The ideas I recently described about the similarities between abolishing slavery and debtors prisons have got me thinking about the similarities between no-fault divorce and the ease with which an employer can dismiss employees.
Attitudes about whether the breakup of a romantic relationship indicate that someone was at fault have influenced how easy it is to end such relationships. In subcultures I see here in Silicon Valley where it isn’t expected that people will assign any blame when a relationship ends, there is less cost to breakups (the people involved are more likely to remain friends). This means there is probably more trial and error in picking relationships (possibly at the cost of each individual relationship being valued less than in cultures where people are expected to make a marriage last a lifetime).
Silicon Valley also has a culture which attaches little importance to an employee leaving a job, and I suspect this extends to employees who get fired as well. The relatively high turnover means more acceptance of trial and error by both employees and employers, less damaging disputes when an employee leaves, and ease of a former employee getting a new job. This contributes to Silicon Valley’s success at enabling startups. (These comments are loosely based on my recollection of Annalee Saxenian’s book Regional Advantage).
Are these two sets of phenomena symptoms of one underlying attitude?
Is the casual attitude toward romantic relationships producing advantages similar to the advantages that Silicon Valley produces for startups?
Can a better understanding of these similarities help spread the Silicon Valley attitude toward employment to other regions?
Politics
The jury system in the U.S. originated in times when most communities were small enough that jurors were likely to feel close enough to defendants to have tribal/friendship/etc desires not to convict someone without cause, and to be sufficiently at risk from a defendant’s future crimes to take some care not to acquit the guilty. But today, those motives have broken down in many urban and suburban places, and trials are often decided by those who are too dumb to get off jury duty.
I don’t have good ideas for ensuring that jurors are chosen so that they feel like they’re part of the same small community as the defendant, so I’m hoping instead to create new incentives for jurors to care about verdicts.
Simply increasing the pay for serving on a jury would help to avoid the problem of jurors being selected for low intelligence, but I can’t tell how much of the problem that would solve.
I propose a additional ways of rewarding jurors based on results. If the jurors acquit, the jurors could get some large payment in 5 or 10 years if the defendant commits no crimes during that time, but no further payment if the defendant commits a crime. If the jurors convict, the jurors could get some large payment in 5 or 10 years unless the defendant has been exonerated or the conviction reversed on appeal.
The size of the payments would need to be carefully calibrated so that the average award is the same for juries that convict as it is for those that acquit.
Since it would take forever for the government to work out all the details needed to translate these ideas into a fair and predictable system, I’m wondering whether a private charity could implement them. Presumably there are significant legal obstacles to many kinds of payments to jurors, since it’s easy for such payments to be intended to serve the interests of one party to the trial. I can’t tell whether the relevant laws are broad enough to prohibit desirable incentives, or if so whether it’s feasible to relax those restrictions.
Jeff Hummel recently gave an interesting talk on the subject of how the law should treat a contract that involves one person becoming enslaved to another. The title made the talk sound like a quaint subject of little importance to present day politics, and I attended because Hummel has a reputation for being interesting, not due to the title of the talk. But his arguments were designed to apply not just to the status that was outlawed by the 13th amendment, but also to military service (not just the draft, but any type where the soldier can’t quit at will) and marriage.
Hummel argues that instead of asking whether slavery ought to be illegal, we should ask what a legal system ought to do when presented with a dispute between two people over enforcement of a contract requiring slavery.
Some simplistic notions of contracts assume that valid contracts should always be honored and enforced at all costs, but the term efficient breach describes exceptions to that rule (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject, I recommend David Friedman’s book Law’s Order as valuable background to this post).
In the distant past, people who failed to fulfill contracts and had insufficient assets to compensate were often put in debtors prisons. That was generally abolished around the time that traditional slavery was abolished, and replaced with a more forgiving bankruptcy procedure. Hummel suggests that this wasn’t a random coincidence, and that a slave breaching his promise to his master ought to be treated like most other breaches of contracts. If bankruptcy is the appropriate worst case result of a breach of contract, then the same reasoning ought to imply that bankruptcy is the worst result a legal system should impose on a person who reneges on a promise to be a slave.
Hummel noted that the change from debtors prisons to bankruptcy happened around the time that the industrial revolution took off, and suggested that we should wonder whether the timing implies that we became wealthy enough that we could afford to abolish debtors prisons, and/or whether the change helped to cause the industrial revolution. Neither he nor I have a good argument for or against those possibilities.
If this rule were applied to military service, unpopular wars would become harder to fight, as many more soldiers would quit the military. As far as I can tell, peer pressure kept soldiers fighting in any war I think they ought to have fought, so I think this would be a clear improvement.
The talk ended with some disagreement between Hummel and some audience members about what should happen if people want to have a legal system that provides harsher penalties for breach of contract (assume for simplicity that they’re forming a new country in order to do this). Hummel disapproved of this, but it wasn’t clear whether he was doing more than just predicting nobody would want this. I think he should have once again rephrased the question in terms of what existing legal systems should do about such a new legal system. Military/police action to stop the new legal system seems excessive. Social pressure for it to change seems desirable. It was unclear whether anyone there had an opinion about intermediate responses such as economic boycotts, or whether the apparent disagreement was just posturing.
Book review: Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff.
This book makes a few good points about what cognitive science tells us about differing concepts associated with the word freedom. But most of the book consists of attempts to explain his opponents’ world view that amount to defending his world view by stereotyping his opponents as simplistic.
Even when I agree that the people he’s criticizing are making mistakes due to framing errors, I find his analysis very implausible. E.g. he explains Bush’s rationalization of Iraqi deaths as “Those killed and maimed don’t count, since they are outside the war frame. Moreover, Bush has done nothing via direct causation to harm any Iraqis and so has not imposed on their freedom”. Anyone who bothers to listen to Bush can see a much less stupid rationalization – Bush imagines we’re in a rerun of World War II, where the Forces of Evil have made it inevitable that some innocent people will die, and keeping U.S. hands clean will allow Evil to spread.
Lakoff’s insistence that his opponents are unable to understand indirect, systematic causation is ironic, since he shows no familiarity with most of the relevant science of complex effects of human action (e.g. economics, especially public choice economics).
He devotes only one sentence to what I regard as the biggest single difference between his worldview and his opponents’: his opponents believe in “Behavior as naturally governed by rewards and punishments.”
His use of the phrase “idea theft” to describe uses of the word freedom that differ from his use of that word is objectionable both due to the problems with treating ideas as property and with his false implication that his concept of freedom resembles the traditional U.S. concept of freedom (here’s an example of how he rejects important parts of the founders’ worldview: “One of the biggest mistakes of the Enlightenment was to counter this claim with the assumption that morality comes from reason. In fact, morality is grounded in empathy”).
If his claims of empathy are more than simply calling his opponents uncaring, then it may help explain his bias toward helping people who are most effective at communicating their emotions. For example, a minimum wage is part of his concept of freedom. People who have their wages increased by a minimum wage law tend to know who they are and often have labor unions to help spread their opinions. Whereas a person whom the minimum wage prevents from getting a job is less likely to see the cause or have a way to tell Lakoff about the resulting harm. (If you doubt the minimum wage causes unemployment, see http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663 for a recent survey of the evidence.)
This is symptomatic of the biggest problem with the book – he assumes political disagreements are the result of framing errors, not differences in understanding of how the world works, and wants to persuade people to frame issues his way rather than to use scientific methods when possible to better measure effects that people disagree about.
The book also contains a number of strange claims where it’s hard to tell whether Lakoff means what he says or is writing carelessly. E.g. “Whenever a case reaches a high court, it is because it does not clearly fit within the established categories of the law.” – I doubt he would deny that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld fit clearly within established habeas corpus law.
This is a book which will tempt people to believe that anyone who agrees with Lakoff’s policy advice is ignorant. But people who want to combat Lakoff’s ideology should resist that temptation to stereotype opponents. There are well-educated people (e.g. some behavioral economists) who have more serious arguments for many of the policies Lakoff recommends.
A story (not online) in a recent issue of Liberty Magazine reports that research by Arthur C. Brooks shows that people who favor government spending on poverty programs give less to charity than those who don’t support such spending.
If that were only true for monetary donations, there would be a number of plausible questions that could be raised. But Brooks gets around those by showing that it is also true of blood donations.
Brooks’ findings should not be used to justify any particular ideology, since a willingness to act charitably doesn’t necessarily correlate with an understanding of the effects of political policies. It might be interesting to know if a willingness to act charitably correlates with more careful education concerning the effects of political policies, but that would be hard to objectively measure. Brooks’ findings should be used only to discredit people who claim that there’s a simple way to determine that advocates of a welfare state are more compassionate than advocates of smaller government.
Here is an excerpt from Brooks’ book, and other reports on his research are here and here.
Book review: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
This book presents carefully researched evidence that suicide bombers are motivated primarily by a desire to force democracies to withdraw troops from the territories claimed by the bombers, that they use rational strategies to achieve their goals, and that suicide bombers are acting mainly out of a sense of duty (like kamikazes) rather than the insanity of ordinary suicides or a desire for rewards in the afterlife.
The book’s style is fairly dry and slow to read.
He sounds like one of the most objective voices on this subject, although his objectivity is hard to verify. He is so careful to minimize partisan comments that his index only lists one entry for George Bush and none for Clinton. One place where this disappoints me is when he reports that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from any country described by the U.S. State Department as sponsoring terrorism. Since this covers a period including nearly 4 years of Clinton’s term, it suggests that the problem of falsely connecting governments such as Saddam’s with al-Qaeda is a more pervasive problem than just one dishonest president (although the State Department used a broader definition of terrorism than the suicide terrorism that the book deals with). I’m disappointed that Pape doesn’t analyze this enough to determine how much of this problem preceded Bush.
His use of the word nationalism to describe al-Qaeda’s aims doesn’t sound quite right, but it is close to the territorial, tribalistic motives that his evidence points to.
It’s only in the last few pages when he departs from reporting research and recommends strategies that he becomes unconvincing. His support for a fence over all of the U.S. – Mexican border seems unrelated to the rest of the book. Does he think stopping people from carrying bombs across the border will help (i.e. that it would be hard for a terrorist to make or buy a weapon after crossing the border)? Or does he hope to stop terrorists from crossing the border (which his book implies would require turning away nearly everyone from Islamic countries with U.S.-backed governments)?
He says “the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is on the verge of world domination … is pure fantasy”. His book provides some evidence for that conclusion, but it involves extrapolating from a small sample of terrorist campaigns to conclude al-Qaeda will stop at achievable goals. I’m uncomfortable with the way he dismissed such an important source of disagreement with excessive confidence and with limited analysis. (I’m also annoyed that he exaggerates the degree of alarmism of his opponents).
The Virgin Earth Challenge would be a great idea if we could count on it being awarded for a solution that resembles the headlines it’s been getting (e.g. $25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix).
But the history of such prizes suggests that even for simple goals, describing the terms of a prize so that inventors can predict what will qualify for the award is nontrivial (e.g. see the longitude prize, where the winner appeared to have clearly met the conditions specified, yet wasn’t awarded the prize for 12 years because the solution didn’t meet the preconceptions of the board that judged it).
Anyone who looks past the media coverage and finds the terms of the challenge will see that the criteria are intended to be a good deal more complex than those of the longitude prize, that there’s plenty of ambiguity in them (although it’s possible they plan to make them clearer later), and that the panel of judges could be considered to be less impartial than the ideal one might hope for.
The criterion of “commercial viability” tends to suggest that a solution that required additional charitable donations to implement might be rejected even if there were donors who thought it worthy of funding, yet I doubt that’s consistent with the intent behind the prize. This ambiguity looks like simple carelessness.
The criterion of “harmful effects and/or other incidental consequences of the solution” represents a more disturbing ambiguity. Suppose I create nanobots which spread throughout the biosphere and sequester CO2 in a manner that offends some environmentalists’ feelings that the biosphere ought to be left in its natural state, but otherwise does no harm. How would these feelings be factored into the decision about whether to award the prize? Not to mention minor ambiguities such as whether making a coal worker’s job obsolete or reducing crop yields due to reduced atmospheric CO2 counts as a harmful effect.
I invite everyone who thinks Branson and Gore are serious about paying out the prize to contact them and ask that they clarify their criteria.
This rather discouraging blog post provides some unusual analogies to historical conflicts that might help predict what will happen in Iraq. The analogies aren’t exact enough to be convincing by themselves, but are close enough to deserve some attention.
This book does an excellent job of reporting important evidence showing that group decisions can be wiser than those of any one individual. He makes some good attempts to describe what conditions cause groups to be wiser than individuals, but when he goes beyond reporting academic research, the quality of the book declines. He exaggerates enough to give critics excuses to reject the valuable parts of the book.
He lists four conditions that he claims determine whether groups are wiser than their individual members. I’m uncertain whether the conditions he lists are sufficient. I would have added something explicit about the need to minimize biases. It’s unclear whether that condition follows from his independence condition, partly because he’s a bit vague about whether he uses independence in the strong sense that statisticians do or whether he’s speaking more colloquially.
Sometimes he ignores those conditions and makes unconvincing blanket statements that larger groups will produce wiser decisions.
He makes exaggerated claims for the idea that crowds are wise due to information possessed by lots of average people rather than the influence of a few wise people. For instance, he disputes a Forsythe et al. paper which argues that a small number of “marginal traders” in a market to predict the 1988 presidential vote were responsible for the price accuracy. Surowiecki’s rejection of this argument depends on a claim that “two investors with the same amount of capital have the same influence on market prices”. But that looks false. For example, if the nonmarginal traders make all their trades on the first day and then blindly hold for a year, and the marginal traders trade with each other over that year in response to new information, prices on most days will be determined by the marginal traders.
It’s not designed to be an investment advice book, but if judged solely as a book on investment, I’d say it ranks in the top ten. It does a very good job of explaining both what’s right and what’s wrong with the random walk theory of the stock market.
He does a good job of ridiculing the “cult of the CEO” whereby most of a company’s value is attributed to its CEO (at least in the U.S.). I was surprised by his report that 95% of investors said they would buy stocks based on their opinion of the CEO. They certainly didn’t get that attitude from successful investors (who seem to do that only in rare cases where they are able to talk at length with the CEO). But his claim that “Corporate profit margins did not increase over the course of the 1990s, even as executive compensation was soaring” looks false, as well as being of questionable relevance to his points about executives being overvalued. And I wish he had also applied his argument to beliefs of the form “if we could just elect a good person to lead the nation”.
Chapter 6 does a good job of combining the best ideas from Wright’s book Nonzero and Fukuyama’s Trust (oddly, he doesn’t cite Trust).
He exaggerates reports that the stock market responded accurately to the Challenger explosion before any public reports indicated the cause. He claims “within a half hour of the shuttle blowing up, the stock market knew what company was responsible.” I don’t know where he gets the “half hour” time period. The paper he cites as the source says the market “pinpointed” Thiokol as the culprit “within an hour”, but it exaggerates a bit. If the percent decline in stock price is the best criterion, then the market provided strong evidence within an hour. If the dollar value of the loss of market capitalization is the best criterion, then the evidence was weak after one hour but strong within four hours.
He also claims “Savvy insiders alone did not cause that first-day drop in Thiokol’s price.”, but shows no sign that he could know whether this is true. He seems to base on the absence of reported selling by executives whom the law requires to report such selling, but he appears to overestimate how reliably that law is obeyed, and to ignore a large number of non-executive insiders (e.g. engineers). He does pass on a nice quote which better illustrates our understanding of these issues: “While markets appear to work in practice, we are not sure how they work in theory.”
Nick Szabo has a
I have one complaint: he says “acid rain in the 1970s and 80s was a scare almost as big global warming is today”. I remember the acid rain concerns of the 1970s well enough to know that this is a good deal of an exaggeration. Acid rain alarmists said a lot about the potential harm to forests and statues, but to the extent they talked about measurable harm to people, it was a good deal vaguer than with global warming, and if it could have been quantified it would probably have implied at least an order of magnitude less measurable harm to people than what mainstream academics are suggesting global warming could cause.