I normally don’t repeat things that are reported on Marginal Revolution since I assume it would be redundant for most readers of my blog, but this story about the relative importance of sports and coups in Fiji is amusing enough that I can’t resist.
Politics
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: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock
This book is a rather dry description of good research into the forecasting abilities of people who are regarded as political experts. It is unusually fair and unbiased.
His most important finding about what distinguishes the worst from the not-so-bad is that those on the hedgehog end of Isaiah Berlin’s spectrum (who derive predictions from a single grand vision) are wrong more often than those near the fox end (who use many different ideas). He convinced me that that finding is approximately right, but leaves me with questions.
Does the correlation persist at the fox end of the spectrum, or do the most fox-like subjects show some diminished accuracy?
How do we reconcile his evidence that humans with more complex thinking do better than simplistic humans, but simple autoregressive models beat all humans? That seems to suggest there’s something imperfect in using the hedgehog-fox spectrum. Maybe a better spectrum would use evidence on how much data influences their worldviews?
Another interesting finding is that optimists tend to be more accurate than pessimists. I’d like to know how broad a set of domains this applies to. It certainly doesn’t apply to predicting software shipment dates. Does it apply mainly to domains where experts depend on media attention?
To what extent can different ways of selecting experts change the results? Tetlock probably chose subjects that resemble those who most people regard as experts, but there must be ways of selecting experts which produce better forecasts. It seems unlikely they can match prediction markets, but there are situations where we probably can’t avoid relying on experts.
He doesn’t document his results as thoroughly as I would like (even though he’s thorough enough to be tedious in places):
I can’t find his definition of extremists. Is it those who predict the most change from the status quo? Or the farthest from the average forecast?
His description of how he measured the hedgehog-fox spectrum has a good deal of quantitative evidence, but not quite enough for me check where I would be on that spectrum.
How does he produce a numerical timeseries for his autoregressive models? It’s not hard to guess for inflation, but for the end of apartheid I’m rather uncertain.
Here’s one quote that says a lot about his results:
Beyond a stark minimum, subject matter expertise in world politics translates less into forecasting accuracy than it does into overconfidence
Book review: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden
This book provides some good descriptions of sexual and gender diversity in nature and in a variety of human cultures, and makes a number of valid criticisms of biases against diversity in the scientific community and in society at large.
Many of her attempts to criticize sexual selection theory are plausible criticisms of beliefs that don’t have much connection to sexual selection theory (e.g. the belief that all sexually reproducing organisms fall into one of two gender stereotypes).
Her more direct attacks on the theory amount to claiming that “almost all diversity is good” and ignoring the arguments of sexual selection theorists who describe traits that appear to indicate reduced evolutionary fitness (see Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind). She practically defines genetic defects out of existence. She tries to imply that biologists agree on her criteria for a “genetic defect”, but her criteria require that a “trait be deleterious under all conditions” (I suspect most biologists would say “average” instead of “all”), and that it reduce fitness by at least 5 percent.
Her “alternative” theory, social selection, may have some value as a supplement to sexual selection theory, but I see no sign that it explains enough to replace sexual selection theory.
She sometimes talks as if she were trying to explain the evolution of homosexuality, but when doing so she is referring to bisexuality, and doesn’t attempt to explain why an animal would be exclusively homosexual.
Her obsession with discrediting sexual selection comes from an exaggerated fear that the theory implies that most diversity is bad. This misrepresents sexual selection theory (which only says that some diversity represents a mix of traits with different fitnesses). It’s also a symptom of her desire to treat natural as almost a synonym for good (she seems willing to hate diversity if it’s created via genetic engineering).
She tries to imply that a number of traits (e.g. transsexualism) are more common than would be the case if they significantly reduced reproductive fitness, but her reasoning seems to depend on the assumption that those traits can only be caused by one possible mutation. But if there are multiple places in the genome where a mutation could produce the same trait, there’s no obvious limit to how common a low-fitness trait could be.
Her policy recommendations are of very mixed quality. She wants the FDA to regulate surgical and behavioral therapies the way it regulates drugs, and claims that would stop doctors from “curing” nondiseases such as gender dysphoria. But she doesn’t explain why she expects the FDA to be more tolerant of diversity than doctors. Instead, why not let the patient decide as much as possible whether to consider something a disease?
Legislators seem to be less strongly tied to voters’ demands than I expected. This report indicates that a congress person’s proportion of daughters significantly influences his or her votes on reproductive rights issues.
I’ve been wondering for a while whether I should blog about the net neutrality legislation that is being debated. At last, Brad Templeton has come up with a good analysis which covers much of what I wanted to say about why the belief that net neutrality is a good rule is not sufficient to tell us whether we should try to have that written into law.
Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas does a good job of explaining why net neutrality is a desirable rule – a commons can be a good thing, and net neutrality is a rule that’s important to keeping the internet functioning as a commons.
If we’re going to hope that legislation can be useful at protecting commons, then I suspect we need a concept of the commons that contains as much of a standardized bundle of rules as most versions of the concept of property rights contains. That way we could ask legislators to just apply this standardized bundle of rules to each new commons we want it to protect, without giving special interests much of a chance to write the details in such a way as to protect their special situation.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a good set of rules which would be as intuitive as the rules which apply property rights to physical objects. I suspect that the best we can hope for is a set of rules like those describing what you own when you buy shares of corporate stock. We might even end up with rules as messy as those use for patents, in which case it’s unclear whether it would be worth the effort.
Book Review: 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann
This book does a good job of discrediting several myths about the nature New World civilizations before Europeans arrived. It implies that significant parts of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel are wrong (in ways that Diamond should have avoided by consulting experts) – Indians were quite capable of repelling Europeans when their advantage consisted of guns and steel. After smallpox spread across the Americas (faster than Europeans), guns and steel were largely superfluous advantages.
The book presents evidence (alas, not enough to be conclusive) that most of the land in the Americas had been altered by civilizations that were much more sophisticated and varied than is commonly realized, and the myth that Indians were primitive savages is largely due to people mistaking the disease-ravaged remnants that the typical European colonist encountered for the pre-European norm.
The book also provides a few bits of evidence against historical determinism by pointing out how differently some aspects of civilization developed in the two worlds. For instance, the New World seems to have been first to get the concept of zero, but only used wheels for toys, and valued metals for their malleability rather than strength.
One very intriguing report is that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation society was freer and more egalitarian than European society, and that this caused a number of Europeans to prefer Haudenosaunee society, but no Indians in that region preferred European society. It’s unclear how strong the evidence is for these somewhat controversial claims. I guess I ought to track down the books he references for this subject.
The book also describes the Inka empire as socialist, without any markets, but I’m disappointed at how little the books says about that (e.g. how broad a definition of market is he using?).
The main shortcomings of this book are the numerous anecdotes that add little to our understanding of Indian civilizations.
“I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel I owe anybody an explanation,” – president George W. Bush (via Andrew Sullivan).
Next time you hear someone implying that commercial development is the primary enemy of the environment, remember stories such as this one about how much harm a single wasteful Army Corps of Engineers project is doing to wetlands.