A recent report that the dangers of a large asteroid impact are greater than previously thought has reminded me that very little money is being spent searching for threatening asteroids and researching possible responses to an asteroid that threaten to make humans extinct.
A quick search suggests two organizations to which a charitable contribution might be productive: The Space Frontier Foundation‘s The Watch, and FAIR-Society, Future Asteroid Interception Research. It’s not obvious which of these will spend money more effectively. FAIR appears to be European and doesn’t appear to be certain whether contributions are tax-deductible in the U.S., which might end up being the criterion that determines my choice. Does anyone know a better way to choose the best organization?
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While checking out a possibly interesting hiking group, I stumbled on this amusing site: God Hates Figs.
Book review: Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior by Helmut Schoeck
This book makes a moderate number of interesting claims about envy and its economic effects, interspersed with some long boring sections. The claims are mostly not backed up by strong arguments. It was written 40 years ago, and it shows – his understanding of psychology seems more Freudian than modern.
His most interesting claim is that many societies have more envy than ours, and that prevents them from escaping poverty. An extreme example are the Navaho, who reportedly have no concept of luck or of “personal achievement”, and believe that one person’s success can only come at another’s expense. This kind of attitude is pretty effective at discouraging people in such a society from adopting a better way of growing crops, etc.
Unfortunately, his evidence is clearly of the anecdotal kind that, even if I were to track down the few sources he cites for some of them and convinced myself they were reliable, his examples are too selective for me to believe that he knows whether envy and poverty are correlated. His hypothesis sounds potentially important, and I hope someone finds a way to rigorously analyze it.
He describes a few attempts to create non-envious societies, with kibbutzim being the clearest example. He gives adequate but unsurprising explanations of why they’ve had mixed success.
He claims “The victims claimed by a revolution or a civil war are incomparably more numerous among those who are more gifted and enterprising”, but shows no sign that he knows whether this is true. He might be right, but it’s easy to imagine that he’s been mislead by a bias toward reporting that kind of death more often than the death of a typical person.
He mentions that tax returns have been public in some jurisdictions. I wish he did a better job of examining the costs and benefits of this (one nice example he gives is that people sometimes overreport income in order to appear more credit-worthy than they are).
On page 82, he describes Nazis as having “an almost equally fanatical attachment to the principle of equality”. He seems there to be referring to when they were in power, but somewhere else he implies they moved away from this belief when they gained power. He was born in Austria in 1922, and studied in Munich from 1941 to 1945, which gives him a perspective that we don’t hear much these days. How much of the difference in perspectives is due to his flaws, and how much of it is due to our focus on the worst aspects of Nazism? There’s probably a hint of truth to his position, in that hatred of the Jews partly started with an egalitarian disapproval of their success.
I found a number of other strange claims. E.g. “The incest taboo alone makes possible the co-operative and stable family group.”; “Lee Harvey Oswald’s central motive was envy of those who were happy and successful”; “In 1920 President Woodrow Wilson predicted class warfare in America that would be sparked off by the envy of the many at the sight of the few in their motor cars.”.
He says “No society permits totally uninhibited promiscuity. In every culture there are definite rights of ownership in the sexual sphere, for no society could function unless it had foreseeable and predictable rules as regards selection of the sexual partner.” I’m not sure how close-minded that would have sounded in 1966, but there are cultures today which discredit it fairly well.
If you read this book, I suggest reading only these chapters: 1,3,5,8,13,17,21,22.
Update: Mike Linksvayer has a better review of the book.
Bryan Caplan has a good post arguing democracy produces worse results than rational ignorance among voters would explain.
However, one aspect of his style annoys me – his use of the word irrationality to describe what’s wrong with voter thinking focuses on what is missing from voter thought processes rather than what socially undesirable features are present (many economists tend to use the word irrationality this way). I hope his soon-to-be-published book version of this post devotes more attention to what voters are doing that differs from boundedly rational attempts at choosing the best candidates (some of which I suspect fall into what many of us would call selfishly rational motives even though economists usually classify them as irrational). Some of the motives that I suspect are important are the desire to signal one’s group membership, endowment effects which are one of the many reasons people treat existing jobs as if they were more valuable than new and more productive jobs that can be created, and reputation effects where people stick with whatever position they had in the past because updating their beliefs in response to new evidence would imply that their original positions weren’t as wise as they want to imagine.
Alas, his policy recommendations are not likely to be very effective and are generally not much easier to implement than futarchy (which I consider to be the most promising approach to dealing with the problems of democracy). For example:
Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as “uneconomical.”
If I try hard enough, I can imagine this approach working well. But it would take a lot more than Caplan’s skills at persuasion to get voters to go along with this, and it’s not hard to imagine that such an institution would develop an understanding of the concept of “uneconomical” that is much less desirable than Caplan’s or mine.
Book review: Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War by Edward D. Mansfield
This book makes a convincing argument that it’s misleading to assume that democracies are less likely to wage wars. That assumption is true of mature democracies, but unstable nations that are trying to make a transition to democracy are more likely than autocracies to wage war. At least part of the reasons are increased nationalism, competition among politicians to be the most nationalist, and the weakness of stabilizing institutions.
The book offers some hints about how a transition to a democracy might be managed to minimize the risks, but this part of the book is more speculative and less convincing.
In spite of the book’s relevance to current events, it devotes little attention to the present. It covers the time period from the French revolution to the present with the perspective of a historian, and says as much about Iraq in 1948 as it does about the recent experiment with democracy in Iraq. It is somewhat valuable for reminding us how many attempts at democracy failed and have largely faded from collective memories.
The dry, scholarly style of the book is a bit mind-numbing.
Book review: Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology by Eviatar Zerubavel
This book is a refreshing and concise collection of interesting tidbits about cultural aspects of human minds. He points out many cultural quirks in our thinking that I suspect many people unconsciously assume are universal beliefs. Sometimes it’s easy to see once you’re provoked to think about it why we should consider something to be a cultural quirk (e.g. putting jam and jelly into two distinct categories rather than one). With others, such as whether the differences between male and female genitalia justify classifying the equivalent parts differently for each sex, I’m almost suspicious enough of his report that western culture had a different answer a couple of centuries ago than it does today to tempt me to check some of his copious references. And there are a few places where his cultural norms seem odd (e.g. his claim that daylight savings time seems natural).
With only 113 pages of actual text, it’s a quick read that would be worth reading for the entertainment value alone, and has the added benefit of shaking up one’s preconceptions.
Book Review: The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen
This book presents some interesting and refreshing speculations on how music and language evolved, emphasizing reasons for believing that music was at least as important as language during significant parts of human evolution. It stretches the limits of what we can figure out from the available evidence, so it’s likely the some of it is wrong. But his hypotheses appear more likely to help us ask the right questions than to lead us astray.
Mithen’s knowledge of archeology helps make his book different from most books about the human mind in that he emphasizes very different selective pressures at different stages in human evolution, corresponding to changes in conditions that our ancestors faced.
Here are some surprising and informative section titles that will tell you something about the flavor of the book: “The musical implications of bipedalism”, and “The sexy hand-axe hypothesis”.
I was intrigued by his description of how music helps a group cooperate by synchronizing their emotions. But he helps point out the limits of those benefits by noting that the chants at Nazi rallies that helped unite most of the German people.
Book review: Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova
Castranova is one of the first intellectuals to notice the importance of new societies that are being created in cyberspace. Much of this book is devoted to (sometimes redundant) explanations of why they are more than just games.
Around the middle of the book, he switches from describing a typical world for the benefit of those who doubt the importance of virtual worlds to describing how to design good worlds. This is where I started to find the book interesting and the questions thought-provoking, but the answers often unconvincing.
His most important discussion is about the near-anarchy that prevails in most virtual societies. He attributes this partly to the “Customer Service State” of for-profit world builders who are too cheap to pay for as much government as he assumes citizens want. But he seems to believe this is too inevitable to be worth much analysis. His more interesting question is why don’t the world’s citizens organize a government of their own? His answer is that citizens don’t have enough power over each other to enforce laws they might create. But he doesn’t convince me this is true (are boycotts useless? is repeatedly killing an outlaw not punishment?), nor does he explain why the designer face little pressure to change the design of the world to make it easier to enforce laws (what would happen if the world were designed to enable one person to effectively banish a person she doesn’t like from her view of the world?). I suspect part of the answer is that there’s less demand for government than he expects. I see some hints that his desire for government in cyberspace is a simple reflection of his desire for government in the real world. Yet I’d expect the analysis of whether government is desirable to be nontrivially affected by such differences as whether poverty and death cause much harm.
He claims “A fun economy should have property, theft, and jail too”, but only gives a few cryptic hints about what theft and jail add to an economy.
He claims “there should be no goods which never depreciate”, and partly justifies that by pointing to some benefits of a continuing need to produce new goods, but leaves me wondering why the rule should be universal or even close to universal.
He hints at the desirability of creating p2p virtual societies so that control over them can be decentralized instead of being determined by a corporate owner, but I’m disappointed that he fails to analyze whether this is practical.
One insight I liked was this description of how to deal with the desire for everyone to have high status: “How do you make a world in which everyone is in the top 10 percent? The answer: AI.”
He has a disturbing idea about the military uses of virtual worlds – an aggressor need not be hampered by unfamiliarity with the land he’s invading if he has unlimited ability to practice the invasion in simulation.
He has some ideas about how virtual worlds might help deal with threats such as grey goo, but doesn’t develop them as well as I would like. His ideas on using virtual worlds to make AIs more friendly appear to anthropomorphise AI in a rather naive and dangerous manner.
Book Review: Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery by David Warsh
This book is an entertaining (but sometimes long-winded) history of economic thought that focuses on the role of technological knowledge, showing how sporadic attempts starting with Adam Smith to incorporate it into the mainstream of economic thought kept getting marginalized until a paper by Paul Romer in 1990 finally appears to have convinced the profession to include it in their models as a nonrival, partly excludable good.
Warsh writes in a style intended to be appropriate for laymen, but I find this rather frustrating, as it leaves out a fair amount of technical detail that I would like to understand, but probably fails to satisfy laymen since the subject of the book will only seem important to readers who already have enough familiarity with economics to handle a more technical discussion.
I liked an analogy that the book reports of the history of maps of Africa, where improved standards of accuracy sometimes caused mapmakers to produce less informative maps as they removed unverified reports of features from interior parts of Africa well before they were able to replace them with something more reliable. The book shows how similar processes in economic models have resulted in similar blank spots in economic thought.
He claims that Romer’s theory amounts to an argument against free markets and in favor of some poorly specified state management of some aspects of the economy. But I saw no analysis to support that conclusion. All I see are arguments that classical economic theory is too simplistic, that we probably need to study lots of messy empirical evidence before deciding what Romer’s theory says about state action.
His analysis of the Microsoft antitrust case provides a better argument than I’d previously heard for breaking up Microsoft into an OS company and an Apps company, but still leaves me wondering why it would make much difference – most of the causes of Microsoft’s OS monopoly power would remain unchanged. His claim (apparently reporting Romer’s remarks) that Microsoft solved the double marginalization problem in a way that a breakup wouldn’t alter seems confused. He is right to point out that those pricing effects weren’t the main issue, although he doesn’t seem to understand why (see Lessig’s The Future of Ideas for a good explanation of how monopolies stifle innovation).
He has a chapter titled “How the Dismal Science Got Its Name” which says nothing about the actual origin of that term (which was coined by a racist who hated Mill’s belief that blacks could be productive without being slaves).
Book Review: Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile by Daniel Nettle
This book provides a fairly good, but not very novel, description of what does and does not influence happiness, the problems with measuring it, and some bits of evolutionary theory that hint at why it is hard to achieve lasting increases in happiness.
The claim I found most important is that “If you control for social class, there is almost no relationship between income and life satisfaction.” This seems to have important implications for what kind of social equality we ought to be encouraging. I’m disappointed that he doesn’t say enough about this for me to determine how robust this conclusion is to the way it’s measured.
I’m disappointed that he ends with some misleading arguments for an alarming trend of increased distress among the least happy. He reports that suicides have increased among the young in recent decades, but fails to note that overall suicide rates in the U.S. have declined over that period. He claims “People are as hard as they ever have”, but cites no references for that, and Robert Fogel has reported research that reached the opposite conclusion in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.