Tag Archives: Social Science

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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Tagged as: Fiction, Future, Social Science

Irrelevant Relevance

By Robin Hanson · September 29, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (9)

The September Atlantic has an “economics” article, by Don Peck, Can the Middle Class Be Saved? As economics, it is a “scam” I see often, but want to complain about yet again. These articles combine two key features. First, they gain “relevance” via detailed discussions of problematic current trends. Such as:

The most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class. … Wide-ranging social consequences of male economic problems [include:] … Women tend not to marry (or stay married to) jobless or economically insecure men—though they do have children with them. And those children usually struggle when, as typically happens, their parents separate and their lives are unsettled. … These sorts of social problems … have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class.

Second, these articles offer “relevant” policy solutions to such problems:

We can adapt, but we have to start now. … [by] … Bigger tax breaks for private R&D spending, and a much lower corporate tax rate (and a simpler corporate tax code) overall. … A National Innovation Bank that would invest in, or lend to, innovative start-ups. … [For] new and emerging industries … our bias should be toward light regulation. … Redoubling our commitment to improving U.S. schools, to letting in a much larger number of creative, highly skilled immigrants each year. … We must press China on currency realignment, putting sanctions on the table if necessary. … Development of “career academies”—schools of 100 to 150 students, within larger high schools, offering a curriculum that mixes academic coursework with hands-on technical courses. … It is hard to imagine an adequate answer to the problems we face that doesn’t involve greater redistribution of wealth.

The key scam is: standard economic theory, the main authority implicitly invoked by such “economics” articles, offers little reason to think these trends of concern have much relevance to these policy proposals. Whether such proposals are good or bad ideas can depend on many relevant factors, but the exact values of these trends are not among those factors! If R&D tax credits are a good idea (economically), they are a good idea regardless of trends in median wages or divorce rates. If raising taxes on the rich is a good idea because, hey, we gotta tax someone, that is a good idea regardless of how well or poorly the rich have been doing lately. As I said before:

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)

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Tagged as: Current Affairs, Social Science

Economists’ Best Advice

By Robin Hanson · August 29, 2011 10:20 am · Comments (59)

Ramone:

I am a proud resident of Fairfax County, in the U.S. state of Virginia. Today, I want to warn my fine fellow Fairfax folk: we interact too promiscuously with outsiders! For example, we are allowed to buy things made outside Fairfax, and leave the county to travel or work. Fairfax firms can even choose outsiders as investors, employees, and suppliers.

Such promiscuous interaction risks polluting our precious purity with uncontrolled contamination! Surely we choose to live in oh-so-fair Fairfax because we believe in Fairfax exceptionalism, in our exceptional mix of climate, culture, attitudes, laws, personalities, etc. Yet we allow any of us to risk corrupting this exceptionality via unrestricted mixing with outsiders. For example, we let outsiders move here who might vote for politicians who also don’t share our political values. And lets not forget that terrorists might slip in.

Much of this mixing surely also hurts Fairfax locals who compete with outsiders. Fairfax residents who drive to other counties to eat restaurant meals take business away from Fairfax restaurants. Fairfax firms that hire workers living in other counties take jobs away from Fairfax workers. Fairfax people who read books and blogs written by outsiders take readers away from Fairfax authors. Sure, sometimes we benefit from mixing with outsiders, and sometimes enough to compensate for losses to locals. But no one can prove that this is always the case, or even usually the case.

So, dear fellow Fairfax folks, we simply must be more careful! I’m not saying we should never interact with outsiders, but we must be more selective. There must be oversight – we can’t just let any of us decide for themselves how much they’ll pollute or harm the rest of us.

Convinced? No? What if Ramone had talked about Virginia, instead of Fairfax – would he have made sense then? If not, then why would the same arguments make sense when applied to the United States? Sure clever folk can think up arguments that apply better to nations than to states or counties, just as they can think up reasons why it is better to let in goods or investments than workers. But it seems quite unlikely that such arguments are actually the main reason most people more easily accept exchanging people between counties and states than between nations, or accept outside goods and investment more than workers.

It seems far more likely that people are invoking ancient classifications and fears, regardless of their appropriateness for today’s world. We probably habitually see the invasion of people as more threatening than things, and see workers from other counties and states more as “us”, relative to “them” from other nations. So to believe that our barriers to immigration are for the best, you have to believe in a lucky accident.

Bryan Caplan recently posted on a Michael Clemens article which mentioned: economists typically estimate that eliminating barriers to moving workers would roughly double world GDP, a far bigger gain than eliminating barriers to moving goods or capital! For this reason economists disagree with the public, and favor open immigration:

[In] a questionnaire sent to 210 Ph.D. economists randomly selected from the American Economic Association, … few economists believe that current U.S. immigration levels are too high (16.7%)—although many (29.5%) are neutral on the matter. (more)

Question: “Please tell me if you think it is a major reason the economy is not doing better than it is, a minor reason, or not a reason at all. (0 = Not a reason at all”; 1 = “Minor reason”; 2 = “Major reason”)” Mean answers: Public: 1.22, Economists: 0.2 (more)

We economists tend to expect open immigration to increase overall wealth and value (and liberty), and to reduce inequality. Furthermore, this seems to be the biggest gain we consistently identify. You might not always listen to or believe we economists, but if you can ever be persuaded by us, please let it be on this, economists’ strongest recommendation: open those borders!

Added 7p: Fairfax County is the third richest county in the U.S., and the richest large (>.4M pop) county, and neighbors the two richer but smaller ones.

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Tagged as: Regulation, Social Science, World

What We Should Study

By Robin Hanson · August 24, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (24)

Me a few days ago:

We usually explain human capacity to create and evaluate chains of reasoning in terms of [seeking] truth. … [But] once you give it a bit of thought, you can see many [other] possible and even plausible explanations.

More generally, we humans not only do things, we explain why we do things. Individuals and organizations stand ready to give reasons why we do each of the things we do. While such explanations are often self-serving, they are usually considered the standard default in ordinary conversation, popular media, and in academia.

I have a colleague here at GMU econ who recently expressed to me his feeling that we academics should usually accept such standard explanations unless we see clear strong evidence to the contrary. That is, if an academic journal has a statement of purpose or aim or mission, then we should believe what that statement says about the main social function of that journal in the world — if it says the journal exists to advance knowledge, that is what we should believe. He thinks we should similarly accept official purpose statements of hospitals, universities, charities, and government agencies. (He might not accept mission claims by firms, e.g., “Wal-Mart’s mission is to help people save money so they can live better”; apparently only admired non-profits deserve such deference.)

The most powerful insufficiently-appreciated insight I’ve ever learned is the one intellectual legacy I’d leave, if I could leave only one: we are often wrong about why we do things. Yes it is hardly original, and it might sound trivial, but few appreciate its full depth.

People are way too quick to assume that the main forces shaping the details of common human behaviors and institutions are their standard claimed missions. For example, people assume that the main force shaping doctors and hospitals is their declared mission to make people healthy, that the main force shaping universities and their research patrons is their declared the mission of advancing the frontiers of knowledge, that the main force shaping human capacities to make and evaluate reasons is the estimation of truth, and so on.

Once a social scientist starts to look seriously look for non-standard explanations, however, it is pretty easy to find them. Standard explanations leave many puzzling phenomena poorly explained, phenomena for which non-standard explanations often better account. Yes, there is an unfortunate tendency to latch onto the first plausible non-standard explanation one finds, instead of continuing to search for more possible explanations. I’ve probably been guilty of this myself, such as by perhaps focusing too much on signaling explanations.

But now I understand: today our priority should be a back-to-basics skeptical re-evaluation of human behavior. That is, we should search for plausible non-standard explanations of our most common behaviors, even those we think “obvious,” and then seek simple matches between the simple robust predictions of each explanation and the puzzling phenomena we need to explain. I’m very interested in participating in such efforts, and uncertain about the best way to proceed.

Within academia, one important obstacle to this project is the tendency of “rigorous” folks like my colleague to insist that non-standard explanations are “extraordinary”, and so require “extraordinary” evidence. They aren’t worth much math modeling until stronger data support is offered, and they aren’t worth collecting much new data to test since they are not yet well supported. (Standard datasets, collected with standard explanations in mind, are usually poorly suited to this task.) Alas the first-cut math models and data analysis appropriate for this first stage of analysis tend to be poor places for academics to signal their math or statistics sophistication.

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Tagged as: Hypocrisy, Personal, Social Science

Why I’m Not Libertarian

By Robin Hanson · August 9, 2011 11:40 am · Comments (66)

Over lunch yesterday, Bryan Caplan explained to me some finer points of standard libertarian legal philosophy. Here is my current understanding (errors mine of course):

Libertarians believe: Each human is endowed with property in his or her own body, and can obtain property in other physical objects, including land, via certain “making” processes. People can trade such property rights via explicit contracts. It is not morally permitted to violate property rights as determined by current contracts, except to defend or retaliate against other violations. Contract violations can happen via “fraud” (= lies) that create deviations between a contract’s words and deeds. (If a contract specifies damages for breach, it is not immoral to breach if you pay the specified damages.) There is more to morality, and within these constraints people should use their property to achieve such other morality.

I’m an economist who appreciates the economic analysis of law. I know how very useful property and contract can be in achieving economic efficiency. But the most efficient forms of property and contract are not obviously only these libertarian ones. For example, many sorts of non-physical property are probably efficient, beyond those that can easily be created via local contracts. It is probably sometimes efficient to initially allocate property in other ways than via the usual “making.” It is probably efficient to endow parents with partial ownership of their children. And it is probably efficient to enforce non-explicit contracts, such as among very large groups.

Yes most libertarians bite these bullets and say the libertarian choices are the moral ones, even if inefficient. But I just don’t find very compelling the morality of this urge to make most everyone worse off on average in order to follow certain traditional rules.

I especially get stuck on the claim that law should limit its attention to “physical,” not info, property and harms. (That’s in quotes because info is completely physical; in fact, there may be nothing physical that isn’t info.) That is, physical rights are said to be pre-existing, but any info rights must be explicitly constructed by contract. Yet people can hurt each other “non-physically” via info in so many ways.

Many libertarians seem to feel they have discharged most of their info moral obligations if there is a reasonable interpretation of their words which has them telling no clear lies. As someone who spend most of my early economist years specializing in the economics of info, this seems spectacularly inadequate. I wonder if, as kids, libertarians tended to be witty weaklings – losing most fair physical fights, but winning most fair verbal sparring. Perhaps such kids prefer everyone to embrace the slogan “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” because then the people they hurt via words can’t complain, because they can’t even admit they were hurt.

Now as a matter of practice, libertarians and I tend to agree in many policy disputes. Their support of property and contract often promotes economically efficient outcomes. And for that, I salute them. I even say sometimes that I “lean libertarian.” But I cannot embrace the above strict concept of libertarian morality.

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Tagged as: Law, Morality, Social Science

Rah Efficient IP

By Robin Hanson · July 29, 2011 11:20 am · Comments (23)

On this blog I’ve long favored economic efficiency.

Economic efficiency is our best wide general analysis tool for finding win-win deals that get people what they want. That isn’t everything, but it is a lot. (more)

On this efficiency basis, I’ve defended many controversial policies, such as blackmail or polygamy. But oddly, I seem to elicit the most opposition by defending the mere possibility of efficient intellectual property! A widely held position and one embodied in law today. If you recall, I argued:

Before barbed wire, it make less sense to farm, or to enforce property rights in land against roaming animals. But after barbed wire, farming and land property rights made a lot more sense. … I’m happy to admit that today intellectual property (IP) is not obviously a good idea. Such property can create large “anti-commons” transaction and enforcement costs … Today, it is often better to rely on other social incentives to innovate. … [But] just as farmers developed barbed-wire, someday I expect IP advocates will develop better forms of intellectual property, and better technologies for marking, sharing, and enforcing such property. Using such innovations, I expect we will allow more and stronger intellectual property. … Which, like barbed-wire, will mostly be a good thing. (more)

Brad Delong responded:

Robin Hanson appears to think that people have the right to send killer robots off to hunt down people who use their ideas without paying. Me? I think this is an example of how thinking too much about property rights can madden the mind. (more)

(Scott Sumner says this “mischaracterizes” me; I agree.)

Matt Yglesias responded:

Robin Hanson is apparently the kind of libertarian who believes in government-created monopolies over the use of ideas: … Are we sad that Isaac Newton was unable to patent a method for calculating instantaneous rates of change? Does Hanson think he should be paying royalties to Michael Spence every time he writes about signaling? … The idea that a person, having shared his ideas with the world, now has the right to call the cops and have people arrested for taking inspiration from the idea without paying for a license in advance seems odd. Which is exactly why historically government regulation of idea-copying has been the exception rather than the rule. (more)

Yes IP’s high costs now make us use it sparingly. But as such costs fall, my guess is that efficient economic institutions will eventually include more ways for users to pay creators of innovations. I make no claims, however, about the exact forms such property and payments will take.

To reduce transaction costs, property rights may expire after a time, and both “usage” and “authorship” may be evaluated at large crude granularities, rather than “every time he writes about [Spence-style] signaling.” There may be random auditing of innovation usage, and folks may buy access to large bundles owned together by those who worked on related innovations. I don’t know if paying for access will be done before or after usage. I also don’t know if such property will be enforced by government monopoly or private law – perhaps people will voluntarily opt into property rights regimes.

What I do know is that enormous value is at stake in getting good innovation incentives and access, value that can probably be increased by better property rights. Economies show a weak a long-term tendency to adopt more efficient institutions, and that tendency is mostly a very good thing.

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Tagged as: Social Science

Selection Is Slow

By Robin Hanson · June 25, 2011 3:25 pm · Comments (6)

If you imagine that a 25% cost advantage would let your firm quickly displace all rivals, think again. Yes more efficient firms and plants eventually displace less efficient ones, but it is easy to overestimate the strength and speed of this effect. For example, in a US manufacturing industry with five plants in use, the best plant will typically produce about twice as much with the same inputs (including materials, land, labor, etc.) as the worst plant. In India and China, it will make five times as much:

[The median] four digit SIC industr[y] in the U.S. manufacturing sector [has] a TFP ratio of … 1.92. … This … says … the plant at the 90th percentile of the productivity distribution makes almost twice as much output with the same measured inputs as the 10th percentile plant. Note that this is the average 90–10 range; … several industries see much larger productivity differences among their producers. U.S. manufacturing is … if anything … small relative to the productivity variation observed elsewhere. … [Researchers] find even larger productivity differences in China and India, with average 90–10 TFP ratios over 5:1.

These figures are for revenue-based productivity measures; i.e., where output is measured using plant revenues (deflated across years using industry-specific price indexes). TFP measures that use physical quantities as output measures rather than revenues actually exhibit even more variation than do revenue-based measures as documented. …

Another robust finding in the literature—virtually invariant to country, time period, or industry—is that higher productivity producers are more likely to survive than their less efficient industry competitors. …

Aggregate productivity growth in the U.S. retail sector is almost exclusively through the exit of less efficient single-store firms and by their replacement with more efficient national chain store affiliates. … Why is within-store productivity growth so small on average in retail, but not manufacturing? (more)

Yes, some of these large differences may be due to unmeasured quality differences.

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Tagged as: Finance, Social Science

Raid The Rich

By Robin Hanson · June 19, 2011 12:10 pm · Comments (9)

Me in March on Why Track Trends?:

Tyler’s thesis is that the US has slower growth than decades ago because we’ve used up the low hanging fruits. … My grad school (Caltech) didn’t teach macro … so I’ll stay agnostic for now. But what I can speak to is how little such trend analysis or projection matters, at least for most economic policy. … 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.

Me 1.4 years ago on Enable Raiders!:

A robust, properly functioning market for corporate control is vital to the performance of a free-enterprise economy. …

It is hard to exaggerate how very important this is – we’d be so much richer now if it it had long been easier for raiders to take over public firms. We now put many inexcusable obstacles (listed below) before such raiders, including disclosure, super-majority, poison pill, and merging delay rules.

Today’s Post:

Growing income disparity in the United States … has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, … the [140,000 member] top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, … with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. …

In 1975 … the top 0.1 percent of earners garnered about 2.5 percent of the nation’s income, including capital gains. …. By 2008, that share had quadrupled and stood at 10.4 percent. … The share of the income commanded by the top 0.01 percent rose from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent over that period. For the 15,000 families in that group, average income now stands at $27 million.

The inquiring mind is surely curious to know who exactly are today’s super-rich, and how much richer they are now than before. But good policy is mostly about good institutions, which just shouldn’t depend much on such parameters. If you worry that managers get paid more than they contribute to firm value, a robust solution is to strengthen competition for corporate control, so raiders can takeover and then fire overpaid managers. Trying to independently determine manager contribution is far far harder.

If you worry instead about how much managers respond to taxes by reducing their efforts or moving to other jurisdictions, that also probably doesn’t depend much on just how rich they are or how much that has changed in recent decades. Wanting to tax managers more because you learned that they made more money than you thought seems much more like envy than neutral efficiency analysis.

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Tagged as: Management, Politics, Social Science, Wealth

Wolfers Gets Loopy

By Robin Hanson · June 17, 2011 4:50 pm · Comments (24)

Over the years I’ve not only met folks who do drugs, I’ve met folks who’ve had deep mystical experiences on drugs. They have told me that their drug experiences made them feel sure the physical world we see around us just can’t be all there is — they’ve touched something deeper and more important. When asked how exactly a weird drug experiences could possibly count as evidence on basic physics, they have little coherent to say. It seems their subconscious just told them this abstract conclusion, and they can’t not believe a cocksure subconscious. Even one on drugs.

Druggies might say such things in private, but it is much rarer to hear a professional physicist say them in public. Odd then to hear professional economist Justin Wolfers say his near-mystical parenting experience makes him doubt standard econ:

I learned economics in my twenties, before I became a dad. … Hard math and complex models … exploring the basic idea … that people are purposeful, analytic decision makers. … I had always believed in the analytic self; I was rational, calculating, and tried to make smart decisions. Of course real people don’t use math, but I figured that we’re still weighing costs and benefits just as our models say. …

Today, I’m not so sure. My feelings toward my daughter Matilda aren’t easily expressed in analytic terms. … Her laugh is the greatest joy, and it thrills me that she shares it with me. … She’s central not only to my life, but to who I am. There’s something new and strange about all this. Today, I feel the powerful force of biology. It’s visceral; it’s real; it’s hormonal, and it’s not in our economic models. I’m helpless in the face of feelings that overwhelm me.

Yes, I know that a twenty-something reader will cleverly point out that I just need to count kids as a good which yields utility, or perhaps we need to add a state variable to the utility function as in rational addiction models. But that’s not the point. I’m surprised by how little of this I’ve consciously chosen. While the economic framework accurately describes how I choose an apple over an orange, it has had surprisingly little to say about what has been the most important choice in my life.

I’m a committed neoclassical economist. … But what kind of economists would we be if we learned our economics only after we were parents? It’s an interesting thought experiment, and truth is, I don’t know the answer. … Slivers of evidence—my own introspection, conversations with other economist-parents … —all tell me that it would be different. (more)

I don’t need to speculate – I am exactly that kind of economist. I started econ grad school with two kids, ages 0 and 2, and had no undergrad econ. I’ve seen a lot of the parenting cycle – my youngest graduates from high school tomorrow. My kids are central to who I am, and I’ve known well feelings that are visceral, hormonal, and that overwhelm me.

But none of that makes me doubt the value of neoclassical econ. How could it? First, econ makes sense of a complex social world by leaving important things out, on purpose – that is the point of models, to be simple enough to understand. More important, econ models almost never say anything about consciousness or emotional mood – they don’t at all assume people choose via a cold calculating mindset, or even that they choose consciously. As long as choices (approximately) fit certain consistency axioms, then some utility function captures them. So how could discovering emotional and unconscious choices possibly challenge such models?

Having an emotional parenting experience is as irrelevant to the value of neoclassical econ as having a mystical drug experience is to the validity of basic physics. Your subconscious might claim otherwise, but really, you don’t have to believe it.

Added 11p: Wolfers is usually an excellent economist, and here he seems to realize he is acting a bit loopy. This suggests a “religious” scenario, where someone tries to show devotion via a willingness to believe extreme things. Wolfers feels a new strong attachment to his family, and shows it by a willingness to change related beliefs in an extreme way. Being an economist, one of the biggest beliefs he can sacrifice on this altar is his belief in the standard economic framework. So Wolfers says that his new family attachment has made him question this framework.

Added 22June: Wolfers responds here.

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Tagged as: Kids, Personal, Social Science

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