A Two-Step Model of Class-typical Behaviour

Let's start with the example: In the U.S., high-SES people used to smoke more than low-SES people until about 1965. Then the lines crossed, once, and they never crossed again. These days, there are many high-SES people that you don't have to tell about health risks: to them, smoking is prole. And who wants to be prole?

More generally, there are many behaviours that low-SES people show more frequently than low-SES people, and vice-versa. Why? Let me propose a two-step model. First, there is some initial reason why a certain behaviour is shown more often by low-SES people. Then, the behaviour becomes associated with being low SES. Then, the behaviour is reduced even more by high-SES people. 

Smoking is, I think, a good example. Initially, high-SES people may have had access to better information, or have been better at processing the information, or had more self-control, or have put a higher value on health, or what have you, or all of the above. This created an initial smoking gap. This helped associate smoking with being prole. This, in turn, caused people who don't want to be seen as prole to smoke less.

In some cases, the reason for the initial reason could simply be chance.

The model implies that SES differences in smoking were easier to explain in terms of the psychological factors mentioned above (more self-control, etc.) in 1970 than today. Generalizing this is left as an exercise to the reader.

How to Keep Your Man Happy

1. Have sex with him when he wants to.

2. Don't question his respectability.

It seems to me these are the two rules that are true for almost every man, and at the same time are specific to keeping your man happy, rather than keeping your spouse happy.

Cops Don't Shoot People, Guns Do

Eric Crampton:

I'm a fan of the right to keep and bear arms. But I prefer unarmed police and restricted gun rights to strong gun rights combined with a police force that regularly shoots civilians 'by accident'.

This is in the context of a discussion that uses the U.S. as an example of a country where cops bear arms as a default and New Zealand as an example of a country where they don't. The danger of police carrying guns is readily apparent given recent events and discussions about them in the U.S.: if they have guns, cops might use them all too often. I'm guessing a comparison of death by cop statistics between New Zealand and the U.S. would support that view.

But there's another important variable: the availability of guns to citizens. Apparently (based on information in the thread I link to above), it is pretty limited in NZ, whereas in some U.S. states, any Tom, Dick and Harry can buy a gun. Let me submit the theory that this is what really counts. I'm basing this view on a third data point: Germany. Here, cops routinely carry guns. If you play your music too loud at 10.01 p.m., the cops you'll find knocking on your door will be carrying fully loaded pistols. And yet, in 2011, police fired only 85 bullets while on duty (presumably not counting training), of which 49 were warning shots and 36 aimed at people; 15 people were injured and 6 killed. The numbers for 2010 were 96, 59, 37, 17 and 7, respectively.

Let me wildly generalize from that small heap of data and assumptions: When the probability is high that the other person has a gun, police will be quick to shoot. Part of this is split-second rational(ish) decision making, but there is also a wider institutional context in which this occurs - such as police guidelines about when to shoot and where to aim. The way to reduce police killings of citizens is hence to make it hard for citizens to bear arms.

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.

Why Is Quitting Smoking So Hard?

Quitting smoking is generally considered very hard. Anecdotally, most attempts seem to fail. Malcolm X is said to have said that quitting Heroin is not easy, but smoking is the real challenge.

I can't speak to the biochemistry of it all, but from a purely anecdotal-behavioral perspective, it is not obvious why quitting smoking should be particularly hard. I can see one big argument for why it should be easy and one for why it should be hard.

1. Should be easy. Beyond the addiction itself, there's little reason to smoke. It is not hard to see why people would consume alcohol or heroin: They're psychoactive, in ways that are often experienced as extremely pleasant. Strictly speaking, nicotine's psychoactive, too, but, really, that's negligible. So, in that sense, smoking is the stupidest addiction there is: You don't even get a high out of it. Why not stop altogether?

2. Should be hard. Being addicted to heroin or alcohol fucks up your life. You probably won't be able to hold down a job, and mess up your personal relationships as well. (Yes, there are high-functioning alcoholics. This is one of those cases in which the existence of the term tells you that it's been invented to describe an exception. Nobody would come up with the term "low-functioning alcoholics" because that's just, you know, regular alcoholics.) In contrast, the near-term consequences of smoking are minor (smell, yellow teeth, shortness of breath), while the biggie (lung cancer) is far into the future, and you, like everyone else, are a time discounter.

So, no major reasons to continue, but not that many reasons to stop either. Should be a wash in those terms, right? And yet quitting smoking is considered unusually hard. Let me suggest that this is a variant of the phenomenon "bad is stonger than good" (low quality pdf). That is, other drugs give you a better reason to continue (good), but they also give you a better reason to quit (bad). Bad gets a higher weight than Good, so if both are stronger, people feel less of a motivation to kick the low-bad, low-good addiction than the one that's high on both. Why go through all the trouble when you're not hurting yourself all that much?

Why Should You Talk to Your Friends?

Most people would agree that (i) one of the reasons people have conversations is to exchange information, (ii) there are other reasons. An interesting question in this respect is to what extent voluntary, private conversations serve the purpose of exchanging information. It seems to me that even portions of conversation that appear to be about the exchange of information are not, actually. I am saying this because of experience. Sometimes I have been asked stuff that I couldn't answer right away, or couldn't answer in a way I would have deemed appropriate, and offered to follow up on this later on. Once I was asked my opinion about a topic (I don't remember what it was) and answered that my view was quite complex and I probably wouldn't be able to appropriately express it spontaneoulsy, but, fortunately, I had written a blog post about it in which everything was laid down in a well-structured manner and would be happy to send a link. That didn't go down well. If you would like to adjust your estimate of what percentage of private conversation is for exchanging information downwards, you should try something similar sometimes.

So, what is the purpose of having private conversations? Reasons given sometimes include stuff such as affirming group identity, exchanging jokes (laughing is fun, as is having one's jokes laughed at), getting into the other person's knickers, and so forth. All of these are real, but it seems that the main reason for having conversations with people you like is having conversations with people you like, which is pleasurable in itself. It's like listening to music. The purpose of which is not gaining information about sounds.

A related thought: You could do the following. Write down the five or ten points that you think best define the way you view the world. Then have someone you consider a good friend guess what you wrote. I am not saying you should do this. I haven't and I won't. Happy new year.

Why So Few Private Schools in Germany?

One of those many things that, for quite some time, I had been wondering about in the sense that I had stored it in the folder "phenomena not understood by me", but not in the sense that I had taken steps to transfer it into the "phenomena understood by me" folder is that Germany has so few private schools, compared to the U.K. and the U.S. Now there seems to be an obvious hypothesis. That is, Germany has a tiered (tracked) school system, while the U.K. and the U.S. do not. Hence, in order to separate your kids from the riff-raff, you don't need to send them to a private school if you're in Germany (provided they manage to get into a first-tier school).

That obviously entails the hypothesis that untracked school systems bring about private schools. If you compare countries, you'll want to adjust for the right variables. Someone else do it!

Screamers Gone Awry: The Availability Heuristic Meets Selection on the Dependent Variable

I've just finished Soccernomics by journalist Simon Kuper and sports economist Stefan Szymanski. Skipping the matter of the title, I can say that the authors oversell plausible ideas and the results of multivariate regressions, seem to believe in best practice analysis, have already been shown wrong by developments that happened after the book was finished, and yet, I read its 400 pages in three days (which is very quick by my standards). It's so entertaining! But let's not give the authors too much credit. After all, what could go wrong when you pack football and econometrics into one book? It's almost as irresistible a combination as topless darts.*

An interesting factoid from the book is that only about two percent of shots from outside the eighteen-yard-box result in goals. The players are trying to score one of those spectacular "screamers" that they remember from televised matches, Kuper and Szymanski guess, and hence fall prey to the availability heuristic. But perhaps it's not simply that players remember spectacular goals better than failed attempts. Watching many live matches takes a lot of time, and matches to watch cluster on certain days, so much of football coverage is watched in the form of summary highlights of five to ten minutes. Perhaps that's especially true of professional footballers who will often themselves be at work when there are live matches to watch on the telly. And the highlights don't show all the attempts from outside the box, but they certainly show all that result in goals. In contrast, attempts from inside the box (I'm guessing) are shown at a much higher rate. Selection on the dependent variable. To be precise, that's even differential selection on the dependent variable.

On top of that, when live matches are watched, the teams that are on will often be way above average, including at converting long-distance attempts. Selection on the dependent variable again. Hence, some professional watches Gareth Bale hammer the ball into the top corner on Wednesday night and tries the same next Saturday, only to watch it sailing into the stands.

What coaches should do: Show their players a truly random sample of shots from outside the area. Ten minutes once a week should help.

_____

*Best sentence from the link: "When L!VE TV was Millwall FC's shirt sponsor, they originally wanted to advertise this show on the shirts, but club bosses nixed that idea because they were worried it might encourage fans to throw darts." The sentence is funnier if you know a bit of context. A fine link, that one. It does not, however, mention my favourite episode "Topless Darts on the Titanic" ("Oh, no! An iceberg! Let's hope it melts before we hit it!").

Comments, Journal Space, the Internet, and the Cynical Theory of Journals

Andrew Gelman, discussing scientific standards in the social sciences, relates the following:

Recently I sent a letter to the editor to a major social science journal pointing out a problem in an article they’d published, they refused to publish my letter, not because of any argument that I was incorrect, but because they judged my letter to not be in the top 10% of submissions to the journal. I’m sure my letter was indeed not in the top 10% of submissions, but the journal’s attitude presents a serious problem, if the bar to publication of a correction is so high. That’s a disincentive for the journal to publish corrections, a disincentive for outsiders such as myself to write corrections, and a disincentive for researchers to be careful in the first place.

Commenter WB wonders:

Why don’t journals simply post serious criticisms and important corrections on their websites? Any reluctance to admit mistakes and publish corrections seems inexcusable given how easy it is to post items online. Obviously, websites don’t face the strict space limitations of print journals. So online sections could be used to publish items that aren’t “in the top 10% of submissions to the journal,” but are nonetheless important and worth the attention of readers.

And Gelman replies:

I suppose one reason they don’t do it is that it would take effort and expense to set up the website. Another difficulty is the need to review the critiques. If it were easier to publish a letter to the editor, I suppose the journal would get more submissions, then they’d need to find more reviewers, etc.

Yeah, maybe. But for the time being I'll hypothesize that the cynical theory of journals explains a larger chunk of the variances.

Differences: Smallness and Closeness

When you look out into the distance, the distances between nearby objects are magnified relative to the distance between objects that are further away. Strangely enough, this is a good model for how the psyche works more generally; people are well aware of differences between "objects" that are "close". This way of dealing with limited cognitive differences is useful. For example, it is more important for you to understand the differences in character between your two brothers than it is for your best friend; it is more important for a New Yorker to know the difference between the North and South Bronx than it is for a Bostoner, and so forth. Also, knowing about the differences between the North and South Bronx is easier when you live in New York. That is, motivation and opportunity, the two horsemen of psychology, are at work again.

Keeping this in mind helps you avoid violations of other people's vanity. Many people have pointed to photos claiming that the person pictured "looks like you"; they were always wrong. Likewise, I once talked to a Frisian who declared that everything south of the river Elbe is Southern Germany, but I can assure you that residents of Cologne don't think they reside in the same corner of the country as Bavarians, and they don't like being told otherwise.

This is sometimes referred to as the vanity, or narcissism, of small differences, but perhaps it is not only the smallness of the differences that counts, but also the fact that differences which are nearby are easier to see. Your typical socialist will see Rothbard and Friedman as more or less interchangeable, but if you've actually read them, it's genuinely easy to point out differences between the two, not least because Rothbard spends a considerable portion of his time pissing in the general direction of Friedman. Which may well be an instance of the narcissism of small differences.

Three Quick Shots

1. If you like outlandish academic papers, how about "An examination of Rushton’s theory of differences in penis length and circumference and r-K life history theory in 113 populations" by Richard Lynn? Here's the abstract:

Rushton’s (1985, 2000) r-K life history theory that Mongoloids are the most K evolved, Caucasoids somewhat less K evolved, and Negroids the least K evolved is examined and extended in an analysis of data for erect penis length and circumference in three new data sets. These new data extend Rushton’s theory by presenting disaggregated data for penis size for European and North African/South Asian Caucasoids; for East Asian and Southeast Asian Mongoloids; for Inuit and Amerindians and Mestizos, and for thirteen mixed race samples. The results generally confirm and extend Rushton’s r-K life history theory.

Seriously, though, this paper is pretty uninformative for the same reason that most research on sex differences is pretty uninformative: It uses nonrepresentative samples.

2. A NY Times comment by Thomas Edsall (via) discusses disagreements about economic inequality. Basically, economists seem to have different opinions on whether consumption inequality is more important than income inequality, and if so, which consumption counts and how it should be measured. This illustrates a pervasive point about the inequality debate in both academic circles and society in general. Few people care about economic inequality per se; what they really mean is human well-being. But the psychological theory that would tell you how inequality translates into well-being is, basically, absent, and people work with implicit assumptions all the time. For example, if you think that consumption inequality is the only kind that matters, you are implying (whether or not you're aware of it) that nobody's ever suffered because his colleague down the hall earned ten percent more. Speaking of which, the concept of the reference group is old, but, unless I've missed something, social scientists have yet to come to a conclusion on what the relevant reference group for a person is. I suspect that has nothing to do with social scientists' laziness and a lot with reality not lending itself to a general answer.

3. Via Steve Sailer, here are some results from a study of the representation of women among authors of academic papers (the dots represent subfields within a discipline, such as "socilology of the family"):

You could explain the differences in representation between economics and sociology as a consequence of economics being much more mathematical than sociology, combined with the fact that women tend to be underrepresented where maths features heavily. Unfortunately, this theory runs into the immediate problem of women being underrepresented in economics even relative to probability and statistics. However, both observations are consistent with a two-step selection model. In a first step a person either does or does not go into a social science field, and in a second step, the more specific discipline is selected. This is basically the same explanation I've offered for why there are no romantic comedies for men. Well, sort of.

The Growing Social Gradient in U.S. Educational Attainment and the Shadow of Meritocracy

Here's from a New York Times article by Jason DeParle John Cohen links to:

Poor students have long trailed affluent peers in school performance, but from grade-school tests to college completion, the gaps are growing. With school success and earning prospects ever more entwined, the consequences carry far: education, a force meant to erode class barriers, appears to be fortifying them.

“Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer — the place where upward mobility gets started,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine. “But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.”

The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed.

Class an increasingly good predictor of academic success after decades of equal opportunity efforts? That's just what my theory of the changing relative importance of external resources and personality predicts.

The article presents a laundry list of possible influences on the phenomenon, all of which probably explain some of the variance. My theory suggests that a nonnegligible portion of the growth of the gap is explained by growing differnces in the personality characteristics that you need to succeed academically. And indeed:

Income has always shaped academic success, but its importance is growing. Professor Reardon, the Stanford sociologist, examined a dozen reading and math tests dating back 25 years and found that the gap in scores of high- and low-income students has grown by 40 percent [...].

Reasons given for this: The rich provide more "enrichment" and enjoy an "advocacy edge". Again, that probably plays some role, and data is cited to the effect that lower-class students finish college less often even holding skills constant. But I don't think you can understand that kind of phenomenon unless you look at past meritocracy, and acknowledge that children will tend to resemble their parents no matter what.

I predict that we're going to see a lot of handwringing like this in the coming years and decades. As societies stay relatively meritocratic, class will become a better and better predictor of education. This will lead to more pressure to tackle the remaining deficits in meritocracy. This will only help to solidify the phenomenon it was meant to rectify. And so on, and so forth, civil war.

The Best Blog Posts of 2012: Vanity Edition

After my post on other people's 2012 posts that I liked best, here are ten of my posts from last year that I find more worthwhile than the others. In chronological order:

• How "Social Distance" Is Misleading
• The within-between Fallacy
• The Discrimination Fallacy
• The Argument from the Absence of Apocalypse
• Poverty and Life Outcomes: A Theory of the Changing Relative Importance of Resources and Personality
• Why You Shouldn't Borrow Books from Acquaintances
• The Greatest Tracks of the 1990s, Part 3: 30-1
• Testing vs. Matching and the Attraction of the Aphorism
• Sometimes You Need Both Blades of the Scissors
• Why Most Studies of Male-Female Differences Are Useless

This is the last installment of my turn-of-the-year flurry in linklists. I promise the next post will contain substantial blocks of new text written by me.

Testing vs. Matching and the Attraction of the Aphorism

Don't ask me where it was, but I recently came across an internet comment that dismissed 19th century novels. These novels, the commenter said, traded in aphorisms, such as Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." An interesting question with regard to this statement is whether it's true, and if you want to know, the commenter argued, you should turn to the social and behavioural sciences, not old novels. To him (I think it was a he), 19th century novels were made redundant by the modern social and behavioural sciences like punchcards were made redundant by PCs.

My initial reaction (which I kept in my head) was that if you want to learn about family happiness, you should by all means turn to the social and behavioural sciences; read Tolstoy if you appreciate his language, characterizations, or plots.

But now I’m not so sure that gets to the heart of the matter. I am currently reading Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (in German, mind), and it is full of apodictic statements about how the human mind works. Thing is, these are among the best bits of the novel. What’s going on?

In a different context, Karl Smith writes:

The world is extremely complicated and doesn’t make sense – at least not in the way we want it to. We don’t want to understand the world simply by following some complex routine of intellectual gymnastics. We want it to makes sense intuitively. We want it to bound up in a single completely digestible ball. The world, sadly, does not always comply.

So we build miniature models of the world in our minds – fictions that do make sense. When we run into a part of the world that doesn’t co-operate we either shoehorn our observations into that miniature model or tear through, blogs, articles and books until we find someone who can.

The statement “it makes sense” is, however, a statement about how pleased we are with our efforts to shoehorn observations into our miniature model. It is not a statement about our understanding of the world.

To check our understanding of the world we have to ask not “does it make sense”, but “how would I know if I was wrong?”

“How would I know if I was wrong?” is, of course, the Popperian ideal of Capital-S Science: You try to show that your guess was incorrect; if you cannot show this, you accept that your is correct – tentatively, for the time being. As a measure of caution, you’re biasing yourself against your guess.

The other mode of comparing data to guesses Smith describes is biased in favour of confirmation. This describes how people approach this problem most of the time. For example, there is a study (the citation to which escapes me right now) that looked at doctors diagnosing. The standard procedure seems to be that doctors listen to patients for a while, develop a guess about the problem and then ask follow-up questions in order to confirm that guess.

In other words, the mind uses a particular version of satisficing. If the data and the model match, that’s good enough, and if it’s good enough, that produces a pleasant sensation, like completing another row in Tetris.

I submit that the aphorism works by making sense of disparate data, thereby reducing the need to compute. A bit like factor analysis, if you don’t mind another simile. Reduction of the need to compute produces pleasure. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a just-so evopsych story about why this should be so.

In contrast, when you’ve internalized Science, you’ve internalized uncertainty, which is unpleasant. This is one reason why reading novels is more fun than doing science.

Of course, testing is a much better way of getting at the truth than matching. But then, novels are not for truth, they're for entertainment.

Poverty and Life Outcomes: A Theory of the Changing Relative Importance of Resources and Personality

Why do the poor experience low-quality outcomes in areas such as health, education, and crime? Bryan Caplan has recently been arguing "that social scientists need to search for factors that cause both poverty and irresponsible behavior. Such as? Low IQ, low conscientiousness, low patience, and plain irrationality" (also here and here; critical comment here). The position he is disputing is what you might call the Trading Places interpretation: low-quality outcomes are the consequence of the social situation called poverty. According to this view, there's a big fat causal arrow running from poverty to outcomes such as those mentioned above. In Caplan's model, there are two big fat causal arrows from a summary variable you could call "personality" (which encompasses low IQ, low conscientiousness, etc.) to both poverty and other outcomes of interest (a textbook "third variable" explanation).

I'm ambivalent about Caplan's position. On the one hand, his actual line of argument is deficient bordering on the ridiculous - among other things, it suggests he's never heard of opportunity costs, which would be kinda surprising for a professor of economics. On the other, I agree with the conclusion that both social scientists and laypeople are much too quick to interpret a correlation between poverty and some problem outcome as a poverty effect, and that much more weight should be put on personality as an alternative explanation. Sociological work is perhaps particularly bad in this respect.


My own model is a bit more nuanced. Let's start by imagining we had found a way to partial out those bits of the poverty-problem correlation that are due to poverty as a consequence (e.g., you become unemployed, and hence poor, due to bad health). It seems to me that 100% of the remaining correlation can be explained by "personality" (Caplan's focus) plus the structural restrictions brought about by poverty (standard sociological focus). It follows logically that the portion of the variance explained by one of those two factors must go up when the proportion of the variance explained by the other goes down, and vice versa.

My model applies to societies that today are relatively affluent and meritocratic, such as the USA, Germany or Japan. Back in the day - let's say 150 years ago - the common explanation for the poverty-problems correlation used to be in terms of "personality", but actually much of the reason for its existence was structural. Then structural explanations became more popular, and with it efforts to tear down the structural impediments to better life outcomes. These efforts were effective to a large degree: opportunities actually became more equal. This is another way of saying that the portion of the correlation explained by structural restrictions went down, which, in turn, means that the effect of personality must have gone up.

If true, this implies a neat "perverse" effect (in the sense in which the word is used in sociology): the more one type of explanation for the poverty-problems correlation is believed, the less true it becomes. 

So far my argument may have brought to mind programmes that allow young people from low-income families access to universities (and hence better-paying jobs), for example. But there's more to it, namely intergenerational transmission and the shadow of meritocracy.

In order to demonstrate the logic of the argument, let's first point to the fact that children tend to resemble their parents (their personalities are positively correlated). Let's also note that societies can vary in the degree to which they are meritocratic. One could say - non-normatively - that some people "belong" at the top (the intelligent, industrious, etc.), while others "belong" at the bottom (the dull, lazy, etc.). "Belong" here means simply that we would expect these people at certain positions in society, and these expectations should be the stronger the more meritocratic a society is. But we cannot predict the degree of "fit" we observe simply by looking at how meritocratic a society is now. We also need to look at the past: If a society has been highly meritocratic for a long time, children will tend to already start out in the place of the social structure where they "belong". This is due to the positive correlation between children's and their parents' personalities.

This view, if true, has a number of implications.

(i) You cannot judge the degree to which a society is currently meritocratic by looking at the social mobility which it exhibits. Holding current meritocracy (and parent-child resemblance) constant, we would expect societies with a long tradition of meritocracy to exhibit less mobility. Hardly anybody who talks about this topic understands this.


(ii) We should expect a lower "fit" between personality and social position in those groups who can't have benefited much from past meritocracy, such as recent immigrant groups.


(iii) If you make a society more meritocratic, you should expect the biggest movements right away. For example, programmes that allow children of low-income parents access to univerity will be most effective shortly after their introduction. After a few generations, there won't be so many many highly talented kids left among the potential beneficiaries.


(iv) Caplan's model is more true today than it would have been 150 years ago, because it became unfashionable.


The model also explains why the left (as in "people who favour lots of social mobility") used to like IQ tests, now don't.


An illustration: the social gradient in health
In the 19th century, when these things were first measured, it became apparent that the poor experienced worse health than the rich. In the middle of the last century, it was expected that this poverty-health correlation would soon disappear in affluent western countries due to improvements such as clean drinking water for everybody and universal healthcare (doesn't apply to all nations). Dirty drinking water-type illnesses did indeed disappear, but the social gradient stuck around. These days the leading causes of morbidity and mortality are too much food, alcohol and nicotine. According to some (standard citation), the continuing significance of socioeconomic status as a predictor of health is due to high socioeconomic status allowing access to a multitude of varied resources, such as money, networks and knowledge; access to such resources will be beneficial no matter what the specific causal channels from status to health are. Others contend that individual behavioural choices are important, and according to Linda Gottfredson's theory, the actual fundamental cause is not socioeconomic status, but general intelligence, which correlates positively with the former. My view is that Gottfredson's focus on intelligence is too narrow; that you must also include factors such as high time discounting and preferences for risk taking and that these personality factors are more important now than they used to be. Note how nicely this is in line with the change in the leading causes of poor health: dirty water then, too much to drink now.


Odds and ends
(i) Very careful readers may have noted that my dynamic general model of meritocracy and intergenerational mobility made an unspoken assumption; namely, that the personality traits that were beneficial for parents will also be beneficial for children. The less true this is, the more intergenerational mobility we should expect, holding all else equal.


(ii) I made a clean distinction between "structural" and "personality" influences. But the former may influence the latter. For example, Daly and Wilson (scroll down to p. 1271) hypothesize that growing up in a neighbourhood where life expectancies are low causes people to discount future consequences of actions more (they also present some evidence, but it's low-quality). If this type of explanation is true, it is not crystal-clear whether to model time discounting simply as a personality variable or a consequence of structural disadvantage. Which solution you choose will depend on the exact question you're asking, but take this as a note of caution to give it some thought.


Where credit's due
With a bit of inspiration from Thilo Sarrazin and Steven Pinker not otherwise acknowledged.

Hansi Mourinho-Tajfel

So, the festivities have begun, and Hansi Flick gave journalists something to write about:

The Germany assistant coach Hansi Flick has apologised for saying his players would need steel helmets for protection against Cristiano Ronaldo's free-kicks.

The comment made earlier on Friday before the team's departure for Lviv caused a stir in Germany due to its military connotations.

[...]

Flick had replied "I think just steel helmets and to make themselves big" when asked how Germany planned to deal with free-kicks from Portugal's Ronaldo in their opening Group B game in Lviv on Saturday.

Ugh, and this year's championships are held in Poland and Ukraine. Yeah, I know, the German army ran riot almost everywhere you could hold a European championship, but I guess in Poland and Ukraine such a statement is a little trickier than in, say, France or Belgium.

So, why? One answer is that, yes, that Ronaldo guy has an eminently hard shot and you might wish for a helmet should the ball come your way. Couple that with the fact that this whole fashion of being sensitive towards other people's feelings never really caught on in football - a dressing room's not a sociology seminar - and you can see how Flick might spontaneously come up with a wording that turns out to be not all that wise. (As you might have guessed, he has already apologized.)

On the other hand, the way the role is interpreted in the current German national team setup, talking to the press is one of the main responsibilities of the "assistant coach". And Flick, while not a major player in German intellectual life, doesn't strike me as an idiot. Are we really supposed to believe that was a gaffe?

Here's a more interesting theory. Ever since 2006, everybody's been saying what a likable, multicultural, attractively playing team Germany are. Also, Germany have won absolutely nothing since 1996, despite being among the favourites due to the quality of the players in recent years. There's a feeling that it's about time.

What to do? Look to the past! Between 1980 and 1996, everybody in world football associated the following terms with the German national team: great stamina, ruthless, never-say-die, efficient, destructive, The Tanks. They won two European and on World Cup. 

Which is better, being liked and losing or being hated and winning? Decisions, decisions!

So I say Flick's comment is an attempt to use Mourniho's favourite public relations tactic: conjure up some hatred for the team, which, in turn, may be expected to cause the players to circle the wagons and put in that extra little bit of nitty-gritty which comes in handy when the other side are also excellent in terms of technical abilities and tactics.

Will it work? In a few hours, we'll know a little more.

Identity Formation and Indirect Signaling

Robert Wiblin and Katja Grace ponder why conflict, rather than compromise, is such a popular feature of fiction. Robert's answer is that cheering for an uncompromising character "allows us to signal how much we value loyalty and justice" without the costs that we'd have to face if we applied the uncompromising strategy in real life. Katja points out that this leaves unanswered the question why we should not use fiction to signal willingness to compromise. Her answer is that

there is no point in demonstrating that you will compromise. As a default, everyone can be expected to compromise, because it’s the rational thing to do at the time. However it’s often good to look like you won’t easily compromise, so that other people will try to win you over with better deals. Celebrating ruthless adherence to idealistic principles is a way of advertising that you are insane, for the purpose of improving your bargaining position. If you somehow convince me that you’re the kind of person who would die fighting for their magic tree, I’ll probably try to come up with a pretty appealing deal for you before I even bring up my interest in checking out the deposits under any trees you have.

This jibes well with my view that a nonnegligible portion of human behaviour can be understood as signaling power (see here). It also nicely illustrates that much of "signaling" is not really signaling to others, but rather to yourself, i.e., internal affirmation of identity. Think about it: Watching movies that feature uncompromising heroes is not really going to make others more likely to believe that you are the uncompromising type. Indeed, they may conclude the opposite: "He likes tough guy movies because they make him forget he's such a loser in real life." But identifying with the tough guy may help you see yourself as a tough, uncompromising guy. That, it turn, is going to make others more likely to believe you are. It's signaling alright, but it's indirect. This kind of indirect signaling seems underappreciated by many; as a consequence, they misinterpret indirect as direct signaling.

The Mystery of Holiday and Airport Reading

Americans have coined the term "airport reading" for books that are easy, trivial reads. Here in the more densely populated Europe, a more illustrative term would be "train reading". The phenomenon's the same, though: Just check any bookstore in a train station, and you'll find that the books they have on offer are easier reads than the ones on display in your average bookstore. A related phenomenon is holiday reading - again, these are books that are easier than the avearage book.

It is somewhat puzzling that one should choose easier reading for travel and holidays, as has been noted by quite a few authors over the years. For example, Andrew Gelman writes: "I’ve never really understood the idea that a 'beach read' should be something light and fluffy. On the beach, you can relax, you have the time to get into anything." Likewise, I find a silent long-distance train carriage the ideal reading environment, superior even to a silent home. (Admittedly, not all train carriages are silent.) So why should station's book stores carry more trivial matter?

I guess this way of looking at things is an instance of the within-between fallacy: You look at your own reading choices on the beach or train and conclude that beach and train reading should be harder, not easier, books. But actually, a different kind of selection is going on. Beach and train reading is mainly reading by people who otherwise don't read a lot. That is, we are not talking of cases in which an easy book is chosen instead of a harder one, but those in which a book is chosen instead of none. Naturally, such choices will be slanted towards the easy-to-consume. Regular readers actually take the demanding stuff on trains and holidays.

But that seems to make the wrong prediction about the books on offer in the station's book store: we should expect the station's store to carry books that are about as demanding as those in a regular store; furthermore, we expect some of the really tough stuff on offer in the station. Yet they don't seem to sell much Joyce and Kant there.

I think this is explained by the fact that people who read regularly typically have quite a number of unread books at home, and will bring them. In contrast, people who don't read a lot think: "Got four hours to kill on the train, will pick up a thriller before departure." The train station's book store is hence dominated by the tastes of those who don't read regularly.

This suggests that these stores have been, and will be, hurt a lot by the new option of bringing your laptop to watch movies on it.

A General Theory of Political Philosophy

Political philosophies differ in large part because they make different assumptions about human nature, or what people are like. People thus differ in their political philosophy mainly because they make different assumptions about human nature. These differences in assumptions are due to differences in what different people are like, combined with people assuming that others are roughly like themselves. The fact that different people root for different political philosophies thus is itself evidence that political philosophies which make sweeping assumptions about human nature will be too simple.

Money Inequality: What Are You Talking about?

Reading the comments section at someone else's post, Matt comes up with an insight:

Briefly, we learn that [blogger] Jason [Kuznicki] and the freed-markets commentariat use wealth as a proxy for quality of life, while the left-progressive commentariat uses wealth as a proxy for power. No wonder they’re talking past each other!

That's one to remember. It might help you keep frustrating discussions short. But maybe quality of life is a little too broad. Let me explain.

Andrew Hammel links to an L.A. Times piece by Don Lee describing/praising redistribution, German style. According to the article, the great virtue of the German system is that even families with modest incomes can live well due to access to lots of subsidized stuff, like a well-run transport infrastructure and near-free healthcare and higher education.

Whatever your views on the wisdom of this approach, it makes you wonder about the utility of international inequality comparisons. According to the article, Germany is higher than the U.S. on forms of redistribution that don't go into the usual redistribution statistics - namely stuff that is available for free or at below-market prices for everyone irrespective of outcome. Poorer people tend to benefit more from this than richer ones.* As a consequence, measured financial inequality, even if measured after taxes, understates actual inequality if low-inequality countries do more redistribution-by-financing nonexcludable goods (stuff available for everyone).

That is, if by "actual inequality" you mean inequality in the quality of consumption. For example, if your city's got a great public transport system, the advantage in consumption of owning a fancy car is greatly diminished. But, irrespective of that, the owner of the fancy car still gets to signal that s/he is a person who can afford a fancy car. And perhaps that's what you actually care about: inequality in (ability to signal) status.

This highlights, I think, a weakness in the above distinction between quality of life and power. After all, isn't power - rougly, the ability to get what you want - a dimension of the quality of life (the more power, the more quality of life)? The real difference here seems to be between quality of consumption and status. Status is different from consumption because it's a positional good and hence strictly zero sum: If you get to be president, it means I don't. If I have the fanciest car in the neighbourhood, then you don't.

You can go further than that, though. After all, what we get out of status, or lack thereof, is enjoyment, or lack thereof. That is, insofar as status is interesting, it is because it confers a kind of consumption value. It all ultimately boils down to the currency of utility; are you surprised? You could say that some kinds of utility derived from being able to take the fancy car are "direct" (more comfort, less time spent on travelling, etc.), while those that work via status signaling are "indirect".

You could then rephrase the differences in the connotations that people hear when they hear "money inequality" as follows: it makes one bunch of people think mostly of differences in direct utility and others mostly of indirect utility. You could then say that, descriptively, lefties tend to argue that indirect utility is a large chunk of utility while righties and libertarians tend to see it as a small part.** Normatively, lefties would like to see the positive correlation between direct and indirect utility shrink, while libertarians would not. (With conservatives, I guess it depends on whom you ask.)

And of course the left see the utility of money and indeed pretty much anything as decreasing more quickly than libertarians and conservatives do. Standard arguments from the undesirability of money inequality qua power inequalitiy via negative externalities - rich chemical factory owner buys off legislators, can keep on polluting - boil down to this, I think.

On an unrelated note, here is a video called The Empire Farts Back.

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* I say "tend to" because this tendency is in part offset by the apparent countervailing tendency to subsidize stuff the educated care for more, such as libraries and opera houses.

** I wonder whether that's in part explained by research-by-introspection plus the false consensus fallacy. I have a hunch that libertarians tend to be less socially attuned and hence not care so much how they do relative to others. If they generalize from their feelings to "everybody's", they're bound to arrive at the conclusion that indirect utility ain't all that important.