Predictions Concerning Migration to Germany

1. The current love-fest, remindful of the opening of the Berlin Wall, will soon end and something in the range between disillusionment and xenophobia will set in. Like the post-reunification hangover, really, only on steroids, coke and speed.

2. Family reunification legislation (Familienzusammenführung) will be severely tightened within the next three years.

Low Status and Economic Inequality: Two Points Often Overlooked

Lots of talk about economic inequality around U.S. blogs recently, on the occasion of the translation of Piketty's book. Here are two points that I think are often overlooked. Each of the points could hold if the other does not.

1. Let us say we know with certainty that low-status people suffer because most others are higher up the ladder. This suffering may come in the form of envy or of more distal outcomes such as poor health. This phenomenon, considered well-established by many, is often presented as an argument for reducing inequality. But does it follow that high-inequality societies are worse off, all other things equal? Of course not! Presumably, if low-status people suffer because they occupy a low rung, high-status people benefit because they occupy a high rung. The benefit experienced by high-status people might outweigh the suffering experienced by low-status people. Put differently, it is conceivable that, net of the influence of other factors, the avarage utility per person is as high or higher in a high-inequality society as it is in a low-inequality society. You might say that similarity of utility is desirable in and of itself, but then you'd be introducing an additional moral principle that not everybody might share. I'm saying "additional" because, as soon as you're arguing on the basis of people's suffering, you're already arguing on a utilitarian basis, whether or not you're aware of it.

2. Again, let us say people experience psychological costs because others do better than they do. But, clearly, there are positive externalities, too. In any society which uses taxation to pay for free or subsidized goods, poorer people benefit from having rich people around. That's because rich people pay disproportionate shares of the cost of amenities such as public libraries, clean drinking water, and a functioning criminal justice system. Low-income earners pay less than their share, even in flat tax regimes. Put differently, they get more than what they pay for. Would they really be better off if they switched to a regime in which they were less envious, but got Zimbabwe-level sewage and criminal justice systems? Probably not.

Ich weiß ja nicht, mit wem Jan Fleischhauer so abhängt

Will Wilkinson meint, Mad Men sei für viele männliche Zuschauer so attraktiv, weil die Serie zu zeigen scheint, "how sweet it would be to have women take care of all the annoying details of life and smoke at work." Laut Jan Fleischhauer geht es vielen Deutschen mit mit Vladimir Putin ähnlich:

Nicht trotz, sondern wegen der Erziehung zu Pazifismus, Geschlechtersensibilität und fortwährender Antidiskriminierung ist ein Gutteil der Deutschen so fasziniert von Russland und seinem Anführer.

Putin steht für das unterdrückte Andere, das gerade, weil es so selbstbewusst und unverstellt auftritt, einen unwiderstehlichen Reiz ausübt.

Diese Erklärung wäre freilich überzeugender, wenn erst mal etabliert würde, dass der zu erklärende Tatbestand überhaupt zutrifft. Mir zumindest ist in Deutschland keine besondere Putin-Begeisterung aufgefallen.

Vielleicht täusche ich mich aber auch, und Fleischhauer hat recht. Das Problem ist, dass weder Fleischhauer noch ich valide Repräsentativdaten zu der Meinung der Deutschen über Putin haben. So hängt die Weltwahrnehmung dann von dem ab, was man so mitkriegt. Ein grundlegender Wahrnehmungsfehler der Menschen ist es, "das, was man so mitkriegt" für repräsentativer zu halten als es ist. Soziologen machen sich nicht deshalb so einen Kopf um Sampling-Probleme und Frageformulierungen, weil man so toll gelehrte Artikel darüber schreiben kann, sondern weil sie bemüht sind, über das Niveau der Alltagswahrnehmung hinauszugehen.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 106

1. The importance of being able to enjoy the mundane (Ben Casnocha)

2. "Nonshared environment" might best be conceived of as noise, not environment, says Kevin Mitchell.

3. External validity alert: Are patients in medical trials selected for large treatment effects? (Andrew Gelman/Paul Alper)

4. Chris Bertram makes a surprisingly good case for the argument "Squeezing the rich is good: even when it raises no money".

5. "Is there no racial bias precisely because it seems like there is?" Ole Rogeberg takes us into the mind of the microeconomist.

6. The fun of being criticized for doing the right thing, namely keeping the normative and the positive apart (Bryan Caplan)

7. An argument against men attending childbirth (Dennis Mangan) (via)

8. 50 great book covers from 2013, collected by Dan Wagstaff (via)

9. The low-hanging fruit of immigration: Bryan Caplan offers another metaphor.

10. The argument that extremely high cognitive talent is specific. (Bruce Charlton)

11. The argument for being an asshole (Scott Adams)

12. What's it like to hear voices that aren't there? (Christian Jarrett/L. Holt and A. Tickle)

13. Which works did sociologists cite most in 2013? (Neal Caren)

The Best Blog Posts of 2013

It's about time, so here.

As usual, brackets are appended to each link to indicate whether the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low-Brow, and Funny or Not.

For other years' lists, use the tag.

15. Offsetting Behaviour: "Social Costs and HPV", by Eric Crampton

14. Discover: "Why Race as a Biological Construct Matters", by Razib Khan (L; HB; N)

13. The Power of Goals: "Home Sweet Home", by Mark Taylor (L; MB; N)

12. Crooked Timber: "New Tools for Reproducible Research", by Kieran Healy (S; MB; F)

11. German Joys: "The Metamorphosis (US Summer Movie) Elevator Pitch", by Andrew Hammel (S; MB; F)

10. Code and Culture: "You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You", by Gabriel Rossman (L; MB; N)

9. EconLog: "The Homage Statism Pays to Liberty", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

8. Scatterplot: "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets", by Jeremy Freese (S; MB; F)

7. Overcoming Bias: "Future Story Status", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; N)

6. Gulf Coast Blog: "Defamiliarization, Again for the First Time", by Will Wilkinson (L; MB; N)

5. Armed and Dangerous: "Preventing Visceral Racism", by Eric S. Raymond (L; MB; N)

4. Askblog: "It Is Sometimes Appropriate . . .", by Arnold Kling (M; HB; N)

3. EconLog: "Make Your Own Bubble in 10 Easy Steps", by Bryan Caplan (M; LB; N)

2. Armed and Dangerous: "Natural Rights and Wrongs?", by Eric S. Raymond (M; HB; N)

1. Falkenblog: "Great Minds Confabulate Like Small Minds", by Eric Falkenstein (L; HB; N)

Thanks and congrats to all above.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 102

1. The experiment Milgram chose not to publish (Tom Bartlett/Gina Perry) (via)

2. Disagreement on the bellicosity of stateless societies (Larry Arnhart)

3. Velvet glove, iron fist, or: How government force works. (Bryan Caplan)

4. The "forced rider problem" and disutility from "public goods" (Eric Crampton). Useful concept!

5. The view that TV shapes people's thinking by not mentioning aspects of topics (Steve Sailer/NOTA)

6. Why people dislike photos of themselves: Mirrors meet the mere exposure effect (Robert T. Gonzales). But don't miss the link in the last paragraph.

7. 26 great words from the OED (Carolyn Kellogg/Ammon Shea)

8. Differences in preferences for competitiveness as an explanation of the male-female wage gap (John List and Uri Gneezy)

9. "This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken." (Sherbrooke)

10. Three by Tim Harford: Why pro-free-market arguments don't work well for finance; banks are relying less on leverage; how to use e-mail efficiently at work.

11. Paging Quetelet: Why song lenghts are not normally distributed (Gabriel Rossman) (via)

12. People respond to incentives, giving to the poor edition (Eric Crampton/Jillian Keenan)

13. Feelings of extreme bliss produced by targeted brain stimulation (Christian Jarrett/Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda, and Fabrice Bartolomei). Gimme, gimme, gimme!

14. Why wages don't fall during recessions (Bryan Caplan/Truman Bewley)

15. How to make voters better informed (Bryan Caplan)

16. Another bonkers graphic presented by Kaiser Fung.

17. The impact on wages of: height; smoking; testosterone (Economic Logician/Petri Böckerman and Jari Vainiomäki/Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts/Anne Gielen, Jessica Holmes and Caitlin Myers).

Pebbles, Vol. 44

1. When absence of evidence is evidence of absence (xkcd)

2. An attempt to answer the question, "What were Stanley Kubrick's favourite films?" (Nick Wrigley)

3. One more time: Changing football coaches seems to make no sense (on average, within the observed range) (Hannah Barnes)

4. Where does the phrase "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" come from?

5. Researching the effect of stop-and-frisk is really hard. (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)

6. Andrew Gelman on Axelrod's interpretive overreach concerning trench warfare and the multiple comparisons problem and expressing uncertainty.

7. Who guards the guardians? Cameras could. (Randall Stross)

8. "Slot machine sounds can manipulate players, researchers say" (Meerie Kim)

The Methodology of Positive Economics - Reversed

Leigh Caldwell, a behavioural economist, writes about microfoundations in economic models. Microfoundations means that you don't just talk about aggregate-level variables, but model the decision-making of economic agents (typically persons) in your theory, and develop the aggregate-level predictions on that basis. Caldwell correctly points out that homo oeconomicus isn't very realistic and that, consequently, microfounded theories based on the idea of homo oeconomicus are wrong.

He goes on to outline two typical responses to the critique that humans aren't the superrational decision-makers many economic models portray them as. One, actual people are pretty close to homo oeconomicus; two, let's forget about microfoundations. Caldwell suggests that instead economic models be built on more realistic microfoundations.

Between the two of us, Caldwell's the only economist, but I'll still try to make the case that the above is all besides the point. Naturally, it all leads back to Friedman (1953). The article - "The Methodology of Positive Economics" - is all about microfoundations. Friedman's point is simple: He doesn't care whether the microfoundations are correct, as long as they give the right macropredictions, and they often do. 

What Friedman doesn't tell you is this: Economic models are consistent with a lot of predictions, and hence a lot of microfoundations.

Let's take the economic theory of crime. If you ask economists, it starts with Becker (1968).* Among other things, the theory predicts that if the likelihood of being punished for a crime goes up, the volume of crime goes down, all other things equal. Ehrlich (1973) translated that into a microfounded model in which agents make decisions in part based on their rational calculations about the likelihood of being punished if they commit a crime. It's basically the same thing (frankly, I fail to see the point). Both models predict: Punishment up, crime down.

But it doesn't say by how much. And it's not just the economic theory of crime. All that mathematical modeling in economics is highly misleading: It looks exact, but all they'll really tell you is the direction of an effect. The rest is left to empirical estimation. 

You might think that's a big problem for economics, and compared to an ideal world of exact predictions, it is. But, in fairness, it's not as though the other social sciences deliver anything else. As far as I can see, all social science theory is about signs.**

Back to the example: If you can show that a rise in the likelihood of punishment leads to a reduction in crime, that's consistent with superrational decision-makers. It is also consistent with some decision-makers being superrational and all the other people not responding at all to the change in the likelihood of punishment. Etc. If you think it through you end up with something like the following: The finding is consistent with some of the people being sorta rational some of the time, and their effects outweighing the effects that are due to people behaving contrary to what the theory says. 

For Friedman and me, that's fine. Leave psychology to the psychologists.

But there is one very important consequence of all this: If your macro-level finding is consistent with a theory built on a microfoundation that assumes rational agents, this does not show many people act rationally in any substantial sense. This is important because economists like to argue otherwise, and soon you arrive at the stance that all drugs should be legal because drug addicts are rational. I'm open to the idea that all drugs should be legal, but a finding that increases in financial or nonfinancial drug prices decrease demand does not provide a strong argument in favour of legalization. If you want to argue individual decision making, bring individual-level data.

Note. All cites from memory. And not even a list of references!

____________

*Of course, the ideas formalized in Becker's theory had been around for centuries, even in writing. E.g., Cesare Beccaria.

**There's also quite a bit of "theory" in the social sciences that's not really theory in the sense of a system of falsifiable hypotheses. Sociology is big in this department.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 101: Long Wait, Long List

Because I've been collecting for so long, it's so many links. Because it's so many links, I'm posting it early.

1. If the effect in question was found in a particularly small sample, should that strengthen or weaken your belief in the effect? (Eric Falkenstein) From the same author: A critique of Stevenson and Wolfers' happiness research.

2. Thoughtful, personal essay by Eric S. Raymond about the emotion and cognition of racism.

3. A body-mind theory of lefties and righties (Agnostic)

4. "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets" (Jeremy Freese presents the American Sociological Association make an ass of itself)

5. Wie intensiv werden die Deutschen eigentlich von der eigenen Regierung ausgespäht? Man weiß es nicht. (Niko Härting) (via)

6. "A conservative estimate is that we’re spending a million dollars per year per terrorist, maybe more – that’s not even counting Iraq and Afghanistan." (Gregory Cochran)

7. The case against (eating lunch) outside (Matthew Yglesias) (via)

8. Matthew Desseem reviews Rififi.

9. Person fixed effects and psychological testing.

10. The theory that Marcia Lucas contributed more to Star Wars' quality than is usually acknowledged. (Fabio Rojas)

11. A discussion of reviewing and reviewers (with a focus on sociology) (olderwoman and commenters)

12. Is US violent crime actually down? Looking at non-police data. (Steve Sailer)

13. "William Boyd’s Taxonomy of the Short Story" (Will Wilkinson)

14. How not to get published. (Andrew Gelman/Brian Nosek, Jeffrey Spies, and Matt Motyl)

15. Getting the priorities straight (Foseti) (on this blog)

16. Male feminists: Demand and supply. (Nick Borman)

17. Real life cases of amnesia that are stranger than fiction. (Christian Jarrett)

18. Season of birth is endogenous (Eric Crampton/Kasey S. Buckles and Daniel M. Hungerman)

19. A model of how the internet works (Marco Arment) (via)

Seems It's Never Really, Really Hot in Peking (First Post from Berlin)

So, first post from Berlin. I can't really say much about the city yet, as I've been preoccupied with work and looking for a flat. So far, my predominant impression of Berlin is that it's hot, though that doesn't really distinguish the city from the rest of the country. Hence, a (heat-related) anectoid about Peking instead.

 

I've recently had breakfast with a couple - Chinese husband, German wife - who live there most of the year. They said that Peking is both extremely smoggy and extremely hot. But official temperatures rarely reach 40 degrees centigrade. The reason is easy enogh to see: There is a rule that if it's 40 degrees or more, factories need to close for the day. 

Lest you think this kind of thing only happens in extremely authoritarian societies: I once heard from people who were consultants with Copenhagen (?) city services. The city was obliged to provide snow clearing services when the ground was "covered by snow". Can you guess who were the last people in Copenhagen to notice when the ground was covered by snow? That's right: City officials.

If you teach stats, you may want to try and get your hand on a dataset of official Peking temperatures and see if you can quasi-replicate Quetelet: Presumably, actual temperatures follow a near-normal distribution, so in official Peking temperatures, you should see a bump at 40 degrees. This might also be useful when introducing regression discontinuity approaches.

P.S.: Another thingy the Chinese husband told: A taxi driver asked him: "What? You have a European wife and you live in China? Why?"

Pebbles, Vol. 43

1. "The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant". And: A timeline of NSA domestic spying; also: Bruce Schneier on why whistleblowers are needed. Und: Bespitzelung in den USA und Deutschland.

2. Orson Scott Card on four types of stories.

3. Interview with a two-handed climate scientist (via)

4. Epigenetics and the dissimilarities between "identical" twins.

5. The first issue of the open-source Journal of Causal Inference is out. (via)

6. Photographs of poor New Yorkers in the 1890s.

7. Ein Grund, nicht die SPD zu wählen.

8. There's a beetle named in hounour of Hitler. Not to be confused with the bug that looks like Hitler. Or the goldfish that looks like Hitler. Or the house that looks like Hitler. 

9. When love disappears.

10. Merton's concept of ritualism illustrated (via)

11. The technical trends of the 2012-13 football season

Estimating the Effect of Helmet Laws on Cycling-related Injuries: You Can't Do It Like That

In some places there are laws that require people to wear helmets when cycling. One may wonder what effects these regulations have on injuries. That's a question a paper (open access) by Jessica Dennis, Tim Ramsay, Alexis F. Turgeon and Ryan Zarychanski is trying to answer. They use data from the Canadian provinces, some of which introduced helmet legislation for minors only, while in other provinces the laws apply to people of all ages, and yet others introduced no such legislation. Have a look at the basic data:

Red lines are for adults, blue lines for minors. The dotted lines indicate when the legislation was introduced. You'll note that the provinces differ in when they introduced the laws. There are no clear breaks in the trends when the laws are introduced. On the other hand:

The rate of hospital admissions for cycling related head injuries in Canada among young people decreased from 17.0 to 4.9 per 100 000 person years between 1994 and 2008 (fig 1⇓). In provinces that implemented helmet legislation, the rate decreased steeply between 1994 and 2003, the time over which legislation was implemented, from 15.9 to 7.3 per 100 000 person years, corresponding to a 54.0% (95% confidence interval 48.2% to 59.8%) reduction. In provinces and territories that did not implement helmet legislation, the rate of admissions for cycling related head injuries also decreased between 1994 and 2003, but to a lesser degree. The reduction in provinces without legislation was 33.2% (23.3% to 43.0%), corresponding to a decrease from 19.1 to 12.9 per 100 000 person years. Among adults, the rate of admissions for cycling related head injuries was low in all provinces and across all study years. Between 1994 and 2003, the rate of head injuries in adults in provinces with helmet legislation decreased by 26.2% (16.0% to 36.3%), a reduction from 3.0 to 2.2 per 100 000 person years, compared with a negligible increase in rates in provinces and territories with no legislation, from 2.7 to 2.8 per 100 000 person years.

That's the authors' preliminary, narrative analysis. They point out that other cycling-related injuries also decreased. The authors then make some data analysis decisions which I would describe as suboptimal. First, they run an interrupted time series regression for each province separately, adjusting for trends. Second, they do not differentiate between provinces in which the laws apply only to minors and those where they apply to all, on the basis that some other study found spillover effects of legislation aimed at young people on helmet use in adults. Third, they take as their dependent variable hospital admissions for cycling-related head injuries as a ratio of hospital admissions for all cycling-related injuries.

The authors estimate no significant effects and conclude that "the incremental contribution of provincial helmet legislation to reduce the number of hospital admissions for head injuries is uncertain to some extent, but seems to have been minimal."

But you cannot conclude that from their analysis. First, recall that the provinces introduced their laws in different years. Dennis et al. throw that variation away and hence cannot control for time effects. Just pool the data and run a regression controlling for both province and year fixed effects! I guess that's almost all you need for identification, but one might consider controlling for differences in weather, which surely must have some effect on cycling.

Second, why not differentiate between laws applicable to all cyclists and minors only, respectively? Just use two different dummies. If the minors-only laws have effects on adults, that's information you want to explicate.

Third, and most importantly, you really, really do not want to adjust for all cycling-related injuries. The authors state that they do this in order to adjust for changes in cycling. But this makes no sense, and doubly so. (i) You automatically adjust-out any differences that the laws might make by reducing cycling. I believe there are studies suggesting such an effect, but I have not seen them. It would certainly make sense: Forcing people to wear a helmet makes cycling less attractive to some. (ii) There is a large literature on the topic of the consumption of risk (Peltzman effect). The idea is that when safety measures are put into place, people are going to consume some of that risk by adjusting their behaviour. For example, cyclists might cycle faster. So some of the effect of the law should be on cycling-related injuries not to the head.

In other words, this is an ideal design to find no effects even if there are some. I'm not saying that's deliberate - maybe it is more appropriate to say that this reflects disciplinary differences. For a medical researcher, it's probably natural to ask how much a helmet helps once there is an accident, which is roughly what the adjust-for-all-injuries strategy does. But if you measure that, you're not measuring the full effect of the law, which is the authors' stated aim. The concept of consumption of risk is standard knowledge in economics, and also known in other social sciences. And any undergraduate who has taken in, say, Wooldridge's Introductory Econometrics, should be able to suggest the design I outlined above, especially given the yummy data structure. Maybe that's just not obvious if your training was in medicine.

In this case, and as a noneconomist, I'll say it's the (hypothetical) economists who get it right. Oh, and I don't think you should use significance tests with this data.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 99

1. What happens to CEOs who don't want to hand over their customers' data to the NSA? (Jason Kottke/John Gilmore)

2. This looks like it might be a useful equation for stratification researchers, if they allowed themselves/dared to use it. (Gregory Cochran)

3. Robin Hanson and Bill Dickens develop a theory of fertility.

4. ". . . and if you be drunke annoint your privie members in vineger, and ye shall waxe sober." Advice from 1628 (via).

5. A graphical test for whether time trends moving in parallel suggest causality (Kaiser Fung)

David Brooks on Johann Georg Elser

Strangely enough, New York Times columnist David Brooks today writes about failed Hitler assassin Johann Georg Elser:

The Solitary Assassin

Based on the historical record, it appears Johann Georg Elser was the ultimate unmediated man. Though obviously a talented craftsman, he could not successfully work his way through the social process of his apprenticeship as a lathe operator. Then, when his wife gave birth to his child, he failed to marry her.

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to  have been a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of his age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the growing share of young men in their 30s who were living craftsmen's existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of Nazi society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and Führer. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of pacifism that were blossoming in his fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of warmongers, the strong belief that military hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to peace, the assumption that human lives have value.

It’s logical, given this background and mind-set, that Elser would sacrifice his career to assassinate Hitler. Even if he did not publicize any manifesto explaining his rationale, he was bound to be horrified by what he saw as a coming war. And, of course, he was right that there was a war coming.

But war was not the only danger facing the country. Another was the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who were so individualistic in their outlook that they had no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This was not a danger Elser was addressing. In fact, he made everything worse.

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to the Führer. By deciding to unilaterally assassinate Hitler, Elser betrayed all of these things.

He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. As a German citizen, he was bound by the Führer's will. He rose up against that will.

He betrayed the cause of peaceful government. Every time there is an assassination attempt like this, the powers that be get a little more enraged.

He betrayed the German state. The Führer did not unite the German people under him so that some solitary 36-year-old could make unilateral decisions about who should be Führer. Snowden self-indulgently undermined the will of the people, putting his own preferences above everything else.

Elser faced a moral dilemma. On the one hand, he was convinced that war was imminent. On the other hand, he had certain commitments as a citizen, as a member of the German people. Sometimes assassins have to assassinate. The situation is so grave that it demands they violate the law.

But before they do, you hope they will interrogate themselves closely and force themselves to confront various barriers of resistance. Is the situation so grave that it’s worth betraying your loyalty to the Führer, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally causing a death that can never be undone?

Judging by his comments recorded in the interrogation protocols, Elser was obsessed with the danger of war but completely oblivious to his betrayals and toward the damage he did to social arrangements and the invisible bonds that hold them together.

It's Not the Most Original of References, But This Really Is 1984

Lots of people have commented, of course, so there's not a lot that I can add, but let me say the following. One, surely the most trustworthy source - certainly more trustworthy than, say, Obama - on this is Ed Snowden himself, right? If he says that any analyst with sufficient clearance can target anyone at anytime, surely you should believe that, at least for the time being? Which leads us to the view that, just perhaps, the NSA is putting pressure on Obama, rather than the other way around, as suggested by commenter roystgnr here. If that's a little too spy novel for you, I'll say J. Edgar Hoover. Anyway, let me link to some pages, which I found useful: Bruce Schneier, brings the security expert's perspective to the table, and Arnold Kling provides a short political theory treatment. Steve Sailer wonders whether he's being paranoid. The Guardian has a page for people who have trouble telling PRISM from Verizon, compiled by Ian Black. May you all be safe in your homes.

Gender Studies as Anti-Science

I've recently said something along the same lines, but Harald Martenstein makes the point more clearly (link in German): Gender studies is not just not science, it is anti-science. Indeed. Scientists collect evidence, gender students denounce evidence as an instrument of the patriarchy. Scientists want to learn, gender students already know. Science stresses uncertainty, gender students know no doubts. It is a shame that these types are allowed a place in our universities. The average theologician is probably more of a scientist than the your typical professor of gender studies.

Complication of the Day

The president, who today begins a two-day retreat in California with Chinese president Xi Jinping, immediately faces complications from the disclosure of the programs, however. Obama planned to press Xi on China's use of cyber-attacks and hacking against US targets.

Dammit!

Around the Blogs, Vol. 98

1. Race as a biological and social construct (Razib Khan)

2. The case for taxing oral sex (Eric Crampton)

3. "My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes." (Arnold Kling)

4. Don't try to become good at something (Ben Casnocha)

5. If you really set your mind to it, you can find unfair inequalities everywhere. Scatterplot's mike3550 shows how to.

6. "Want to Know What Someone Really Thinks?" (Gretchen Rubin) The case seems way overstated to me, but you may want to add that tool to your box.

7. Wikipedia's most controversial topics (Samuel Arbesman/Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, János Kertész) (via). Who would have guessed that the most controversial topic in German Wikipedia is Croatia?

Pebbles, Vol. 42

Rolf Dobelli explains why you shouldn't follow the news.

Arnold Kling makes the argument that states are better than clans.

"A founder of the anti-GM food movement on how he got it wrong: Mark Lynas in conversation with Charlie Gillis"

Naughty logos (mildly NSFW) (via)

Preface and Chapter 1 (Abraham Lincoln) of Edward Jay Epstein’s book, Annals of Unsolved Crime (via). Don't be put off by the trashy graphics.

Paris in 1900 vs. 2013 photos (via)

Startup ideas that looked stupid but weren't (via)

Small island problems (via)

New journal called Porn Studies founded. Sounds interesting, but the Call for Papers/Mission Statement suggests it's some cultural studies crap.

Gender and Causality

As far as I can see, a lot of the astronomical number of citations Paul Holland's article "Statistics and Causal Inference" has accumulated is due to the fact that he coined the term "fundamental problem of causality", describing the fact that you can observe a unit only with or without treatment, but not both. Every time you mention that problem, you're pretty much obliged to cite Holland. I'm not so happy with Holland's coinage of the term, because I would have thought that an even more fundamental problem of causality - or rather, the estimation of causal influences -  than the one Holland referred to is that you cannot observe causality.

Like many others, I am also unhappy with the maxim "No causation without manipulation" that Holland's article spread. Writes Markus Gangl in his pretty good (but not untechnical) review of causal inference with observational data (pp. 38-39; gated link):

The perception that the counterfactual framework would primarily apply to the effects of policy interventions or other explicitly manipulated (or at least manipulable) treatments is perhaps the single most important impediment to its more widespread adoption in sociology. This perception is a major misunderstanding on the part of sociologists (cf. also Heckman 2005, Moffitt 2005, Sobel 1998). Whether nonmanipulable factors such as gender, race, or class affect life courses is a perfectly sensible counterfactual question to begin with [...]. With respect to gender, for example, the counterfactual “manipulation” in question is the determination of fetal gender at inception, which, moreover, is plausibly random (Rubin 1986), so that its causal effect is directly identified from the comparison of mean life-course outcomes among men and women from, for example, the same birth cohort or country. In this specific case, and ignoring SUTVA [...], the main impediment to causal inference is not so much a lack of controls, as a lack of representative samples (see Sobel 1998).

That's right: If you want to look at the causal effects of gender, just compare group means. I don't know, though, what Gangl is getting at with his remark on representative data - there's quite a few representative datasets that contain both men and women. The problem (that Gangl hints at in technical, general terms on p. 39) is rather that nobody really cares about the total effect of assignment to a sex. What people care about are the mediating mechanisms - testosterone, discrimination, that kind of thing.

Speaking of discrimination, feminism is a bewilderingly imprecise term, but I have found the following, very reductionist, model helpful when thinking about the strand sometimes called "radical feminism." You can see it as an ideology that took two figures of thought referring to the interrelationship between groups and applying them to gender. From anti-racism, radical feminism took the idea that differences between groups cannot be based on biological differences. From Marxism came the idea that history is mainly the struggle between groups, which leads to fanciful statements such as the description of rape as "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Note that the two combine nicely to shut off uncertainty. The no-biology view tells us that all observed differences between men and women must be due to discrimination of one sort or another; the men-against-women view tells us who's doing the discriminating. No further research needed.