Truth Claim of the Day

We are not good when we are happy and bad when we are down. We are simply experiencing the natural spectrum of emotions as part of our human experience. When we take the time to appreciate all of our experiences, they will have far less power over us, thus increasing our capacity for true joy and contentment.

Please, discuss. The context is here.

Social Science, Mad Science?

I love this recent news story. A respected psychologist at Brown University has shown that simple stimulus-response experiments with known results still produce the expected response (although with a weaker correlation) even if the stimulus happens after the fact. That's right, folks, precognition!

In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

The article says the effect was "small but statistically significant," meaning it's pretty unlikely that the relationship is due to happenstance.  That's not scientific proof of precognition, by any stretch, but it does mean the results are worth taking a look at, and others are.

A skeptical approach to the paper that I found pretty interesting can be found here.  I think the take-home point is great:

The real lesson? This is the level of methodological scrutiny every paper should receive, and not just the ones you think are crazy:[...]

But beyond that, I think this article also sums up one of the main reactions to the paper:

I don't believe a word of it because a) let's face it, it's about precognition [...]

Some would say that it is appropriate for scientists to be particularly skeptical about anything supporting stuff we "know is wrong" like paranormal activity. If we think of science as a Bayesian process (which I think we should, but that's a post for another time), then we are essentially updating our beliefs about different explanations of the world as new data arrives.  Our beliefs don't, and shouldn't, shift to whatever the latest results say, because we have a lot of prior knowledge that matters for how we form our beliefs.

That said, though, a Bayesian view of science also implies that total certainty doesn't exist, and that no matter how wacky or far-fetched a theory may seem, we never rule it out completely. We might want to prioritize and spend as little time as possible exploring things that contradicts our prior expectations, but the Dana Skully Scully refrain "It's scientifically impossible!" isn't an acceptable argument in a scientific setting. The sciences don't get to be so dogmatic.

PS - Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Taking Offense

After what was essentially a six-week hiatus, I thought I'd hit the ground running with something substantial:

If you met this fellow on the street, would you be offended? If he told you he didn't know what the symbol in his arm meant, he just thought it looked cool, would that make it OK?

Unless he's an actor in a movie or some sort of reenactment, I think we would all generally agree that wearing a swastika armband necessarily associates you with something decent folk don't want to be associated with.  In this sense, what you wear communicates something, whether the wearer intends to communicate it or not.

What about this?

Nobody really thinks that wearing a bomber jacket tells others that you have a pilot's license, or that you have destroyed enemy bunkers using military incendiary devices.  It's entirely plausible for someone to be a complete pacifist but still wear a jacket like this just because you think it looks cool.

So there seems to be a spectrum of association and message when it comes to things like clothing. Somewhere in the vast space between swastikas and bomber jackets, there is a line that, if crossed, moves you from wearing something "because you like it" to wearing something to "send a message." And it's really not a matter of intent: the swastika sends a particular message, period.

I bring this up because I have been thinking about the issue of offending others with something you see as harmless.  This article, in particular, got me wondering.  As an example, I know a lot of people who find this...

...to be a simple expression of support for their home state, states rights, or simply a rejection of an overly intrusive central government. On the other hand, basically every African-American I know looks at that shirt and sees this:

These white hooded figures are Boogey Man, a fear passed from parent to child over generations until it becomes ingrained in the society as the thing we must fear, not unlike the Nazis to Jewish communities. (As an aside, I have a friend of Jewish ethnic heritage who was once called a Nazi by a political science teacher. Bad form, political science teacher; very bad form indeed.)  When you fly your confederate flag, you are linking yourself to the KKK in the minds of most onlooking African-Americans as surely as if you were burning a cross in your front yard. It doesn't matter whether you intend it that way, just as it wouldn't matter if you wore a swastika armband to a bar mitzvah. You are doing something with a distinct meaning to another people group, and that meaning doesn't go away just because you don't see it.

Should the offense done to this people group be reason enough for you to eschew the confederate t-shirt? My instinct is to say yes; there are ways to express your group identity with other Southerners without hurting African-Americans, so the loving thing, the Christlike thing, to do is probably to avoid giving unnecessary offense.

But of course there must be a limit to the application of this logic, since every attire and activity risks offending someone.  Is the offense to animal rights activists sufficient reason to avoid something like this?

Aesthetic arguments are a separate matter.

I'm not sure, but again my intuition is to say the offense is not enough.  We aren't required to avoid all offense at all cost, and I'm not sure it is even possible to do so.  So if someone wants to wear a Victorian explorer outfit to a convention, are you aligning yourself with European imperialism?  If someone informs you that, as descendants of a subjugated people, they find your outfit offensive, do you owe an apology?

Is this man just having fun, or basking in retro-futuristic irony?

How should the second greatest commandment guide our willingness to invoke terrifying images or hurtful history upon those around us?  Where is the line beyond which our aesthetic choices begin to speak without our consent?  Or is this an instance where the mechanic is simply asking the wrong sort of question, where the mystic's way of thinking yields greater light?

I wish I had the answer to these questions.  I tend to think academics in the humanities over-play the idea of "the other," but on balance how we relate to "the other" is something most people should probably be more intentional about.

The Labor Market

I've been putting a lot of work into it, and thus have been unable to post for a while. This could continue for another week or two.  I apologize for the inconvenience, as I know you are all desperate to hear my ponderings on all matters. The truth is all the topics I planned to comment on before my recent job market blitz are now so stale that I will probably have to find new ones.

In the meantime, though, I thought some of you might find this piece at VoxEU interesting. It offers a plausible explanation and some additional evidence that increased immigration (legal or otherwise) does not hurt wages in the host country. On the contrary, if anything they seem to increase wages for native workers:

Several studies find that immigrants do not harm the wages and job prospects of native workers. This column seeks to explain these somewhat counterintuitive findings by emphasizing the scope for complementarities between foreign-born and native workers. Examining 14 European countries from 1996 to 2007, it finds that immigrants often supply manual skills, leaving native workers to take up jobs that require more complex skills – even boosting demand for them. Immigrants replace “tasks”, not workers.

Non-economists may find the material a bit dry, but I did want to offer their explanation:

In a recent working paper (D’Amuri and Peri 2010), we provide a potential explanation for this phenomenon, analysing European labour markets and immigration over the period 1996-2007. Our paper follows a similar analysis one of us did for the US (Peri and Sparber 2009). Rather than considering the labour market as made up of homogeneous and identical workers with potentially different skill levels, we consider that production is divided into a series of tasks that can be organised in a continuum spanning from simple-routine and prevalently manual tasks to complex-interactive and prevalently cognitive tasks.

Companies have to perform a range of these tasks in order to produce goods or services; hence the increased supply of some of them may increase the demand for others. For instance, for a construction company the supply of more construction workers performing manual tasks (such as installing dry-walls and raising foundations) generates the need for more construction supervisors, technicians, engineers, clerks, and sale representatives (as the company grows) who typically perform more interactive and complex tasks. As these tasks are all needed to produce final goods (they are “complementary” with each other), if immigrants and native workers specialise in different segments of the task-specialisation spectrum, then more immigrants can generate higher demand for natives.

This work is hardly the final word on the matter, but the simple fact that differences between workers matter means simple supply-demand logic isn't good enough to sort out the effect of more immigrant workers on native workers. The empirical evidence in the literature is pretty strong, so the burden of proof is really on those who want to say immigration hurts natives, rather than the other way around.

Accountability Moral and Economic

The real guilty party.

Reader kenestral passed along this article, which highlights the occasional tension between moral and economic obligations. It seems in Obion County, Tennessee, if you don't want the local fire department to be on call, you don't have to pay for it. This seemed all well and good to resident Gene Cranick until his house caught fire:

I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong.

They did respond to calls from a paying neighbor.

This was a really thought provoking article for me. If I were calling the shots at the fire department, I probably would have put the fire out anyway, thus validating Cranick's attempt to be a free-rider supported by the payments of his neighbors. It's not OK to let people's homes burn.  But if I were in charge of investigating the fire department, as you know had to happen, I'd probably not accuse them of any wrongdoing. They fulfilled their contracted duty.

The author of the article, Daniel Foster, sees this as a pretty good argument for providing fire-fighting services to anyone in the jurisdiction, and just charging them through a tax (that is, nobody gets to opt out).  In one sense I tend to agree, but that left me wondering how this was different from the Obama Health Care plan, which I don't like. After talking it over with my wife (who has better economics instincts than I do, despite never having taken a class on the subject), we concluded that the main difference is that there is nobody else offering to put out fires; if you wanted to use another service to put out fires, too bad, there's nobody.  No amount of money is going to be enough to get someone else to provide fire-fighting services. That's not true when it comes to doctor's office visits, checkups, and prescription drug provision. Now, if Obama had proposed a plan for universal catastrophic health insurance (with correspondingly high deductible), then it would be a lot more like public provision of fire departments. I might be OK with that health insurance system, too.

But what this really got me wondering about was Cranick's homeowner's insurance. Do they have to pay out despite the fact that he could have gotten fire-fighting protection, but didn't?  How can you even get homeowner's insurance on a house that isn't covered by the local fire department?  If I'm the insurance company, I probably wouldn't sell to a guy who won't join the local fire department club, no matter how much he tries to reassure me "oh, they'll come anyway, trust me." They don't make premiums high enough for that kind of nonsense.

On the other hand, might Cranick be able to argue that he offered to pay them the cost of fighting the fire ex post, and they refused?  Could he say it's really their fault everything he had burned to cinders?  I suspect this wouldn't fly, but I really don't know. 

The gist is, I guess, that I don't agree with the fire department's call, but I'm having trouble drumming up sympathy for someone victimized by his own poor choices. Not too much of a surprise, I guess, since we've learned years ago from Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom (via Freakanomics coauthor Stephen Dubner) that economists are evil.

David Henderson offers a libertarian response here. Tyler Cowen is not moved.

Truth Claim of the Day

Japanese politics is less competitive and Japanese rent-seeking is less competitive than in the United States.  Sustained near-zero growth in the United States would mean that interest groups tear apart the social fabric and grab too lustily at the social surplus.  Whether we like it or not, we are "built to grow" and we use the fruits of that growth to buy off interest groups as we go along.  Japan in contrast has greater capacity to stifle these grabs for new redistributions because their politics is more of an insider's game.

In other words, American society is arranged such that we must "grow or die"; other countries might not be. Please, discuss. The context can be found here.