Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Matthew Yglesias says:

Here in the United States, the right has a tendency (once, but mostly no longer, found on the European right) to serve up a mixture of hostility to intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, academics, and residents of big cities along with valorization of farmers, soldiers, and small-town life that I, at least, find remarkably uncongenial to the values of American Jewry. I rather doubt, at this point, that there's any actual anti-semitism lurking beneath this murky cauldron of anti-semitic tropes, but still, there they are. Or to put it another way, granting that pretty much nobody on the American right seems to hate Jews as such, pretty much everybody on the American right seems to hate the things that, in practice, American Jews do. While remaining unimpressed with the tendency of many on the American (and more on the European) left to see Israel as simultaneously the most evil state in human history and also the root cause of all evils everywhere in the world, I'm equally unimpressed with the Christian Zionist view that Israel must be supported in order to encourage all Jews everywhere to move there in order to hasten the end of the world as we know it.

The Irish aren't quite as city-loving, movie-making, academia-dominating a group as the Jews, but we're close. I'm certainly one of those coastal elite types that I hear ranting about, and yes, my friends, I do love a good triple venti skim latte.

But I find this logic a little weird. Do I really have to like things that I would otherwise despise, just because Jews do them? Does it make me a bad person to hold onto my distaste? Should our distaste for anti-semitism extend to those who have no animus towards Jews, but a style objection to six-pointed stars? Do I have to like female circumcision, arranged marriages, honour killings, and large, intrusive, and ineffective quasi-socialist states in order to prove that I don't hate Arabs?

Rural people hate city people for basically the same reasons everywhere, as far as I can tell: the social values required for living in a small community full of people who you've known forever are very different from those that work in a big place full of transient strangers. And the city slickers, being richer and closer to the centres of power, have somewhat more ability to enforce their values on the rest of the country. If there is less of this in Europe, it is probably because the Europeans don't have very much countryside left. Most of my New York friends find nothing odd or prejudiced about hating people in the south because they disagree with their way of life, and resent the need to compromise with them politically.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Splain me, please?

Let me make clearer what I said in the last post about fertility and the effectiveness of Plan B.

An egg lives, on average, one day.

Sperm live, in a fertile woman, an average of 3-5 days.

Assume that rapes and accidents are randomly distributed throughout the menstrual cycle. (They probably aren't, but more on that later.) That means that, assuming you are going to have an unfortunate event, there is a 1/28 probability that it will occur on a given day of an average woman's menstrual cycle.

4-6 of those days will be "fertile" days on which it is possible to get pregnant: the day of ovulation, plus 3-5 days before that. Peak fertility occurs on the day before ovulation; you have a 26% chance of getting pregnant on that day. The day of ovulation, it drops to 15 percent (travel time is a killer), and then to basically nothing. On the other end, because sperm die off somewhat rapidly, fertility drops off the longer the gap between ejaculation and ovulation; by four days before ovulation, it's basically negligible.

By rough extrapolation from the the allegation on this fertility site that fertility goes from about 10% day O-5 to 33% on O-day itself (dropping to nothing almost immediately thereafter), I get the following:

5 days before ovulation: 10% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B
4 days before ovulation: 17% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B
3 days before ovulation: 24% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B
2 days before ovulation: 27% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B
1 day before ovulation: 30% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B
Ovulation day: 33% chance of getting pregnant without Plan B

So if 1,000 women have an unfortunate incident in an average 28 day cycle, that will be roughly 35 incidents per day.

On O-5, 3 pregnancies will result
On O -4, 6 pregnancies will result
On O-3, 8 pregnancies will result
On O-2, 9 pregnancies will result
On O-1 day, 10 pregnancies will result
On O day, 12 pregnancies will result

This makes for a total of 48 pregnancies. Assuming that ovulation comes at the beginning of O-day, 12 of them will come after ovulation.

Now, let's posit two things:

1) All the women take Plan B immediately (for maximium effectiveness)
2) Plan B does not prevent implantation, only ovulation

Even if Plan B were perfectly effective every single time it is taken right up to the moment of ovulation, it would still have a failure rate of 25%, higher than its quoted rate. So one of these things must be true:

1) It fails more than quoted
2) My probabilities are off
3) It suppresses implantation

Moreover, most women don't take it right away. Accidents aren't randomly distributed; they're undoubtedly concentrated in several ways. First, women seem to be more attractive when they are ovulating; second, accidents are almost certainly concentrated on weekends, when health clinics are harder to get to. Third, they will be concentrated at night. Unless they've been raped, women are unlikely to get out of bed and go to the emergency room, particularly if they've been drinking.

So now let's lag the fertility by 12 or 24 or 48 hours. It takes only a few hours for sperm to reach the fallopian tube. Suddenly, 17-31 out of 48 pregnancies prevented by Plan B involve already fertilised eggs.

Now, perhaps I'm missing something here. I'm sure my avidly pro-choice readers will be happy to explain it. But given the life of a sperm, I just don't see how it's possible that Plan B both noticeably affects pregnancy, and does nothing about implantation.

Now, personally, I don't think I care whether it does or not. But if it doesn't touch implantation, I'm puzzled.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Dig that mote . . .

Mark Kleiman responds to my post on abortion with one misunderstanding and, in my opinion, several errors.

Misunderstanding: I'm not pro-life. I'm pro-choice. I weigh the mother's right to choose whom she shall support more heavily than the fetus-as-future-person's right to get born. At some point, before the third trimester but after the pregnancy test shows positive, implied consent kicks in. This does not require believing that a fetus is a bundle of cells of no possible moral interest, and I do not so believe.

Errors:

1) Mr Kleiman puts "pro-life" in scare quotes, but not pro-choice, on this logic:

In general, people are entitled to the labels they choose for themselves, and others should use those labels, within reason. For example, unless I'm reflecting on the language itself, I'm happy to go along with the convention that uses the label "conservative" for the current ruling clique of radical reactionaries, who have nothing but contempt for our traditional form of government (with the Congress having primacy among three branches of government including an independent judiciary). Since they have successfully appropriated the label "conservative," that's mostly what I call them.

(As libertarians love to point out, if liberalism is typified by Locke and Mill, then "liberal" is a somewhat misleading label for the faction to which I belong, which mixes liberalism on some issues with democratic, social-democratic, and progressive tendencies, and which on many issues is actually conservative, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.)

But "pro-life" is a nasty bit of question-begging, designed to imply that those who are for choice on abortion are "anti-life." I refuse to go along. Sorry if that hurts someone's feelings, but calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one, even if all the tails get together and call themselves the leg movement.

Pro-life strikes me as a silly label, but no nastier or question-begging-ish than "pro-choice". Pro-lifers are not against "choice"; they are against a particular choice. Everyone is against some kinds of choices, like the choice to mug little old ladies and use the money to buy crack. Similarly, obviously, with the possible exception of a few ZPG types, pro-choicers are not against life; they are against forcing women to sustain a particular future life inside them. Pro-choicers do not believe that a fetus is a legitimate life; pro-lifers do not believe that abortion is a legitimate choice. But neither opinion is so much obviously more ridiculous than the other that one label is entitled to scare quotes, while the other is to be treated as a statement of fact.

It would be better if the labels were something like "right to life" and "right to choice". Most accurate of all would be "fetal rights" versus "maternal rights", but maternal rights is too broad, and I don't know of a word for "women who are pregnant, but don't want to be". Tactically, pro-choicers might do well to reframe the issue that way (although I can also see how it could backfire awfully).

2) Mr Kleiman argues that pro-choicers are justified in believing awful things about pro-lifers, because some of the pro-life leaders are awful. Actually, he seems to be lumping all the pro-life groups in with Operation Rescue. More to the point, many pro-choice leaders are, at least from the moderate position, equally awful. As far as I can tell, the leaders of Operation Rescue are no farther from the mainstream in their beliefs about things like sex roles and reproductive rights than are NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Obviously the people on our side seem more reasonable and fair than the people on the other side; after all, they agree with us. Also, at least for Mr Kleiman, feminists come agreeably bundled with all sorts of beliefs about things like income distribution and economic regulation that make them seem even more admirably even-keeled. But as someone who embraces neither the visions of the feminist movement, nor the fundamentalists, as to what would constitute an admirable and enjoyable society, it seems distinctly non-obvious that one side is more reasonable thn the other.

3) Mr Kleiman complains about the lack of moderate pro-life groups. But where are the moderate pro-choice groups? As far as I know, all the major abortion groups either seek a ban on virtually all abortions; or believe that abortion should be legal right up to the point where the doctor slaps it on the ass. The issue doesn't seem to make for good moderates. Possibly this is because the pro-life groups have been open about their desire to use partial-birth abortion and parental-consent laws as a wedge to shove us all down the slippery slope. But one could as easily blame the decidedly immoderate slant of American abortion law.

4) He claims that Plan B works only by supressing ovulation, as per this blog. As far as I know, it's not quite that clear how Plan B works. It is likely to largely work by preventing ovulation, but given the relative survival times of sperm and eggs, I find it impossible to imagine how a pill that works up to five days after intercourse could possibly work only by suppressing ovulation. Five days is a marathon length of time for sperm to survive. As I understand it, if you have intercourse on the day of ovulation (Day 14 of a perfectly normal cycle) you have a roughly 25% chance of getting pregnant. If you have intercourse 3 days before, the chances are less than half that. Five days before, the chances are filed under "Well, miracles do happen". So anything that has a 90-95% effectiveness rate would, I would think, have to supress implantation at least part of the time. Otherwise, if nothing else; the women who ovulate just before the risky sex (eggs survive 12-24 hours) would all end up getting pregnant. Since there's only about a 5-day window out of 28 when you can get pregnant, that should reduce your effectiveness considerably even if everything else always works perfectly.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

CAFE standards are stooopid

Greg Easterbrook is a brave man. In a recent Slate article (with the ripe byline "the conventional wisdom debunked") he writes:

Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The No. 1 failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards [aka CAFE standards] have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase

Perhaps he meant, nothing the US can do in energy policy is more pointless than an mpg increase? He makes precisely this case a few lines later

In fact, the goal the president laid out in his State of the Union address sounds remarkably like a repetition of the first phase of federally mandated mpg increases. When the OPEC oil embargo took effect in 1974, there were no federal fuel-economy standards, and average actual consumption by new vehicles was 13 mpg. From 1975 to 1987, automakers were required to make continuous improvements in fuel economy. New-vehicle actual gasoline economy rose to a peak of 22 mpg in 1987. What else happened during that period?

What else indeed. Give me a moment, I'm thinking...

The reason for rising petroleum demand for cars and trucks is that Americans today own twice as many cars and trucks as they did 30 years ago and drive them nearly three times as many miles. Yet since 1988, fuel economy standards have not toughened.

Getting consumers to use less petrol, through driving less and through buying more fuel efficient cars, is easy -- make gasoline expensive. This is what OPEC did via the oil embargo in the 70s, although rationing meant that people paid this higher cost via waiting in line as well as higher prices. Thankfully, because the US government has the ability to tax whatever it wants, it does not need to wait for Saudi to stop pumping oil, it can raise the price of gasoline unilaterally via a tax.

Gasoline prices rose slightly a year ago from $2 to $3 (readers in Europe are snickering, or sobbing) and the media was filled with how awful this was and what oh what was the president going to do to bring prices back down? Now that gas is cheap again, the hue and cry is about how to get people to use less. In the garbled logic of politics, where human beings are unmoved by incentives, CAFE standards offer a "have your cake and eat it to" promise -- low gas prices and low gas consumption. Unfortunately, reality will assert itself and we will find low gas prices bringing high gas consumption, no matter what CAFE requires.

As Greg himself notes "people are driving three times as many miles" -- how are required mileage quotas going to impact how far people choose to drive?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Too good to check

Over at Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward writes:

In short, really long, hot summers make some guys a little nuts, and warmer winters make people a little happier. Plus, the data set is composed solely of Italians, a notoriously emotionally unstable people.

For my take on another dumb study on suicide rates--conservative governments apparently make Brits suicidal--go here.

This reminds me of a factoid I picked up somewhere. Allegedly, in Europe, the rate of violent death is roughly the same across all countries, but is differentially composed of suicide vs. murder. The rates vary inversely: warm countries have low suicide rates and high murder rates, while cold countries have the opposite. The explanation, which seems more than a little dated, ran something like this: in Italy, someone sleeps with your sister, and you kill hiim. In Sweden, you spend the long, cold winter locked in your house brooding, and then you finally kill yourself because it's too cold to go outside.

I have not checked this in any way. Thoughts?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's all about me!

As usual, blogging about abortion is producing a lot of heated and very emotional debate. There are a few categories of this: some very good posts about philosophy, which make me sad, because they are so interesting, and yet so pointless, because the main figures in the debate seem to me so clearly to be looking not for a well-thought out position, but for a philosophical premise which will tickle the crude moral intuitions of a public which does not and will not read moral philosophy. Nor can I say that I've found a well-reasoned answer to the abortion question; my only defense is that I'm well aware of it.

Then there are the personal anecdotes. Pro-choicers waving around the abortions they've had to say "See! I needed that abortion!" and (currently) pro-lifers waving around the abortions they've had to say "See! It was the worst thing I ever did!" Pro-choicers talking about their children to prove that they do too like kids, and pro-lifers showing cute pictures of Jimmy and asking "What if he'd been aborted?" Paul Campos has pointed out the futility of these demonstrations: everyone's seen the coathanger pictures and the fetuses with the faces and the fingers and toes, and everyone's still disagreeing. The premise that the other side would agree with you if you could just use provocative images to call forth some emotion on the topic seems particularly odd in the case of abortion; if there is one thing that the debate is not suffering from, it is a lack of emotion.

My favourite, though, are the posts where everyone speculates on the motives of the other side. You see, pro-lifers don't care about babies at all, because that would make their points something you might have to listen to and we can't have that, can we? So what they obviously really care about is screwing up women's lives so that they'll have to spend the rest of them barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen making lemonade for Pa and his friends when they come in from a hard day of plowing and oppressing colored people. And pro-choicers don't actually care about women; all they're really interested is enforcing a radical feminist agenda on the rest of us so girls won't be able to wear dresses and lipstick any more and boys will have to have their genitalia surgically removed at puberty and replaced with a copy of The Feminine Mystique. Also, while we can't be totally sure, it's reasonable to assume that many of them enjoy baby-killing, and would sacrifice live infants if not restrained by the hard work of good, Christian folk.

I was recently at the University of Chicago graduate school of business interviewing professors about their work, and got a chance to spend half an hour talking to Nick Epley, who is a psychologist. He's done a lot of fascinating work, but one of the first things we talked about is a simple concept he didn't invent: egotistical bias. We tend to use ourselves as a model for everyone else's behaviour, even when doing so is wildly inappropriate. This is the source of fundamental attribution error, among other things.

We actually spoke specifically about abortion in reference to this, and he pointed out something I hadn't noticed up until then, but which now leaps out screaming at me from these posts and comments: people involved in a debate tend to assume that their opponents are disagreeing with them about the aspect of the debate they care most about.

Pregnancy is a fundamentally unique situation in which there is no possibility of Coasean bargain; the rights of the mother to things like control over her own body conflict directly and irreconcileably with the rights of the fetus-as-potential-human. There is no good metaphor for it, no parallel where we can try to work out the ancillary issues. It's a toughy. The pro-choice end up thinking the rights of the mother are more important; the pro-life think that the rights of the baby that will be here in nine months are more important. Neither of these positions is obviously wrong, as far as I can see. As I say, it's a toughy.

But the really committed pro-choicers I've seen commenting act as if what pro-lifers were doing were considering the rights of the mother over her own body, and rejecting that principle, rather than curtailing it after weighing it against other principles; hence the accusations that pro-lifers hate women, or women with careers, or freedom, or whatever. And pro-lifers respond by calling pro-choicers baby killers. Nice.

Admittedly, there are some crazy people on both sides who really do cherish a vision in which [women leave the workforce and get back to having like, a zillion babies/men and women merge into a single androgenous species]. This is not, however, the majority. It is fair to say that there is quite a lot of reasoning from the result to the premise on both sides: people who think that it is of surpassing importance for women to take their place at the helm of half the world's institutions notice that this would be much more difficult in a world containing both frequent sex with people you don't intend to spawn with, and restricted access to abortion; they therefore reason that abortion must be moral. Conversely, the pro-life side notes that if you deny the obligation of a woman to carry her pregnancy to term, all sorts of other family obligations become harder to logically support, and therefore conclude that abortion must be wrong. Since the pro-life side generally does not care so much about total workplace parity, and the pro-choice side generally does not care so much about preserving traditional family structures, they conclude with some truth that there is a somewhat questionable moral discounting going on across the divide. But the sin is sufficiently equally distributed that this is not enough reason to dismiss the moral heft of the other side's arguments. Pregnancy and parenthood are HUGE DEALS. So is not existing. That's why so many people are so frightened of doing either.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Kevin Drum asks:

And as long as we're thinking big, I'll toss out one of my favorite outlandish suggestions: why not abolish the corporate income tax as part of this grand bargain? After all, it doesn't raise all that much money any more (less than 2% of GDP); it's by far the biggest source of tax complexity we have; it mostly gets passed on to consumers anyway; and it's the foundation of all corporate welfare. Take away the corporate income tax, and presto! No more tax breaks for special interests. K Street would be decimated.

Consider this deal: The corporate income tax goes away. It's replaced by a VAT plus an increase in capital gains and dividend taxes to the same level as the tax on income. (Added bonus: the whole "double taxation" argument goes away since corporate profits aren't taxed in the first place.) And the whole thing is used to fund national healthcare (along with the payroll taxes and general fund revenues that are already dedicated to healthcare). States could be encouraged to follow suit by agreeing to pick up the Medicaid costs of any state that kills its own corporate income tax. . . .

Since no one else that I know of has ever proposed a deal like this, I assume it's a dumb idea. But I'd be curious to learn why it's a dumb idea. If the corporate income tax were responsible for a significant part of the federal budget, I could see why we'd need to keep it. But in fact it's responsible for no more than a tenth of all federal receipts. So why not kill it and replace it with something better?

Kevin, I thought we were friends. I proposed something like this years ago. Not a VAT, of course; it's regressive, not transparent, and has significant compliance costs. But the elimination of the corporate income tax and the taxation of captial gains and dividends at par with wages, which is the main thrust of the thing.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I just got woken up by a text message from someone purporting to be reporting to his mother that his company was merging with Boeing tomorrow so the share price will go up--don't tell anyone! But the ticker is F!

Some thoughts:

1) Wasting my text messages and waking me up when I'm on holiday should be federal offenses carrying stiff sentences, separately and together

2) I would feel better about the whole thing if the scam was better constructed. On what exchange is this ticker? The text message doesn't mention. I'm pretty sure that the Ford motor company is not going to merge with Boeing tomorrow, and it seems a little too well capitalised to be used in a pump and dump scam.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Apparently, it's Blogs for Choice day. In a related development, the New York Times Sunday Magazine investigates "post abortion syndrome". Both seem to spend a lot of time exploring the question of how bad women feel after having an abortion.

Whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, I don't see how this is a relevant policy question. People feel bad after doing all sorts of things, yet it is not illegal to say hateful things to your spouse or major in Comparitive Dance. On the other hand, people have a tremendous ability to rationalise how something that they really, really want to do is therefore something that they can acceptibly do, and indeed something they ought to do, as anyone knows if they have ever lived through a friend's extramarital affair.

I am sure that if theft were legal, very few people would feel guilty about it at the time, or later, and yet theft would still be wrong. And some things, like jaywalking across an empty street, are not morally wrong no matter how drastically proscribed. I know it's a rather tired metaphor, but was slavery right just because most of the slaveholders died believing that they were entitled? After all, without slaves, they had a sucky life being subsistence farmers, instead of a fun and glamourous life being plantation owners! How could you ask them to give that up because the darkies, who weren't even legally, or as far as they were concerned, morally people, didn't like it?

Which is not to say that this metaphor means abortion is wrong; we're back to the same old arguments about personhood, or partial personhood, or pre-personhood, or whatever you want to call it. But declaring "My conscience is clear!" doesn't really influence my opinion on the matter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The mystery is gone

Apparently, HD video is making porn . . . er . . . less attractive. This is not a new phenomenon--apparently, a number of stars like Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt are in trouble from HD, because of their bad skin. But the porn industry, which works on lower budgets and relies more on close ups, is having the biggest trouble. Most interesting part of the article for me:

The movie makers assert that it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread.

“When you’re introducing a new format, it would seem like the adult guys can help,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chief executive officer of Vivid Entertainment Group, a big player in the industry. Mr. Hirsch added that high definition, regardless of format, “is the future.”

I never thought about it that way. Forget Al Gore; Ron Jeremy really invented the internet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can Hillary win?

Democracy in America asks the question. Also, what are the best politic books ever?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Overcoming Bias definitely wins "Best New Blog" award in my book. This post on how deeply scientists understand their craft is no exception.

But this did make me wonder:

Suppose we have an apparently competent scientist, who knows how to design an experiment on N subjects; the N subjects will receive a randomized treatment; blinded judges will classify the subject outcomes; and then we'll run the results through a computer and see if the results are significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Now this is not just a ritualized tradition. This is not a point of arbitrary etiquette like using the correct fork for salad. It is a ritualized tradition for testing hypotheses experimentally. Why should you test your hypothesis experimentally? Because you know the journal will demand so before it publishes your paper? Because you were trained to do it in college? Because everyone else says in unison that it's important to do the experiment, and they'll look at you funny if you say otherwise?

Now, I come from a family with a fairish amount of Victorian detritus floating around, and I know how the machine age resulted in the invention of a whole lot of barely marginally useful crap, just because there were a lot of newly rich people and middle class people around, and a lot of new machines that could mass produce stuff for the newly rich people. One of the reasons that there is so much hideoeusly ornate late Victorian furniture is that the Victorians invented wood-turning machines, and started putting decorative spindles on everything.

Nowhere is the effect of new riches combined with mass production more evident, however, than in the matter of silverware. The Victorians liked to show off their new wealth with massive dinner parties, one of the objects of which was to show just how much silver you had. There was a fork, knife, or spoon for everything, and special tongs for asparagus besides. Many of these things were at best marginally more useful than an ordinary fork, knife or spoon, and some of them were actively less useful. Useless silver was their version of the Quesadilla maker or the $5,000 coffee machine.

The 1920's and 1930's winnowed the list of utensils quite a bit. My Burkean streak kind of presumes that the items remaining have been somehow tested for fitness, and that a salad fork is better at grabbing your salad than a dinner fork. Reader thoughts?

(Incidentally, the cultural horror of using the wrong fork is completely ridiculous. The Victorians made it dead easy: start outward and work in, unless a specialty item like a lobster pick is served with the course. Anything located at 12 o'clock is for dessert. If you get the wrong fork under this system, they have set the table wrong, entitling you to sneer.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Favourite new blogger

Actually, he's been blogging for a while, but he's got a new site. No, I can't explain it: just follow the link, and click on the map. You'll see.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Just came across this interview with one of my favourite business school professors, James Schrager. He teaches New Venture Strategy at the University of Chicago, the highlight of which is a final project in which you design a new business and pitch it to him as you would a VC, whereupon he systematically destroys the egos of arrogant students with visions of getting rich quick. This bit struck me as particularly funny:

Now for a series of short questions:

Do you own an IPOD? No

One thing the Chicago GSB should do better? Student parking

One thing the Chicago GSB does perfect? Allows the faculty maximum creativity and develops an exceptionally high standard for research. This is what is behind the Nobel awards.

Favorite place? Chicago, Illinois

Most exciting place to visit? Johannesburg, South Africa

Last Motorcycle you owned? [Big grin again] Oh Yes! A Penton 125cc Motocross bike.

Favorite Book? Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom

One thing all Chicago GSB students should do?

Go to the Museum of Science and Industry, or, even more importantly, TOUR A FACTORY. It is incredible how much can be gained through this experience.

Why is this funny? The business my team and I pitched to him was a valet parking service for the business school students.

How did I come across the article? While looking for the columns I wrote for the student paper while I was there. Unlike Kieran Healy, however, I am embarassed enough not to link to them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A propos of Will Wilkinson's attempt to convince me that I am not an agnotheist, but in fact an atheist, I pass on this question from Robin Hanson:

Last November we learned that the US public believes in God more than college professors, who believe more than professors at elite schools:

Almost a third answered "none" when asked their religion -- more than twice the percentage found in the general population. Science professors were the least religious. Accounting professors were the most religious. More than half the professors at places other than so-called "elite" universities said they absolutely believed in God. About a third of the professors at elite schools took that position. ... About 30 percent of community college professors considered intelligent design as a serious scientific alternative. Fewer than 6 percent of professors at elite universities took that position.

If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view. But other considerations can be relevant; if we knew elite professors favored increasing elite research funding, we might attribute that to self-interest bias. So should we favor elite professors' views on God, or can we identify other relevant considerations?

Discuss.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Brooke Oberwetter takes me to task for my post on being tall:

. . . most people find it in slightly poor taste to blog about your empowering liberation from your angst over being tall and stunning, and to do so in an adorable self-deprecating manner where you go on and on about how funny and weird it seems to you that people stare at you and find your tall stunningness attractive, and oh, by the way, you skipped the first grade.

As a tall stunning woman who repeated the second grade because she couldn’t tie her shoes or “play nice with others,” I should know: it’s tacky to mention how tall and stunning and smart you are, even in a self-deprecating way, which is why you’ll never catch me doing it. Believe you me, no one wants to hear about my ravishing beauty on my blog, even if I make it funny.

I am tall. I have no reason to believe that i am particularly stunning; I manage to make it through my daily toilette without even a vague feeling of faintness. And interestingly, though I for years assumed that I had skipped first grade because of early brilliance, it turns out that the reason I skipped first grade was not from any positive personal attribute. I skipped first grade because--wait for this--I was tall.

I wasn't one of those petite kids who suddenly shot up in tenth grade; I was big from birth. At least, I was long; my mother describes me as having looked much like a noodle. I was so long that the pediatrician flatly told my mother there was no such thing as an infant that long, resulting in shocked surprise when he actually measured me. So in that respect, at least, I was stunning.

I continued to grow faster than everybody else. I was asked to leave playgroup because at 1.5 years of age, I was no nastier than other toddlers, but big enough to enforce my will on those around me. By kindergarten I looked as if I was starring in a community playhouse production of "Snow white and the seven dwarfs". My parents thought I would stand out less in second grade, where I would be roughly the same height as the others.

You can imagine the sequel: by third grade, I was once again bigger than almost everyone in my class. I was five-foot-something in fifth grade. I reached my full height, all 74 inches of it, in seventh grade. In my entire school, there was not one person as tall as me until my senior year, when a 6'5" sophomore transferred in. Had there been surgery to reduce me to a manageable 5'7 or something, I would have mortgaged my grandmother to get it. So it's not entirely weird that I should be surprised when shorter women say "I always wanted to be tall". If there were girls around me who wanted to be a full five or so inches taller than all the boys in our class, they sure did hide it well. And I find it particularly weird to conflate "tall" with "stunning".

Obviously, though, I have no idea what terrible things short women went through to make them wish they were tall.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

If you know me and I'm not emailing back

It's probably because the comments and emails from the little controversy I seem to have sparked are overwhelming my mailbox. I'm trying to pick out the emails of friends from the mess, but I think I'm probably hitting about 50-50, plus my spam filter is going a little crazy. Be patient -- or mail again . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Doves are not evil, even ones who endorse the Lancet study

I seem to have been misunderstood slightly on my previous post on the Lancet study by Burnham, et al. Both pro- and anti-war commenters took me to be saying that I thought people who supported the high Iraq casualty figures wanted an extra half million people to be dead. This is not what I was saying, and I apologise for the false implication.

What I was trying to say is that it's easy in an argument, particularly one that has been as vicious and emotional on both sides as the debate over Iraq, to get caught up in winning. Repeated ill-tempered exchanges etch resentments of your opponents deep into your soul; repeatedly defending yourself from attacks that blend personal insults with repetitive iterations of arguments you consider self-evidently ridiculous, combined with an obstinate refusal to consider the irresistable logic of your position, ratchet up our committment to the position you have staked out. Then along comes something like the Lancet study*, and you think "Yes! I was right! Those unreasonable, amoral bastards will have to listen now!"

It's very easy to overlook the fact that "Yes! I was right all along!" means that 500,000 or so extra people are dead. We're not programmed to deal with that sort of thing. We're programmed to live in small bands of perhaps 30 people, and to respond to conflicts with an implacable rage to win.

Look back at the Jenin massacre. Did the Palestinians want hundreds of their countrymen to die? Of course not; whatever you may have read, Palestinians are not amoral animals who don't care about human life. They're normal people, who are quite fond of the other people in their country. They weren't saying to themselves "Yes! Hundreds of people are dead!" They were saying (I imagine): "This will show the world what the Israelis really are!" And they held onto the belief in a massive massacre at Jenin longer than the evidence warranted because it fit with their (very emotional) beliefs about the Israelis.

I'm sure that the people who were defending the Lancet study with every fibre of their being feel just as I do about half a million dead people. I just got the feeling that they weren't thinking about the 500,000 extra corpses when they defended the Lancet study with every fibre of their being.

*Yes, this is a terrible way to describe it, but that's the popular locution now

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Julian laments that for all my talk of looking for people with good decisionmaking processes, pundits who supported the war are not suffering any for their poor predictions, and those who were accurate about it are not seeing their reputations elevated. This is true. The market for ideas is not efficient, at least on the micro level; there doesn't seem to be much downside to being repeatedly wrong. I wrote something related to this a little more than a year ago, likening pundits to businessmen issued on-the-money stock options:

The problem as I see it is that the market for punditry has skewed incentives. There is no reward for being boring and right, nor any punishment for being novel and wrong. But there are big rewards, in the form of book contracts and lecture fees, for being novel and right. Pundits are thus tempted to act like executives with fat option packages. Executives with stock options get paid only if the stock appreciates considerably, putting their options "in the money"; but unlike investors, there is no downside for them. They are just as badly off if the stock stays at its current level, keeping their options "out of the money", as they are if the company implodes and the price of the stock drops to 50 cents a share. They are thus tempted to take risky steps which have high upside potential. Similarly, the expected value of an obviously right prediction is exactly the same to the pundit as that of a spectacularly wrong one. They are thus tempted to make risky predictions, hoping that one hits and they strike it rich.

I have myself observed the tendency of journalists to believe that their spectacularly wrong predictions (i.e. my near certainty that Argentina would never default on hte IMF) were merely bad luck, while their correct predictions are evidence of unusual intellectual acumen. Thus, in addition to their likeness to executives with options packages, pundits also closely resemble mutual fund managers, and the people who invest with them.

So why doesn't the marketplace of ideas punish the losers?

Possibilities:

1) Consumers of punditry aren't interested in whether it is right; they are interested in whether it confirms their ideas about the world.

2) Consumers of punditry are more interested in style than substance

3) Consumers of punditry forgive pundits for getting it wrong on big, complicated issues because they themselves have so often been wrong.

4) Consumers of punditry are consumers of interesting facts, not analysis

5) No one is paying attention to what pundits say except other pundits, who all have their own errors mercifully buried under the code of silence

Thoughts? And please, no long, venomous attacks on the character and morals of the hawkish pundits, or their readers. You already have three whole threads for that.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

New predictions

Daniel Davies* asks me what I think about the surge. I think it's extremely unlikely to work, and is an example of what John Quiggin recently plucked out of a Foreign Affairs article on hawkish bias: the tendency to double down when things are going wrong because of loss aversion. If we're serious about this, we should start by figuring out how many troops we need, and then figure out how to get them, rather than starting with how many troops we have and going forward with a policy unlikely to work. It also brings me back to something I said before: as a matter of national security, we might want to explore why our army basically is not up to the task of occupying a small country for more than a few months. If we're planning to keep on being the world's only superpower, that is.

And boy, I sure hope I'm wrong again.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on hawks and doves

A prominent example of what I was talking about in the last post is the bitterness of the debate over the Iraq casualty study. Given the extraordinary difficulties of collecting data in Iraq, I expect that had the study concerned something that the study's supporters had no opinion on--say, pet ownership in Iraq--those supporters would have readily accepted the conclusion that any such estimates were likely to vary widely from whatever the unknowable true figure is; had it reached a really surprisingly high estimate, like every house in Iraq has an average of five dogs, three cats, and an iguana, they would be willing to entertain suspicions that something had gone a little bit wrong. Yet they reacted with furious anger to anyone who suggested that an estimate that indicated over 15% of military-aged males in the Sunni triangle may already be dead could be just a mite high.

One anti-war friend to me said during the flap "I sure hope it's not true. That's a lot of people!" That did not seem to be the prevailing attitude. Rather, the study's supporters seemed to want it to be true, because it supported their prior beliefs. I'm no stranger to that emotion: I eagerly anticipated a stock market crash to validate my prediction that we were in a speculative bubble, and it is only poetic justice that I lost my job when it did. But the study's supporters seemed so focused on winning, on proving that the hawks were bad, wrong, stupid people and the war was an awful, awful, awful thing that the meaning of the numbers got lost in the argument. No one seemed to have any sense that for them to be right, an extra half-million people would have to be dead. The admirable attitude would have been a hopeful attempt to prove the study wrong, laced with a powerful fear that it was not. That attitude was almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it was about beating the hawks.

I thought that wanting to win no matter how many dead bodies that entailed was supposed to be the problem with the hawks side.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Winning isn't everything

Julian Sanchez writes a reasonable response to my previous post on hawks and doves, at which point his commenters do their very best to demonstrate why hawks have such a hard time admitting they were wrong, even beyond the normal human instinct to deny that one ever can be mistaken.

Shorter commenters:

1. I am a lying [expletive deleted] 2. I am a total moron who deserves nothing less than utter ridicule 3. It is not enough that people should not listen to me; I should voluntarily take myself out of the national discourse.

I'm not sure they got the point of my post or the spirit in which it was offered, so let me try again: Iraq is not a game. And it is not a high school debate tournament. The object of this discussion is not to find a winner, or see who scored the most points. Thousands and thousands of people have died. This is a little more serious than that.

I freely admit that the hawks were just as bad in promoting a juvenile tone to the debate before the war. But at least a few of us have learned how ridiculous we were being, something I am afraid I have not found on the dovish side.

So if all you are interested in is the psychic joy of hearing the words "You were right, I was wrong", you've got it. I was wrong. You can take that back to your bedroom, put it on the bookshelf, and fondle the trophy whenever you feel like it. Now please go away, because for me, this is not really about which of us has the bigger intellectual genitalia.

Human beings are really terrible decisionmakers. We cannot completely overcome our biases and our poor instincts. But at least we should try. (Robin Hanson's brilliant new blog is a great place to start.) Having admitted to myself, and everyone else, that the Iraq war was clearly in hindsight a bad idea, I am trying to go back and look at the decision and see how I could make it better in the future. The object is not to prove that I am a better and smarter person than those around me; the point now is to minimise the number of future bad decisions that make a lot of people die.

Judging from the behaviour of most of the doves in public discourse, that is not the most important thing. The most important thing for them seems to be exacting revenge on the hawks and declaring that the doves are now forever their moral and intellectual superiors, even though their nasty public invective ensures that the next time around, the hawks will be exactly as unwilling to listen to them as they were last time. Julian's commenters are certainly doing their best to put me in this camp.

But since I really do believe that better future decisions are more important than my umbrage at petty interpersonal exchanges, I am fighting to supress that urge. Among other strategies for analysing my decisionmaking, I look to the ways in which the dovish decisionmaking process worked better than mine, so that I can emulate those ways. And to me, I'm sorry if this hurts your tender little feelings, but as far as I can tell, it wasn't that much better. What many, or even most, of the doves had was an instinctive antipathy to American military action that is so closely bundled with a zillion other ideological predispositions, some of which to me seem practically self-evidently wrong, that I can't find a decisionmaking process to even analyse; the grounds for opposing the war shifted even as the opposition didn't. Let me make it thoroughly clear: the same shitty decisionmaking was evident on the side of the hawks. But trading one set of questionable propositions for another is not an improvement in decisionmaking; it's playing some sort of metaphysical Monty Hall game. And playing it badly.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

MMMMM

I just made a killer chicken soup with my sister's crockpot. It's not as perfect as it could be, but it was damn good, and very, very fast (to prepare, anyway).

Put into Kitchenaid miniprep (or chop finely):

2 stalks celery
One clove garlic
1/2 small onion
Leaves out of 1/2 box fresh sage (or 1 tsp dried)
Leaves out of 1/2 box fresh thyme (or 1/2 tsp dried)

Pulse until finely diced. Put into crockpot with:

3 large skinless, boneless chicken breasts
1/2 bag baby carrots
1/2 box sliced mushrooms
1 bay leaf
1 box Swanson's Organic Free Range Chicken Broth (comes in one of those shelf-stable boxes, like Parmalat milk)
1-2 cups dry white wine

Cook on low, eight to ten hours. Chop chicken breasts into pieces; serve soup with rice, bread or noodles.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

20/20 bias

Mark Thoma is telling the hawks they've squandered their credibility for a mess of pottage:

Sorry Jonathan, maybe we don't drum you out of the profession -- there aren't simply two extremes where we listen fully or don't listen at all -- but we are going to pay less attention to what you have to say. That's how it to goes when you are wrong about important things. And unlike the parade of polar extremes presented to us in your argument, there are people who have been generally correct all along and I prefer to give more weight to their views than to those who have been so spectacularly wrong.

Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein's actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government--and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.

However.

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It's just that independantly, things they didn't predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.

I'm trying to assess my decisionmaking process without developing a massive case of hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is a familiar phenomenon to most of us--that's why it has its own proverb--but most people don't realise just how bad it is. The CIA explains:

Analysts interested in improving their own performance need to evaluate their past estimates in the light of subsequent developments. To do this, analysts must either remember (or be able to refer to) their past estimates or must reconstruct their past estimates on the basis of what they remember having known about the situation at the time the estimates were made. The effectiveness of the evaluation process, and of the learning process to which it gives impetus, depends in part upon the accuracy of these remembered or reconstructed estimates.

Experimental evidence suggests a systematic tendency toward faulty memory of past estimates.150 That is, when events occur, people tend to overestimate the extent to which they had previously expected them to occur. And conversely, when events do not occur, people tend to underestimate the probability they had previously assigned to their occurrence. In short, events generally seem less surprising than they should on the basis of past estimates. This experimental evidence accords with analysts' intuitive experience. Analysts rarely appear--or allow themselves to appear--very surprised by the course of events they are following.

In experiments to test the bias in memory of past estimates, 119 subjects were asked to estimate the probability that a number of events would or would not occur during President Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow in 1972. Fifteen possible outcomes were identified for each trip, and each subject assigned a probability to each of these outcomes. The outcomes were selected to cover the range of possible developments and to elicit a wide range of probability values.

At varying time periods after the trips, the same subjects were asked to remember or reconstruct their own predictions as accurately as possible. (No mention was made of the memory task at the time of the original prediction.) Then the subjects were asked to indicate whether they thought each event had or had not occurred during these trips.

When three to six months were allowed to elapse between the subjects' estimates and their recollection of these estimates, 84 percent of the subjects exhibited the bias when dealing with events they believed actually did happen. That is, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were higher than their actual estimates of events they believed actually did occur. Similarly, for events they believed did not occur, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were lower than their actual estimates, although here the bias was not as great. For both kinds of events, the bias was more pronounced after three to six months had elapsed than when subjects were asked to recall estimates they had given only two weeks earlier.

In summary, knowledge of the outcomes somehow affected most test subjects' memory of their previous estimates of these outcomes, and the more time that was allowed for memories to fade, the greater the effect of the bias. The developments during the President's trips were perceived as less surprising than they would have been if actual estimates were compared with actual outcomes. For the 84 percent of subjects who showed the anticipated bias, their retrospective evaluation of their estimative performance was clearly more favorable than warranted by the facts.

Many of the doves seem to be reconstructing their memory of why they objected to the war, crediting themselves with having predicted that the invasion would fail in this way. Many hawks are also reconstructing their memories to make themselves less hawkish. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.

The lesson that I can unequivocally take out of this is: do not be so confident in your ability to read other people and situations. Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future.

At the same time, though, in a similar situation this shouldn't necessarily make me listen to the hawks next time. North Korea was behaving exactly like a country that had WMD, and it turned out that this was because they had them. What the doves would like to see the hawk's do--"I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, I am a stupid idiot, you are a brilliant figure with god-like omniscience"--is no better a guide to future decisionmaking than ignoring the fact that you were seriously wrong about the Iraq invasion. They are both ways of being completely stupid, not that this has stopped anyone.

When I look back at the decision I made, and I try to imagine making it without what I know now, which is that Saddam didn't have WMD, could I change it? I'm not sure. I don't see any way that I could have known, without actually checking, that he didn't have at least an advanced programme. And even with the chaos now, had we found an advanced nuclear programme, most of the doves would be finding it much harder to argue that the invasion was a disastrous mistake. Perhaps even if he had had them we should have left him alone, but that's a difficult argument. And given the number of Democrats, including President Clinton, who clearly believed that we would find an advanced weapons programme, I have to conclude that without benefit of hindsight, the information painted at least a 50% chance that he had them.

As I see it, doves have, in effect, benefitted from winning a random game. Not that the result was random--obviously, there was only one true state of the world. But at the time of making the decision, the game was random to the observer, with no way to know the true state until you open the box and poke the cat. Having won a random game, they are now crediting themselves with brilliant foresight. And yet, if the hawks had won the game, they would be preening themselves on their analytical ability, and demanding that the doves prostrate themselves in an extensive grovel.

That doesn't mean that my decisionmaking wasn't faulty. It was, in all sorts of ways, and I am trying to learn from them with proper humility. But I think the doves are crediting themselves with way too much analytical brilliance, which is fine to a point, but not so very fine that I am willing to turn over my decisionmaking to their allegedly more capable hands. World War II, after all, came in part out of learning lessons from World War I that weren't actually there. And the sight of doves saying, in effect, "I don't have to listen to you any more" does not make me sanguine that they are doing much better.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tall tales

Sorry, no economics blogging today. Instead: Silver Spring blogging!

Actually, DC blogging. Completely random interlude that makes me sound really attractive. Go no further, if you don't like that kind of thing. Econblogging resumes later. Plus, a post on food stamps sometime this weekend.

Anyway, so last night I was hanging out in a bar in DC with a woman of my acquaintance. Before we left, we went to the lady's room, and were chatting about various things, including the Reason happy hour where I'll be appearing as a special guest star on Tuesday. I said (ever so modestly) that Nick Gillespie's faith in my drawing power was touching but misplaced, as I couldn't imagine why anyone would come to a happy hour just to see me.

A very attractive, petite girl at the mirror turned to me with wide eyes and said "Because you're so tall and beautiful and stunning. My friend has been raving about you all night."

This is not the point of the story. It's just some gratuitious ego-stroking on the way to the point of the story.

Anyway, she continued in this vein for a while. I am terrible with compliments--believe it or not, I do not like people staring at me--and stammered a bit. But what came through loud and clear is "I always wanted to be tall." She said it several times.

Which struck me as funny, because I always wanted to be short. A clothing line made just for me! Small! Adorable! I think it's safe to say that the only people who have ever considered me cute were two ex-boyfriends, one six-five, the other six-ten.

Mind you, I wouldn't become short now--not when J Crew has just come out with a stunning line of tall clothes. I like being tall, female, and smart. But it took me a long time to get that way. Only in my thirties have I managed to own clothes that did not look as if I'd just undergone a sudden and very unexpected growth spurt, leaving my ankles flapping in the wind, my wrists bared to the world. Talk about fashion forward! I was wearing capris and low-rise jeans years before they came back into style.

Now, I like (most of) the things I am. But I can't say that in my younger days, I didn't dream, often, about changing them; and the more unchangeable they were, the more I dreamed. My body type is what women think men want, which is why I hear the phrase "I always wanted to be tall" so often, even from women who are not particularly shrimpy. I always tell them "I wanted to be short", and leave it at that, but there's quite a lot more I'd like to say, really.

The obsession with being tall and skinny just strikes me as weird--I was at the gym yesterday, with two twelve year olds on the machines next to me, inventorying everything they'd eaten like obsessive society matrons. It is not a ticket to glamour, except in the minds of the women who run fashion magazines, and the gay men who design the clothes in those magazines. Models often have trouble getting dates, because no one dares approach them. (I swear). Plus, they often have really gigantic emotional problems, as would you if you spent eight hours a day being inspected for flaws. I've no evidence that straight men think that the Underfed Valkyrie look is a universal ideal, so why do women think this?

I never did. I wanted to be the little girl guys threw in the pool. During those ridiculous moments when girls were being chucked in pools left and right, I was kept high and dry by the hernia risk.

Now that the pool flinging has stopped among my age group, I do like being tall. I mean, I think I do. Actually, I don't think of myself as particularly tall; it's one of those facts I know about myself mentally but not really emotionally, like "I skipped first grade". I'm always shocked when I meet women as tall as I am; I mean, they're really damn tall. I don't think of myself that way, even though I must relate my height to some stranger at least once a day. At any rate, apart from not being able to wear heels on dates, I very much like who I am and what I look like, but I do seem to have spent rather a long time wishing myself elsewise. Are there any women out there who didn't spend a substantial portion of their youths fantasizing about being someone different? If so, please reassure me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stamp of shame

This post on food stamps, about which I will not comment, made me think of an incident the other day. Since I moved to Silver Spring, I have been exploring the local streets and shopping. This put me in a curious mood the other day, when I was at the market checking out my groceries. I started to wonder: what is this "EBT" thing that's on all the supermarket checkout card machines? So I asked the checkout woman. She stared at me.

"That's for food stamps," she said, finally. She was black. I am so white that sometimes, in the early morning, I blind myself in the bathroom mirror. I have never felt like such a dumb, privileged middle class white girl in my life. Ever.

And yet, the thing is, in New York I shop in a housing project. Indeed, I have lived in marginal or transitional neighbourhoods pretty much all my life. I know what food stamps (now cards) look like; indeed, when I was younger, thanks to friends whose families were on them, I had a pretty good working knowlege of what could and could not be purchased with them, and even what grocery stores in the neighbourhood would let you buy soap with your food stamps. (Don't call me, USDA! I'll never tell.) I am a privileged white woman, but not a totally clueless one. Unless you'd actually used food stamps, how would you know what the code on the checkout machine was?

But I don't think that I am imagining the words "Stupid, rich white suburban idiot" running through the checker's head as I gathered my groceries and left the store.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of huh? huh?

Mark Kleiman doesn't get Eugene Volokh:

Affirmative action is an attempt by an employer to increase the number of workers it draws from groups currently under-represented among its workforce. African-Americans are currently grossly over-represented in the armed services, especially in the enlisted ranks. So I find it utterly baffling that Eugene Volokh sees an inconsistency between (1) supporting affirmative action; (2) celebrating the success of the military in moving African-Americans up its career ladder; and (3) opposing efforts to further increase the over-representation of African-Americans by selectively recruiting them.

Eugene has pointed out that Jacob Weisberg, who wants it to be the case that GWB is inarticulate and incoherent, sometimes stretches to find incoherence where none exists. In this case it seems to me that Eugene, who would love it to be true that the ACLU is inconsistent, seems to have imagined inconsistency in a perfectly consistent set of positions.

I don't get Mark Kleiman. As I understand it, minorities are typically overrepresented in many branches of government employment, relative to their percentage of the relevant workforce; many have described government jobs as the foundation of the black middle class. Yet all the government agencies I am familiar with have special outreach programmes for minorities as workers and suppliers. Does Mr Kleiman want this to stop?

Indeed, it seems to me that the reason that the military is not going to stop "targeting" minorities is that during the long period when there were no wars, this was seen as a very good thing by almost everyone, a way to give marginalised members of society a path to a better life. Institutional culture does not change readily, even if it were at all likely that career members of the military were going to start saying to themselves: "you know, the military really sucks--we shouldn't oppress minorities by trying to get them to join it." The military is recruiting minorities because a) this is fertile territory for them b) people in the military want to help minorities and c) people in the military think that theirs is a worthy career, and they are doing something good for minorities by recruiting them, just as presumably the folks at HUD think they are a worthy agency.

Mr Kleiman has been doing policy a long time. Does he really believe that government institutional policy can turn on a dime, regardless of incentives, or that it would be wise to break this crucial conduit into the working and middle classes?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh my God, I'm a liberal

Who knew? Tyler Cowen reports:

• Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color. Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
• Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I'm the decider."
• Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
• Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
• Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
• Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
• When people are prompted to think about death—a state of mind psychologists call mortality salience—they actually become more conservative.
• Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

Although I have gotten much neater since I was a Socialist. Of course, I've also graduated from college and gotten a job. How do we count people who keep things tidy under (psychological) protest?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Discount rates, again

So the Stern Report is back in the blogosphere, and I am meditating on its treatment of discount rates.

Some priors: I got into this defending Arnold Kling from scurrilous charges of hackery. I was not, as my opponents mistakenly assumed, defending him because we agree on Global Warming. we do not. I think global warming is happening, I find that very upsetting, and like Stern, think that those of us in America and the rest of the developed world should probably be prepared to sacrifice rather a lot of future income to prevent it. But a hack is someone who either does not know what he is talking about, or does not believe what he is saying. I think it's fair to say that someone with a PhD in economics from a first class institution understands discounting better than the philosopher who attacked him on it; and I have never had any reason to doubt Mr Kling's professional integrity. Frankly, I was suprised that Mr Bertram's co-bloggers did not quickly correct his misapprehensions.

And though I essentially agree with the Stern Report's conclusions, I am bothered by its methods. (To be sure, this is rather cheap, since by my calculations the probability that the Stern Report's conclusions will be acted upon is statistically indistinguishable from zero. So endorsing its ideas is a free luxury good.)

Basically, Stern's approach is to set the pure time discount rate, which discounts future utility relative to current utility, to zero. No matter what its supporters say, this is a controversial decision, and Mr Kling was perfectly within reason to controverse. That is not to say that it is wrong, only that extraordinary discount rates require extraordinary justification, and I am not comfortable with the seemingly arbitrary choice of an ultralow rate of time preference as the instrument of pricing.

(For those who do not understand discount rates, this is a really excellent basic tutorial.)

It is really, really hard to price the costs of climate change. This is true for many reasons. First, some regions will benefit: Siberia and Canada will probably blossom under global warming. A true cost benefit analysis would net those benefits out, but how do you price them? How do you price losing Bangladesh? Is that a one-time loss, or should be impute to each generation a new cost for not being able to visit Bangladesh, and how do we counterbalance that against the new pleasures of visiting the Minnesota Tropical Rainforest? Should we take into account happiness research which indicates that people are roughly as happy after a big loss as they were before?

The uneven distribution of the benefits presents another pricing problem, particularly since there are wide income disparities between the affected countries. I'm not entirely clear which way this cuts, since Britain and Ireland get hosed along with Bangladesh, but it's hard to dodge the moral injustice that the United States, which produces more carbon per capita than these countries, may end up a net beneficiary of global warming.

The biggest problem is the easiest one to state: what is a cost and what is a benefit? How do you value the changes?

As I read it, Stern sort of punts when faced with these impossible calculations. Instead, it relies on status quo bias; now is good, so we should bequeath a world to our descendants that looks as much as possible like the one we live in today. Obviously, there are huge problems with status quo bias, most notably that none of us would like it at all if our ancestors had been at all successful in applying it. On the other hand, "better the devil you known than the devil you don't" is not an entirely awful heuristic. At any rate, that seems to be the underlying assumption of the report. The quickest way to produce that result financially is to set the pure rate of time preference to effectively nothing, and (says William Nordhaus) to rely on the more pessimistic forecasts.

Now, I actually find the moral intuition behind a zero rate of intergenerational time preference pretty compelling, but the practical implications are rather daunting. (A John Quiggin post responds that

"Strange as it may seem to Economist writers, there are phenomena in the world that aren’t particularly illuminated by applying economic concepts. Attitudes towards abortion have nothing at all to do with discounting rates."

Which doesn't strike me as illuminating, because the question at the heart of the Stern Report's choice of discount rates is no more a matter of economic concepts than abortion is. It's a moral philosophy problem: are we, or are we not, entitled to privilege our own interests over the interests of those who are not yet born, but probably will be? Otherwise, the low social discount rate is just a pseudomathematical attempt to dress up your preferences as science.)

Can one reject a compelling moral precept just because it's nearly impossible to live by? That's a question that devout Christians wrestle with every day. I am still thinking through this question. But my instinct to reject the precept simply because it would require me to overthrow half of my policy positions is not, at first glance, an admirable one.

But even if you accept a zero rate of intergenerational pure time preference, you can't just smack the pure time discount rate to zero and leave it. Discounting covers a multitude of financial sins by literally making them disappear. For example, if you have a very low rate of discounting, you run into a problem with future generations: there are too damn many of them. Because there are so many of them, even trivial income streams have extremely high net present values.

This is easy to illustrate with a basic equation, such as a discounted cash flow. Let's say that in year one, we have $100 in income, growing at 3% a year. In year 1,000, this will have turned into an annual income of $687 trillion, give or take a few trillion. If, just to keep things fair, we discount this by the rate of growth, we will find that the net present value of income over the next 1,000 years is $100 x 999 or $99,900.

A 0.1% increase in future income over the next thousand years thus has a discounted present value of about a dime a year, which sums to $99. Using these sorts of discount rates, a cost benefit analysis indicates that we should be willing to surrender up to $89.99 in order to produce this small increase in future cash flows, a patently ridiculous result. Discounting takes care of this problem, because even with a low discount rate, the present value of constant income streams quickly declines to nothing. If you don't use discounting, you have to account for this in some other way, by selecting a utility threshold or something. And measuring utility is a rather tricky business.

Another problem is wealth disparities between generations. As I read it, the Stern Report basically assumes that there are low diminishing returns to income (it sets the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, or η, to 1). It strikes me as odd to see the left half of the blogosphere supporting this proposition; I'm fairly sure that John Quiggin, who is a social democrat, thinks it is higher than that. (Or at least I hope he does). Heck, I think it is higher than that; this is why I support a progressive, indeed negative, income tax, rather than a flat tax. (Yes, yes, I know: I'm not a real libertarian. You may have my card and my secret decoder ring back.) Discounting takes care of this problem by getting rid of very rich future generations; having done away with it, we are now stuck with them, the lucky bastards. I don't even know how you value marginal utility of even large income streams when incomes are $6 trillion, but it has to be pretty trivial. (Or maybe that's what our ancestors thought about incomes of $30K.) Anyway, I'm unhappy with Stern's approach. I'm not sure that you can reconcile owing anything to that thousand year generation with even moderate utilitiarianism, unless you keep ratcheting up the price of Cape Cod views.

Then there's uncertainty. There's still an awful lot of it, and I am not picking up the banner of the global warming sceptic here--when Ron Bailey has switched sides, I think it's safe to say that this particular debate is over. But we are still left with all kinds of uncertainties about what exactly will happen, and about what the world will look like, economically, technologically, and so forth. Climate stabilisers may kick in; they may make everything worse; in fifty years we may have batteries that let us use solar and nuclear energy for basically everything, meaning global warming will go away. We could find other ways to abate climate change. We could be preventing the recurrance of a new ice age--don't laugh, from what I understand, we're about due. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, normal discounting takes care of this problem, because things become more uncertain the farther they are in the future. Discounting progressively lowers the weight placed on future income streams, until they rapidly vanish.

A fourth problem was pointed out by an economist of my acquaintance: if you do away with time preference, you can't just apply this to the environment; you have to apply it to everything. Perhaps our descendants would prefer flying cars to Bangladesh. If you deliberately apply these low discount rates selectively, that's not a serious intellectual effort; it is at best cargo cult science, at worst intellectual fraud. I, too, have a strong intuitive preference for leaving the planet to our descendants in as good as, or preferably better, condition than we found it. But I recognize that there are strong practical and moral challenges to this desire, and the costs of advancing my preferences by random application of high discount rates outweigh the benefits. Let me make it clear that I am not accusing Mr Stern or anyone else of acting in bad faith. I am just saying that I think committing to the discount rate also entails committing to its use in a range of other applications, or justifying your environmental preferences on other grounds. I presume that Mr Stern and all of his supporters are prepared to do so, or to convince me that I am wrong and that ultra low pure time discount rates are uniquely applicable to the environment.

Which of course raises the fifth, and possibly the biggest problem with Stern: who the heck knows what our descendants want? Again, discounting takes care of this problem by essentially saying, "to hell with those young whippersnappers!" But if you don't do this, you have to attempt to grapple with changing preferences, a task at which, if Fifties SF is anything to go by, you will almost certainly fail.

This is not support for the "do nothing" crowd; like Megan, I think we should do rather a lot, starting with (in America) really whopping gas and carbon taxes. I am against subsidies for alternative fuels as a policy matter; I want to use a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse emissions with declining annual quotas that includes gasoline. (Yes, yes, I'll never use the secret handshake again, either.) But having endorsed these methods, I don't know how much we need to shoot for--and given the crudeness of the Stern Report's methodology, after reading it I still don't know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on CFL

Michael O'Hare's post here about sums up the amused contempt directed at me for saying that I didn't like Wal-Mart's compact flourescent lights. I'm a moron, I don't know what I'm talking about, CFLs are awesome, and what kind of spendthrift bobo yahoo gets all worked up about the colour of her light?

Perhaps I can clear up some confusion.

First of all, I am not talking about some platonic ideal of CFL which may or may not exist; I am talking about the actual ones I purchased at Wal-Mart, which suck. I got several wattages from (as I seem to recall) several manufacturers; they all sucked. Since CFLs at Wal-Mart were the subject of the article, these are the relevant items to discuss, not some fantastic CFLs you mail-ordered from Japan.

Second of all, I don't have the choice of finding some lampshade in which they don't suck. I live in a 400 square foot apartment, and my landlord picks the white glass shades that go on my overhead lights. I'm sure that if I found some lovely tiffany glass in just the right hue, they'd be adorable.

Third of all, unlike almost everyone on the planet, I am dependent on these lights all day. My apartment does not get enough natural light to work by, and I often work at home. There is a big difference between having kind of sucky light for a few hours a day, and spending your whole day drenched in it. Light really does have an affect on your spirits: that's what Seasonal Affective Disorder is all about, and why people fight so hard for offices with windows.

Fourth of all, I did actually try these things; I'm not mindlessly extrapolating from the lights at work. I don't know what I hate about them--the colour, the glare, whatever. I don't care about the shape, and didn't notice any particular flicker (I'm one of the unlucky ones who can see it in offices with cheap lights). I just know that the one in my range hood now, the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent, emits an ugly glare that is strongly reminiscent of being interrogated by the Mossad, and did so no matter what light fixture or lamp I screwed it into. The actual 100 watt incandescents now there do not. This was the bulb that was advertised on its freaky high-security plastic wrapping as being just like an incandescent.

Nor is this some hysterical reaction from someone prone to hate CFLs. I wanted to like CFLs; indeed, I believed so strongly in them that I had to throw out about $50 worth when I found out they didn't work in my apartment. And everyone else who walked into my apartment with a CFL in the socket had the same reaction; approximately: "Eeeeeeew." The place, now a warmly lit corner of paradise in the cold-hearted city, looked like a badly planned ladies dressing room in a failing discount department store chain. Now, what's really funny: someone who tried CFLs and found that she couldn't stand the way they looked in her apartment, or someone who is so completely unable to imagine any circumstances in which someone might have had a different experience from him with a product, that he writes several thousand words from another city asserting that I must be mistaken? Although I do want to make it claer, for the record, that I fully support Michael O'Hare's right to insert his foot in his mouth, clear up to the sacrum if he chooses.

Now, since my experiment five months ago, perhaps Wal-Mart has changed their entire line of bulbs. Perhaps they are all wonderful now. But they weren't, when I bought them. I'm sure that some people have found that they work wonderfully in a variety of places, but they do not work wonderfully for someone in a cheap, dark rental apartment. I'm just guessing of course, but I imagine that sort of apartment is fairly common among Wal-Mart's clientele, which might be why their bulbs aren't doing so well.

That said, I do plan to experiment, very cautiously, with other brands. I'm cheap, and as I say, I want to conserve electricity. But if they look like the Wal-Mart ones, they go right back out again. My green street cred may suffer, but given that I live in a tiny apartment in a highly efficient dense area, have no dishwasher or car, use a tiny gas range, do only full loads of laundry, and run a single air conditioner only in the room where the dog is, I feel like I've got a little reputational capital there to burn.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Eek!

I get cold sores all the time. Does this mean I'll get Alzheimers? I don't feel brain damaged.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who is watching this Saddam video?

Okay, so I'm against the death penalty, which includes Saddam. But still, even if I were for it, I wouldn't want to watch it. Who is downloading this thing?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Slander! (In which I make a very rare reference to my real name)

Megan says I said I didn't like her. What I actually said was that I don't like being around other Megans, because I get confused when someone else says their name. If you're a David or a Jennifer you get used to this, but I was a rare breed in my generation.

The actual person, rather than the name, I liked very much; I was disappointed not to get to talk more.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Correlation = Causation?

Via Ampersand, I see this article from Peter Campos, arguing that the important thing is not how much you weigh, it's how fit you are.

Leaving aside whether the studies showing fat doesn't matter have overlooked the fact that people who are terminally ill often lose weight years before they die as a symptom of their disease, this still doesn't make any sense to me. It acts as if activity level is an exogenous variable--that is, one unrelated to weight. But surely, being 100 pounds overweight makes it much, much less likely that you will excercise? The people I know who've gained a lot of weight were often sedentary to begin with, but got more sedentary as they gained more weight, because it takes a lot of effort to carry around the extra poundage. If you had to do all your daily activities with a 13-year-old girl strapped to your back, I imagine you'd move less too.

So even if, in theory, what matters is activity, that would still mandate losing weight, because ceteris paribus, thinner people will be able to move more. Moreover, my understanding is that the "fat but fit" folks are a tiny percentage of the sample; fat people overwhelmingly tend to be less active. So what we may really be discovering is that people whose muscle tone and constitution are so extraordinary that they can remain active even with a huge burden of extra weight, live just as long as people of normal weight. That's not quite as surprising a result as "fat doesn't matter".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

When stupid things happen to smart people

Daniel Dennett continues his quest for the title of "stupidist smart person in the world" with his opinion that we can do for religion what we did to smoking. Let me see if I can phrase this in a way that Mr Dennett might understand: if smoking made us live forever, it would be very, very popular. Even if it didn't make you live for ever, but could convince enough people that it might, it would be very, very popular. And anyone who thinks that they have the same caliber of evidence for atheism that we do for the carcinogenicity of tobacco needs to have his ego examined for possibly fatal inflammation. I say this as an agnotheist myself. I think it is vanishingly unlikely that there is a God, but that is not the same thing as having proof that it is so.

Update Chad Orzel had a similar reaction to something else Dennett said, although his is more pithy:

Dennett comes off sort of like a junior high Trekkie who thinks the cool kids will accept him once he finishes dubbing The OC in Klingon. It's tone-deaf in a way that suggests he just doesn't understand people at all.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Let there be (compact flourescent) light

Do you ever read an article and wonder "Where on earth does the author live--Mars?" I had such a moment with this New York Times piece on Wal-Mart's quest to sell more compact flourescent lightbulbs. It makes me wonder because in two pages of analysing the why no one buys the things, the author makes only the most glancing reference to the actual reason, which is that they give off the kind of harsh glare we all leave the office to get away from.

Personally, my home is practically a cave. I have to burn lights even in the day, because I'm in a first floor apartment shaded by tall buildings. I'm also really cheap, and a fairly committed green. So if you can't get me to use the things, you know there's a big problem. And that problem is not, as the article suggests, that light-bulb companies are resisting producing enough of them, that consumers are uneducated, that they are not displayed in the stores correctly, or that the bulbs are a funny shape. The problem is that after five minutes of sitting under a compact flourescent bulb, I feel like an extra in a Fellini film. I use one in the range hood, and if I had closet lights, I'd install them there. But there's no way I'm using them as my primary form of illumination unless legally forced to do so; it's just too murderously depressing. Which is what every single other person who writes about the things says. I can only assume that the New York Times author has never tried the product, or is out too much to actually notice what the lights look like, or lives in some kind of penal institution where such lighting looks natural.

So Wal-Mart: I want to use compact flourescents. If you want to help me, find a way to make the light look good. Of course, I suspect that the reason the light doesn't look good is that the reaction only emits light on a limited spectrum--which is what saves the energy in the first place. On the other hand, this is probably why english majors shouldn't speculate about chemistry.