Tag Archives: Age

Lost Charity

By Robin Hanson · September 2, 2009 9:00 am · Comments (29)

This Obit made me sad:

Alex Grass, 82, who founded Rite Aid and built it into one of the nation’s largest drugstore chains, died Aug. 27  … By the time he stepped down as the company’s chairman and chief executive in 1995, Rite Aid was the nation’s largest drugstore chain in terms of total stores and No. 2 in terms of revenue. …

Grass was a philanthropist who contributed to civic, health and educational organizations. His legacy includes a $14.5 million medical building named after him at PinnacleHealth’s Harrisburg Hospital and $1.5 million to establish the Alex Grass School of Business Leadership at Harrisburg Area Community College.  Mr. Grass also contributed $1.5 million to the University of Florida, where he earned his law degree, to establish a chair for its Center for Jewish Studies and build a new law school building.

When we look back on people in the past and what they did that we are thankful for, creating innovative products, processes, and organizations should come out near the top; that is mainly what made us rich.  And on that count Alex Grass is a hero.

But when folks like Alex spend their later years trying to “do good” with the millions they were paid for actually doing good, they usually end up pissing it away.  We already have too much medicine and academia, because such things are mainly wasteful signals.  We didn’t need and shouldn’t be thankful for more hospital wings or lecture halls.  Imagine how much more good could have been done instead via millions spent trying to make more innovative products or organizations.

Of course most innovations attempts fail, and that wouldn’t have looked so good for Mr. Grass.   I’m sure those hospital wings and lecture halls came with grand ceremonies attended by folks in his social circle, saying what a great guy he was.  And I expect people in his social circle are more likely than most to actually use those hospital wings and lecture halls; he was showing loyalty to his clan by buying such things.

But when I think of all the good that could be done by philanthropists who actually wanted more to do good than to look good, it makes me sad.  At it doesn’t make me sympathetic toward the tax deductions and other social support our society offers for these wasteful signals.

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Reliability Theory

By Robin Hanson · August 31, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (12)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. First line of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.

Broken cars vary more in their capabilities than fixed cars.  Fixed cars all have working engines, brakes, doors, radios, roofs, etc., but in broken cars some of these capacities are greatly diminished.   Broken vs. fixed houses, televisions, plumbing systems, and so on are similar.

Biological bodies, on the other hand, become less varied in their capabilities as they break down.   For example, with increased age the contributions of other factors like social status to human mortality rates becomes weaker.   Similarly high intelligence people vary more in their different mental capabilities.

What determines whether it is the more capable or the less capable systems whose capabilities vary more?  The following figure illustrates a general theory of broken systems (formally “reliability theory“): Continue Reading "Reliability Theory" »

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Seek Superstar Slavery

By Robin Hanson · April 8, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (17)

The latest Review of Economic Studies has a great article (ungated here) by Marko Tervio.  I'll summarize.

CEOs, actors, directors, musicians, authors, and athletes make big bucks because:

  1. Desired abilities are rare and lasting.
  2. It is very expensive to try someone new.
  3. Everyone can see which trials worked or not.
  4. Winners are free to demand more money or walk.

Given these conditions, a few proven winners make big bucks, and few new folks get tried.  After all, a new trial who wins will soon demand as much as other winners.  Here winners avoid retirement to keep milking their gravy train, and small biases in weak signals on new guys to try can magnify into great social injustice. 

Condition 4 is crucial.  When long term deals are allowed, more folks are tried, because a few successes can pay for lots of failures.  Folks being tried get paid more, and there are more better winners who retire earlier and are paid less even when free to walk.  Distorted signals about who to try matter less.  Such long term deal gains were realized, for example, in the US movie studio system of the 1920-40s, the old US American baseball club system, and even now via exclusive long-term music album deals.

Over the last century, however, legislatures and courts have consistently moved to limit and prohibit such long term contracts, thereby increasing inequality and decreasing productivity.  France even forbids artists from selling the full value of their paintings.  The key tipping factor here seems to me to be a public displeased by seeing gains by admired musicians, actors, athletes, artists etc. going to less admired others.  The word "slavery" is often invoked. For example, music fans can be outraged to see their favorite musicians shackled to ungenerous album deals. 

So our vast wage inequality of superstar CEOs, artists, athletes, etc. is caused not by a lack of sensible regulation to limit random cruelties of unfettered markets, but by a public preferring its heroes unshackled, even if those heros had preferred otherwise. Now maybe insuring heroes against financial variations imposes a negative externality on wider admiring publics, one large enough to justify preventing long term deals.  But for now count me as skeptical; I'd rather allow CEO and other superhero "slavery," for their good and ours. 

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I’ll Be Different

By Robin Hanson · March 26, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (38)

A young colleague recently said he didn't want to end up like older folks he knew who didn't keep up with new music fashions.  Some of us older folks suggested he probably would become like us, and he would probably like it.  He was horrified.

People often wonder what it will be like for them to be old, or married, or with a successful career, etc.  They usually conclude they just can't know, and must wait and see.  Yet all around them are other folks who are old, married, etc. – why not just accept those experiences as a good predictions of such futures? 

People usually respond that they are too different from these other folks for their experiences to be a good guide.  A paper in the latest Science suggests otherwise: 

Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this.

We mistakenly prefer an "inside" view, imagining how we'd respond to particular details, but in fact the "outside" view of others' reactions is more reliable.  

This seems to me more than a simple cognitive error.  It seems folks feel that they would not be motivated enough to exercise, marry, work, etc. if they thought their future was going to be much like the futures of others around them.  Are they right?  More from that paper:

Continue Reading "I’ll Be Different" »

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Kid’s Rights

By Robin Hanson · March 13, 2009 11:45 am · Comments (45)

Scott Aaronson confesses:

Discuss: Should children have the right to vote?

The above is a question that’s interested me for as long as I can remember, though I avoided blogging about it until now.  See, unlike many libertarian economist Ayn-Rand types, I don’t actually like asking social or political questions the very asking of which marks you as eccentric and Aspbergerish. I’d rather apply myself to proving lower bounds, popularizing quantum mechanics, or other tasks that are (somewhat) more respected by the society I depend on for my dinner. And I’d rather pick battles, like evolution or climate change, where truth and justice have well-connected allies on their side and a non-negligible chance of winning.  For years, I’ve been studying the delicate art of keeping my mouth shut when what I have to say will be deeply unpopular—and despite lapses, I’ve actually made a great deal of progress since (let’s say) the age of 14.

There are times, though, when a question strikes such an emotional chord with me that I break down and ask it in spite of everything.  Such a case was provoked by this story in the New York Times a few weeks ago (registration required), about a 17-year-old girl who was jailed for creating a MySpace page. …

Continue Reading "Kid’s Rights" »

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To What Expose Kids?

By Robin Hanson · June 26, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (25)

State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents.  The main complaint I’ve heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the world.   For example, Will Wilkinson:

About kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics … It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. … They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds.  Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children’s psychological freedom.

Of course responsible parents know they should expose kids to more than just the local neighborhood.  But parents’ judgments on optimal exposure surely depend on their judgments about that outside world.  Someone who sees outsiders as mostly immoral heathens will choose less exposure than we as outsiders would choose for those same kids. 

So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids?  Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids?  Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?

I wonder, could different cultures make a deal where they each give the other cultures X hours to make their case to their kids?   Of course with many cultures of differing sizes there’d be the issue of what fraction of that time each culture gets to use.  And of course unreasonable cultures might be excluded from the deal. (But what criteria could characterize "reasonable"?)  And if such a deal is not possible, even among some reasonable cultures, what exactly would that say about what we think about who should be exposed to what? 

Added 29June:  Will responds here.

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Joe Epstein on Youth

By Robin Hanson · June 13, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (47)

More on our overconfident kids from a thoughful essay by Joseph Epstein:

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

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How Honest With Kids?

By Robin Hanson · June 8, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (8)

A Mother’s day article a few weeks back posed an interesting question: 

Some months back, I was invited to a party with 20 or so other mothers. … a few of the women began reminiscing about their own youths, comparing the transgressions they’d committed in their teens and 20s and debating whose were the most egregious. … As we pursue the goal of protecting our children from some of our more boneheaded and/or high-risk antics, we face one of the essential dilemmas of parenting: What do children need to know about their parents’ pasts, and when do they need to know it? …

So, should you admit to your child what you’ve done? … If you cop to something, anything, will this give your children tacit permission to try it all? Remarkably few — if any — researchers have explored this topic. … So it’s odd, really, that there is no consensus on what to do when one of the million little interchanges involves the question of whether the parent is — oh, say — familiar with the taste of strawberry-flavored rolling paper. Experts, exploring their own gut instincts, differ. …

And let’s face it: Parents lie to their children all the time, offering up many comfortable fictions. When we read them fairy tales, we are, in a sense, lying. When we lead them to believe every story has a happy ending, we are lying. Our culture puts so much emphasis on frankness and sharing that it’s easy to forget the real uses of evasion and stalling and deftly changing the subject, which are social skills on which civilizations — and, sometimes, families — rely.  Because the truth can be harsh and destructive, and why force it upon them?

So how honest should parents be with their kids about their younger "indiscretions"?

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Overconfidence & Paternalism

By Robin Hanson · May 28, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (27)

Paul Graham tries to explain paternalism: 

Parents know they’ve concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.

Don’t all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren’t as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Like a lot of new inventions, the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings in that respect.  …

Continue Reading "Overconfidence & Paternalism" »

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Lying to Kids

By Robin Hanson · May 23, 2008 8:15 am · Comments (43)

The insightful Paul Graham:

One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is.  All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they’re the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked you who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What’s a prostitute?" you’ll probably say "Ask your parents."

Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.

The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here’s what happened to Einstein:

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression. 

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance.

What if one wrote a clear simple web page explaining to young kids the important lies they are told?  How popular would it be with kids?  Yes, even if kids like the page it might take a while for word to get around about it, but I suspect it would face a much bigger problem: very few kids really want to see through the lies.  Hat tip to Kat. 

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