Nobel economist Thomas Sargent gave a 2007 graduation speech using 12 economic concepts:
1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.
3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.
6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.
This explains exactly why I find economics so valuable.
The Atlantic has an interesting historical piece on the Moynihan Report by Peter-Christian Aigner, who is writing a biography on Moynihan. The piece looks at Moynihan’s actual politics and motivations behind his now (in)famous report and reveals some surprises for both the Right and the Left:
If [the Right] knew what policies Moynihan hoped to spur with his report, they might view him as a Marxist radical to be forgotten, not a visionary martyr to remember. Moynihan stated these goals more than a few times, but new documents from his rich archive give a much fuller, clearer, and bolder illustration of his thinking and hopes.
“With a background in the labor movement and New York state government,” Moynihan “became convinced that poverty amid prosperity was not a “paradox,” as most said in the 1960s, but an inevitable result of the market’s “creative destruction.”” The author describes Moynihan as being influenced by “Catholic social doctrine and European policy thinkers,” causing him to worry “that America’s deep-seated individualism created a “values” framework that inclined the nation too easily to social Darwinism.” For Moynihan, “jobs ought to be a “right,” not a scarcity.” Moynihan was “particularly impressed by Sweden’s cradle-to-grave welfare state” as well as “the “family allowance” (cash transfers used to bolster low wages).”
But JFK and LBJ were not interested in committing large government resources to such policies, and Moynihan lost his biggest fight, to get these ideas into the War on Poverty. That’s when he decided to write “The Negro Family.” Originally, he included the two policy recommendations. But fearing Johnson would reject the memo outright, he chose in the final report to just emphasize poverty’s cultural devastation alone, using apocalyptic and occasionally controversial language. The central message of the 78-page document was that more than 200 years of the “worst” form of slavery in history, and nearly a century of Jim Crow and Great Depression levels of unemployment and poverty had nearly destroyed the black community. So great was the damage that now even the basic unit of society, the family, was coming apart.
The author notes that “years of research have confirmed his suspicion: break-up can indeed be a trigger for poverty, although it is most often a correlate, not a cause. More typically, as he suggested, the relationship is the other way around: Money problems exacerbate the difficulties of marriage and child rearing.” In conclusion, “Moynihan was genuinely concerned about family break-up and its results, but his understanding of the problem and solutions were radically different from that of the right today.”
While I think the author grossly and demonstably misinterprets the research over the past several decades on family structure and poverty,[ref]This has actually been a major area of interest and study for me. I’ve covered it here at DR many times, including here, here, here, here, and here to just name a few. A paper co-authored with Nathaniel on this very subject is currently in its earliest stage of development.[/ref] the historical context and background of the Moynihan Report is important. Check out the full article.
Phelim McAleer is a controversial documentarian whose past work includes FrackNation (a defense of hydraulic fracturing), Not Evil Just Wrong (a critique of global warming alarmism), and Mine Your Own Business (a critique of environmentalist opposition to the Roșia Montană mining project).[ref]I haven’t seen any of these, so can’t speak for or against them.[/ref] He used Kickstarter to garner $212,000 from 3,305 backers for his most recent film (that was FrackNation), and so he returned to Kickstarter for his current project: a documentary about Kermit Gosnell.
Kickstarter wrote to tell us that it “couldn’t” go ahead with our posting — first, we needed to remove our (utterly factual) descriptions of “thousands of babies murdered” in order to “comply with the spirit” of the site’s “community guidelines.”
Well, that sounds sort of plausible at first glance. But wait.
This was shocking — and even more so when I looked at which projects don’t violate those standards. One project about a serial killer had a photograph of a dead body. There were 43 about rape, 28 with the F-word in the title or project description and one with the “C” word. There was even one called “Fist of Jesus” (don’t ask).
McAleer switched from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo to try and get the project going. Then Kickstarter decided to accept the project, but only on condition that they could subsequently cancel it at any time if they didn’t like McAleer’s updates. McAleer stuck with IndieGoGo.[ref]As of this writing, on April 10, they have raised $556,673 out of their goal of $2,100,000 with 32 days to go.[/ref]
The attempt to squelch the Gosnell story is nothing new. Any other story about a serial killer would have been made into a movie by now, but when it comes to abortion no one wanted to touch the story. Just look at the empty seats at the trial that were set aside for media who never came.
It’d be nice if we could just write of the whole Gosnell incident as one isolated, horrific case. The problem is, we can’t. Just last week, Secular Pro-Life ran an article highlighting how New York state has inspected exactly 17 of its 225 abortion clinics in the last 14 years. That kind of political protection is what allowed Gosnell’s house of horrors to continue. Even if you’re not pro-life, anyone who is sincerely concerned with protecting women’s health ought to be concerned at the way the Gosnell story is being swept under the rug as though it had never occurred.
The Atlantic has a recent piece contrasting the claims that to opposition same-sex marriage is just like previous opposition to interracial marriage. This allows those favoring gay marriage to see their cause as similar to that of the Civil Rights Movement, while simultaneously painting their opponents as bigots on par with the Jim Crow South. The author of the piece (who supports equal marriage rights for gays) writes,
Opposition to interracial marriage was all but synonymous with a belief in the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. (In fact, it was inextricably tied to a singularly insidious ideology of white supremacy and black subjugation that has done more damage to America and its people than anything else, and that ranks among the most obscene crimes in history.) Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it’s also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone. That’s why it’s wrong to stigmatize all opponents of gay marriage as bigots…Opposition to interracial marriage never included a large contingency that was happy to endorse the legality of black men and white women having sex with one another, living together, raising children together, and sharing domestic-partner benefits as long as they didn’t call it a marriage.
The author finds the arguments of same-sex marriage opponents unpersuasive, but not necessarily bigoted (though some certainly are). Of course, the claim that the analogy doesn’t work isn’t new. It just doesn’t show up very often in popular media outlets like The Atlantic. In fact, philosopher Francis Beckwith of Baylor University had an essay a few years ago analyzing the analogy. He found that there was no ban on interracial marriage at common law. This “means that anti-miscegenation laws were not part of the jurisprudence that American law inherited from the English courts. Anti-miscegenation laws were statutory in America (though never in England2), first appearing in Maryland in 1661 after the institution of the enslavement of Africans on American soil. This means that interracial marriage was a common-law liberty that can only be overturned by legislation.” Anti-miscegenation laws were also diverse throughout different regions, ranging from indictments against whites marrying blacks, Mongolians, Malayans, mulatto, and even American Indians. “The overwhelming consensus among scholars,” explains Beckwith, “is that the reason for these laws was to enforce racial purity, an idea that begins its cultural ascendancy with the commencement of race-based slavery of Africans in early 17th-century America and eventually receives the imprimatur of “science” when the eugenics movement comes of age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” It is often forgotten that Loving vs. Virginia overturned the eugenics-based Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This is why the interracial marriage analogy is so problematic:
For if the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws was racial purity, such a purpose only makes sense if people of different races have the ability by nature to marry each other. And given the fact that such marriages were a common law liberty, the anti-miscegenation laws presuppose this truth. But opponents of same-sex marriage ground their viewpoint in precisely the opposite belief: people of the same gender do not have the ability by nature to marry each other since gender complementarity is a necessary condition for marriage. Supporters of anti-miscegenation laws believed in their cause precisely because they understood that when male and female are joined in matrimony they may beget racially-mixed progeny, and these children, along with their parents, will participate in civil society and influence its cultural trajectory. In other words, the fact that a man and a woman from different races were biologically and metaphysically capable of marrying each other, building families, and living among the general population is precisely why the race purists wanted to forbid such unions by the force of law.
Beckwith concludes by acknowledging that there are “plenty” of “other arguments for same-sex marriage other than the anti-miscegenation analogy…some of which are serious challenges to the common-law understanding of marriage as requiring gender complementarity.”[ref]One of the best arguments I’ve read in favor of same-sex marriage (which has been highly influential on my own thinking) comes from William & Mary law professor Nate Oman: http://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bxii2wEOc220cDV5SGVQdFlidGc/edit?pli=1[/ref] However, “once one understands the purpose of the anti-miscegenation laws and their relation to the common law understanding of marriage, the analogy not only breaks down, but may actually work against the case for same-sex marriage.”
There are better reasons for supporting same-sex marriage than false analogies. Let’s stick with those, shall we?
If you’ve ever heard the term “patent troll” and wondered just what that was all about, here’s a great video that explains what they are and why they are a problem.
From time to time a member of the Christian left will admonish the Christian right to stop obsessing about sex. This is a clever move because in addition to undercutting traditional sexual morality it also suggests that those who are concerned with the topic are acting on some secret ulterior motive. Voyeurism? Projection? Repression? Whatever the precise cause, it definitely sounds unhealthy.
Thus begins my post on whether or not traditional Christians are really motivated by sex-obsession in their support of traditional sexual morality. (Spoiler alert: they’re not.)
The folks at First Things thought it was interesting enough for their readers, and so that’s where it’s posted. I’m really humbled to have an outlet that I respect so much publish something I’ve written.
[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?
While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.
So concludes an excellent op-ed in The New York Times. I remember reading in The Economist a couple years ago that America’s CO2 emissions had decreased largely due to fracking and the shale gas boom. Yet, many environmentalists continue to object to both natural gas and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.
Just one more reason why I think a serious scientific issue has been hijacked by political agendas.
It’s always interesting to check the correspondence between the headline of an article and it’s URL. In this case, the headline reads: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” and the URL includes: “is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/.” That nuance, that it is designed to be sexist, is going to be important as we delve into this story and ask ourselves this simple question: where do we reach the point where silliness outweighs legitimacy in the discrimination olympics?
So here’s the first fact: virtual reality (like the Occulus Rift) tends to make some people hurl. In fact, a major design point for the upcoming Occulus Rift has been to figure out how to alleviate headaches and nausea that can arise with use. And here’s the second: women tend to react much more to VR then men. But does it really make sense to fling around the term “sexist”? Danah Boyd, who wrote the piece for Quartz, clearly thinks so:
That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality. Being an activist and a troublemaker, I walked straight into the office of the head CAVE[ref]Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a 1997-era VR technology[/ref] researcher and declared the CAVE sexist.
So, to be clear, we’re now declaring inanimate objects to be sexist.
But wait, is this just short-hand for calling the designers sexist? If someone makes a technology that is designed to make women spew chunks, but not men, that would indeed register as “sexist” in my book. But what’s actually going on?
Based on some interesting research, Boyd concludes that men and women process two different cues for depth perception differently. Men rely on motion-parallax, which basically means that closer things move more than things that are far away. Look at the way the clouds in this video (the most distant) move the slowest vs. the tubes (the closest) which move the fastest. That’s parallax.
Women, by contrast, tend to rely more on “shape-from-shading,” which Boyd describes as “a bit trickier.” She goes on to describe it:
If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is.
It’s not just trickier to describe, however. It’s also much trickier to implement. This is obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about computer graphics (lighting is hard!) and Boyd agrees:
It’s super easy—if you determine the focal point and do your linear matrix transformations accurately, which for a computer is a piece of cake—to render motion parallax properly. Shape-from-shading is a different beast. Although techniques for shading 3D models have greatly improved over the last two decades—a computer can now render an object as if it were lit by a complex collection of light sources of all shapes and colors—what they they can’t do is simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive. As a result, 3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape-from-shading.
So that’s my problem with calling VR “sexist”. The problem isn’t, or at least isn’t primarily, that you’ve got a bunch of dudes who don’t care what women need and/or enjoy excluding women. The problem is that the kind of technology that men react to is computationally easierthan the kind that women react to. I’m all for recognizing that fact and working to mitigate it. Now that Facebook owns Occulus I think there’s no doubt that they are going to work hard to get to the bottom of that because you don’t want to alienate half your market. (When Occulus was a hardcore gaming device there may have been a perception that this wasn’t as important. Not anymore.)
I don’t mean to chalk this up to Boyd’s hyperventilating victim-complex. I know that editors choose headlines, and her concluding paragraphs are quite reasonable. But calling the technology itself sexist? Alleging, as the URL does, that it was designed that way? Come on, people. It’s getting silly.
Economist Mark Perry has a rather different take on the gender wage gap:
Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100 % male), fire fighters (96.6% male), police officers (84.8% male), correctional officers (72% male), farming, fishing, and forestry (77.3% male), roofers (98.5% male) and construction (97.5% male); BLS data here. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of women work in relatively low-risk industries, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (73.3% female), education, training, and library occupations (73.6% female), and healthcare (75% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to work-related injury or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women more than men prefer lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death.
In a recent debate, feminist Camille Paglia made a similar point:
Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall. Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role–but women were not its author.
I’ve adjusted for hours worked (full-time vs. part-time), education choices, job choices, time off, etc. when analyzing the gender wage gap. Can’t say I’ve ever taken fatalities into consideration.
We’ve written critically about the proposal to raise the minimum wage here at Difficult Run before. (Quite a lot, in fact.) In one of the first pieces I wrote back in February I pointed out that there are basically three criticisms of the minimum wage hikes.
By raising the cost of labor, they eliminate jobs.
The benefits tend to go towards families that aren’t poor.
There are much better alternatives (like the EITC).
The minimum wage is not the most evil policy in the history of the world, obviously, but I really loathe it because it’s so obviously a bad idea and therefore the only reason it gets advanced is either because politicians are negligent or are intentionally exploiting public ignorance about how bad of a policy it is. If we can’t stop a policy like minimum wage, what hope do we have of rational policy in general?
There’s one more aspect to the debate, however, and that is the fact that as the price of human labor raises, the likelihood of replacing their jobs with robots increases as well. That’s the gist of a new post from Nate Silver’s 538 website: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker. The article covers recent research by economists trying to see which jobs are most vulnerable to being replaced by robots. The short version? Millions of low-wage jobs are incredibly vulnerable to being replaced by robots.
These probabilities are estimated over a 20-year window, but the trend is clear: millions of American jobs are at risk of automation. In the long run, this is a good thing. In the long run, we don’t want anyone to have to do dull, repetitive, simple work just to put food on the table. In the long run, it would be great if all people worked relatively complex jobs that required minimal physical pain and injury and maximal creativity. The question is how we transition from where we are now. We need a gradual transition accompanied by ample educational opportunities. What we absolutely do not need is an artificial increase in the price of labor. Raising the minimum wage might be good politics, but it’s absolutely terrible policy. In addition to the three problems noted above, it can only serve to make the transition more rather than less gradual.
Nobel economist Thomas Sargent gave a 2007 graduation speech using 12 economic concepts:
