In Study 5, familiarity as a basis for the fluency of hierarchy was demonstrated by showing greater fluency for male than female hierarchies. This study also showed that when social relationships are difficult to learn, people’s preference for hierarchy increases. Taken together, these results suggest one reason people might like hierarchies—hierarchies are easy to process. This fluency for social hierarchies might contribute to the construction and maintenance of hierarchies. (more)

More evidence for the homo hypocritus hypothesis that covert dominance was central to forager lives.

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Parent Vs. Kid Status

By Robin Hanson · October 6, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (21)

When parents have a choice between making they or their kids look good, they pick themselves:

The often-dreaded parent-teacher conference … seems to be an evaluation of student performance, [but] is more often than not an evaluation of the parent and the teacher, by each other. …

Instead of defending their children, parents are consistently critical about their children when talking with teachers, often delivering unsolicited, negative information about them. “Parents … [are] showing that they already know about their children’s potential or actual troubles, displaying that they are fair appraisers of their own children, willing and able to detect and articulate their flaws, and reporting on their own efforts to improve or remedy their children’s faults, shortcomings or problems,” …

Teachers regularly work to encourage parents to be first to articulate critical assessments of the student, such as by asking for the parent’s perspective, observations, questions, and/or concerns about the student’s progress. … Teachers … [then provide] face-saving accounts on students’ behalf (e.g. “That’s not atypical of kids”; “For a 12-year-old boy, normal is pretty flaky.”) … “It is the teacher who consistently works to end the parent-teacher conference interaction on a positive note, delivering future-oriented, favorable or optimistic comments about the student.” (more; HT Eric Barker)

Yet another example of parents caring for kids less than they claim.

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‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag

By Robin Hanson · October 5, 2011 10:40 pm · Comments (78)

From a famous Steve Jobs Stanford graduation address:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. (more; HT Alex)

Now try to imagine a world where everyone actually tried to follow this advice. And notice that we have an awful lot of things that need doing that are unlikely to be anyone’s dream job. So a few folks would be really happy, but most everyone else wouldn’t stay long on any job, and most stuff would get done pretty badly. Not a pretty scenario.

OK, now imagine that only graduates from colleges like Stanford or better followed this advice. Since such folks have more fulfilling job options, a larger fraction of them would end up really happy. But we’d still have too much job turnover among our elites, with too much stuff done badly.

Now notice: doing what you love, and never settling until you find it, is a costly signal of your career prospects. Since following this advice tends to go better for really capable people, they pay a smaller price for following it. So endorsing this strategy in a way that makes you more likely to follow it is a way to signal your status.

It sure feels good to tell people that you think it is important to “do what you love”; and doing so signals your status. You are in effect bragging. Don’t you think there might be some relation between these two facts?

Added: Will Wilkinson, Arnold Kling and Megan McArdle weigh in.

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Tyler On Robots

By Robin Hanson · October 5, 2011 10:10 am · Comments (15)

Tyler Cowen recently was part of a recorded panel discussion on Will Robots Steal Your Job? I’ve included some quotes below. I think he basically gets things right, at least from the point of view of humans. Oh he says apparently silly things like:

Smart machines will always be complements and not substitutes [for humans], but it will change who they’re complementing.

But from the context you can see he just means that really rich humans, who own a lot of robot-relevant capital, will enjoy having physical human as servants. Tyler also insists change will be gradual, apparently dismissing the whole brain emulation scenario I focus on, in which some change is necessarily rather sudden. Perhaps he thinks that won’t be possible until very late in his scenario.

My main complaint is that Tyler seems to completely ignore the experiences and welfare of the robots themselves (as do the other three panelists). Somewhat like Europeans in 1700 discussing the wisdom of their colonizing the world, but considering only on its effects on Europeans. I doubt this is because Tyler agrees with Bryan Caplan that robots can’t possibly be conscious. What then? Does Tyler simply not care about non-humans?

Those quotes: Continue reading "Tyler On Robots" »

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