Overcoming Bias

Paternalism Parable

My newly published parable, saying we should be clearer on what justifies our paternalism, or be less paternalistic:

Imagine finding yourself near someone about to walk off a cliff. If he seems distracted enough to not notice a crucial bend in the cliff edge, you might feel quite justified in grabbing his arm, to stop him from falling. You might even expect his gratitude.

But what if he seems well aware of the cliff before him? Well, if he seems crazy, either permanently insane or temporarily drugged, you might still grab him. You might also grab him if you knew his family would miss him terribly. In such cases you might at least expect gratitude from his family, his caretaker, or his future sober self. And if you were morally outraged enough by the very idea of walking off a cliff, you might grab him no matter who was grateful or offended.

But what if, aside from the whole cliff thing, he seems no crazier or immoral than most? What if his action mainly affected only him? What if the cliff was only five feet tall, or 20 feet tall over deep water, or if he walked near the cliff at what he considered a close but safe distance? You might still think of grabbing his arm, if you thought you understood something important that he did not. Perhaps you know the wind is unusually gusty, or the ground is unusually slippery. Perhaps there is no time to explain, or he doesn't understand your language.

But what if he does understand you, and there is time enough to say "Watch out! That cliff is dangerous." If he dismisses your concern and does not back away, would that justify your intervention? Well we can't very well allow anyone to intervene in anyone else's life anytime they feel like it. So if you persist in grabbing we might let him sue you for assault.

But what if you were not alone? What if a great many of you also thought him careless? What if you lived in a democracy and could get enough voters to pass a law banning cliff-walking? Perhaps your law requires tall fences, or threatens to jail those who approach cliffs. Are you justified now?  Even in this situation, you are arrogant if you do not at least consider the possibility the cliff-walker knows what he is doing. ...

Read the whole thing here.

Wilkinson on Paternalism

Memo to self: check Will Wilkinson more often.  From last week:

I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are "irrational" and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. ... There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us. ... I don't doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense. What I doubt, very strongly, is that the discovery of "irrationalities" undermines the authority of market institutions more than it undermines the authority of government institutions.

Similar words have often escaped my lips.  Let me put it this way.  We each realize, to varying degrees, that we have various "irrational" tendencies, and there are many possible advisors, mechanisms, and institutions that we could rely on to help us mitigate these tendencies.  We can think twice about decisions, we can ask for advice, we can empower advisors to veto our decisions, we can join groups that make decisions together, we can seek out contexts where such problems are minimized, or we can endorse politicians who empower regulators to create and enforce rules.  It is not enough to show that we seem to have a certain problem and that a certain regulation might plausibly mitigate it.  The question is the relative value of this last option, government regulation, compared to all the other ways we might deal with our "irrationalities."

Added 7Mar: George McGovern, '72 Demo Pres Candidate, is now against paternalism. HT: Arnold Kling. 

Pod People Paternalism

The fourth film adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this time with Nicole Kidman, is now out on dvd.  It doesn't seem to be anyone's favorite, but it does re-raise an interesting thought experiment in paternalism.  After all, in this movie "pod people" retain their memories and their new "culture" makes them happy, serene, cooperative, and peaceful.  Their main crimes are:

• a flatter emotional tone,
• a foreign origin, and
• converting others by force

But similar complaints apply to giving kids Ritalin, pushing upper class culture in the inner city, or pushing western culture in the third world.  Now hard-line libertarians can consistently oppose using government power to purse such policies, even if they really benefit people.  But what about the rest of you?  Are happy people with the emotional range, peace, and productivity of a typical engineer really such a horror?  From the view of non-libertarian pod people, doesn't it make sense to force everyone else to convert? 

How To Fix Wage Bias

It seems reasonably well documented that tall, slim, pretty people get higher wages.  A 2005 review:

Hamermesh and Biddle found that the "plainness penalty" is 9 percent and that the "beauty premium" is 5 percent after controlling for other variables, such as education and experience. In other words, a person with below-average looks tended to earn 9 percent less per hour, and an above-average person tended to earn 5 percent more per hour than an average-looking person. For the median male in 1996 working fulltime, the respective penalty and premium amounted to approximately $2,600 and $1,400 annually. The corresponding penalty and premium for the median female worker are $2,000 and $1,100. ... In a separate paper . ...They found evidence of a beauty premium for attorneys that increases with age, at least for the 1971-78 classes. Five years after graduating, a male lawyer from these classes with a beauty rating of one rank above average had approximately 10 percent higher earnings than his counterpart with a rating of one rank below average. Fifteen years after graduation, the beauty premium increased to 12 percent.

I Dare You Bunzl

In yesterday's Post, philosopher Martin Bunzl says:

I spend most of my waking hours worrying about how to reduce my output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yet my behavior seems to march to a different drummer. I need to get the best deal. For me, not the world. When it comes to what counts as the best deal, my values don't get incorporated into the calculation. I am attuned only to price. And I don't think I am alone in this.

Fine, you say. Big deal. The solution is obvious: We adjust the price to make the "right thing" priced right for me. But here is another problem -- when it comes to pricing I am totally irrational. Offer me two washing machines, one that is more expensive now but more efficient over its lifetime, and hence cheaper in the long run, and I'll choose the one that is cheaper now. ... 

Honest Teen Paternalism

Worried about teens taking risks tonight, on New Year's Eve?  Most people think teens take too many risks, and so we should limit the risks teens can take, for their own good.  And from the usual lectures we give teens, it seems we think teens underestimate the rate and severity of bad events.  But in fact, a recent NYT says teens overestimate drug and sex risks:

Scientific studies have shown that adolescents are very well aware of their vulnerability and that they actually overestimate their risk of suffering negative effects from activities like drinking and unprotected sex.

Guardians of the Gene Pool

Followup to:  Guardians of the Truth

Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II.  You may remember that Hitler and the Nazis planned to carry forward a romanticized process of evolution, to breed a new master race, supermen, stronger and smarter than anything that had existed before.

Actually this is a common misconception.  Hitler believed that the Aryan superman had previously existed - the Nordic stereotype, the blond blue-eyed beast of prey - but had been polluted by mingling with impure races.  There had been a racial Fall from Grace.

It says something about the degree to which the concept of progress permeates Western civilization, that the one is told about Nazi eugenics and hears "They tried to breed a superhuman."  You, dear reader - if you failed hard enough to endorse coercive eugenics, you would try to create a superhuman.  Because you locate your ideals in your future, not in your past.  Because you are creative.  The thought of breeding back to some Nordic archetype from a thousand years earlier would not even occur to you as a possibility - what, just the Vikings?  That's all?  If you failed hard enough to kill, you would damn well try to reach heights never before reached, or what a waste it would all be, eh?  Well, that's one reason you're not a Nazi, dear reader.

It says something about how difficult it is for the relatively healthy to envision themselves in the shoes of the relatively sick, that we are told of the Nazis, and distort the tale to make them defective transhumanists.

It's the Communists who were the defective transhumanists.  "New Soviet Man" and all that.  The Nazis were quite definitely the bioconservatives of the tale.

Inconsistent Paternalism

All but one US state requires drivers to wear seat belts, and every airline flight must be delayed so all passengers can hear a safety lecture, but BASE jumping is widely allowed and terribly dangerous:

Veterans of BASE jumping -- an acronym that stands for parachute free falls from buildings, antennae, spans or earth -- call their sport the most dangerous in the world, with only 1,200 experienced jumpers and at least 115 fatalities. ... BASE jumping is illegal in parts of the world and across the East Coast ... Right now, a BASE jumper dies somewhere in the world about once every three weeks.

This Washington Post article mentions the danger but is not particularly disapproving, a vastly different tone I'm sure than if they were reporting on other nations without seat belt laws.  Why the vastly different treatment?

My best explanation is social status: we are much more paternalistic toward the low in status.  We allow rich people to invest in most anything they like, but limit poor people to investments approved by regulators, and we are far more concerned about alcohol and illegal drug use by the poor than the rich, even though both groups use them at similar rates.  An inner city activity with a similar mortality rate to BASE jumping would be illegal so fast it would make your head spin.

Added: To see what best explains paternalism, we should create a dataset of behaviors, where we code the degree of paternalism regarding those behaviors, and other possible explanatory features of those behaviors, so we can systematically check for patterns.  Any grad student interested in trying this?

Regulation Ratchet

A recent email asked me to admit that the current credit crunch shows we need more government regulation; the author thought it "easy to see" regulators could have foreseen and avoided the problem. This made me realize that we often hear claims that bad economic news, such as the dotcom crash, rising oil prices, or rising medical prices, suggests we need more regulation.  But we rarely hear claims that bad news suggests we need less regulation, or that good news suggests we need less regulation. 

Now perhaps it makes sense to change policy more in bad times than good, though even this is not clear; after all, we can better afford to experiment with change in good times. But it seems biased to call for more regulation given a certain cue, without calling for less regulation given some other cue.  If we all agreed we have too little regulation, then we should just add more regardless of whether news is good or bad.

This bias would seem to produce a regulation ratchet: increased regulation after bad times, but little change after good times.  Of course this by itself doesn't say if we have too much or not enough regulation; it just says the time trend is wrong.

Perhaps this regulation ratchet arises from a hindsight bias, i.e., an illusion that regulators could have foreseen current crises, combined with a tendency to more often think "something must be done" in bad times, combined with the Politician's Syllogism, (which I previously called Caplan's fallacy):

Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, this must be done.

Why Teen Paternalism?

Though in centuries past 15-19 year olds were treated as adults, today we often paternalistically restrict their behavior because of "immature" brains.   An OpEd in Monday's New York Times says 35-54 year olds actually behave worse:

A spate of news reports have breathlessly announced that science can explain why adults have such trouble dealing with teenagers: adolescents possess "immature," "undeveloped" brains that drive them to risky, obnoxious, parent-vexing behaviors. ... But the handful of experts and officials making these claims are themselves guilty of reckless overstatement. More responsible brain researchers ... caution that scientists are just beginning to identify how systems in the brain work. ...

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises: ... 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today's middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19 ... 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined ...

Overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers. ... More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, ... It's true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Strangely, the experts never mention even more damning new "discoveries" about the middle-aged brain, like the 2004 study of scans by Harvard researchers revealing declines in key memory and learning genes that become significant by age 40.