Sentences that I Might Have Written, Continued

Then there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.” We know this, we know that, and we know better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk. In other words, the members of this second group are endowed with a happy combination of power and expertise.

That is Jeremy Waldron, and I recommend the entire essay.

A Puzzle

Kevin Williamson writes,

New York City is not only poorer than the New York State average, its median household income is, in absolute dollar terms, lower than that of such dramatically less expensive areas as Austin, Texas, or Cleveland County, Okla., where the typical household income is a few thousand dollars a year more than in New York City but the typical house costs less than a third of what the typical New York City home costs

So why don’t people move from NY to cheaper cities, until something closer to parity is restored in the cost of living? Some possibilities:

1. By some more accurate measure, the cost of living is not so much higher in NY.

2. Living in NY is an expensive taste that occurs among many people, even those of modest means.

3. NY has jobs for lower-income people that are not available in the other cities.

4. NY’s rent controls and other housing regulations have created a lot of inframarginal winners whose housing costs are well below those of the marginal resident. (Think of those who are able to buy their apartments when they turn co-op at ridiculously below-market prices.)

5. Location adjustment is a very slow process. In fifteen years, these differentials will be noticeably smaller.

I do not claim to have the answer.

Still More Sentences I Might Have Written

an ideal epistocracy would know that on some issues, democracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to democratic opinion. Similarly, an ideal democracy would know that on some issues, epistocracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to epistocratic opinion. Accordingly, under ideal conditions, epistocracy and democracy perform equally well.

That is Jason Brennan, paraphrasing theKling indifference theorem. Both Brennan and I were responding to Helene Landemore, who claims that democratic voting should lead to better outcomes than elite decision-making. In my comment, I said that “The whole issue boils down to who is more over-confident. If the people are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the elite. If the elite are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the people.” I go on to raise the Hayekian point that the elite are likely to be over-confident and hence markets are to be preferred.

I found Brennan’s most devastating criticism to be this:

If one can show that citizens are systematically mistaken, this is bad news for all three a priori defenses of democracy. If citizens are systematically mistaken, then by definition their errors are not randomly distributed, and so the so-called miracle of aggregation does not occur….According to the Jury Theorem, if citizens’ mean competence is less than 0.5, the probability that democracy will get the wrong answer approaches 1…citizens so not have cognitive diversity–they instead share the same incorrect model of the world–and so the Hong-Page Theorem does not apply.

In the real world, we do not observe direct democracy. Some people think that if we did, we would like the results.

I doubt that direct democracy is feasible. For example, we know that poll results depend on how questions are worded. So who will decide how questions are worded in a direct democracy? If it is a small group of experts, then that sort of defeats the point of direct democracy. So before people vote on a question, they have to vote on the wording of the question. And before they can do that, they have to vote on the wording of the question of how to word the question. etc.

If you can think you can solve the question-wording problem, then go on to deal with the “who decides which questions get voted on” problem.

Tyler Cowen vs. Ezekiel Emanuel

Tyler writes,

And to sound petty for a moment, I don’t want to pass away during the opening moments of a Carlsen-Caruana match, or before an NBA season has finished (well, it depends on the season), or before the final volumes of Knausgaard are translated into English. And this is a never-ending supply. The world is a fascinating place and I fully expect to appreciate it at the age of eighty, albeit with some faculties less sharp. What if the Fermi Paradox is resolved, or a good theory of quantum gravity developed? What else might be worth waiting for?

Off hand, I would say

1. Grandchildren
2. Medical progress to reverse degenerative illness

Jason Collins Reviews Scarcity

He writes,

I also doubt that Mullainathan and Shafir’s description of the poor as suffering from scarcity is generally true. When it comes to time, the poor watch more television, invest less time in caring for their children, have plenty of free time to think about what they will eat, and yet are more likely to be obese. Their characterisation of the poor having a lot on their mind whereas the rich are relaxed despite their more complex employment does not seem particularly strong.

Read the whole thing.

Threat Exaggerated or Minimized?

Robert Wright writes,

A central lesson of the disastrous Iraq War is that one job of a post-9/11 president is to calm fears, not feed them. Some of us voted for Barack Obama thinking he would do that, and help restore reason to foreign policy discourse. For a while it looked like we were right. Now it looks like we weren’t.

He suggests that the threat to the U.S. from ISIS is exaggerated. Here are some reasons to agree:

1. The threat from Saddam Hussein was exaggerated.

2. It is in the interest of government officials to exaggerate (at least some) threats in order to expand their power.

The alternative view is that the threat has been minimized. Some reasons to agree are:

1. We have been way too optimistic that civilized values will prevail in that part of the world.

2. We have been reluctant to hold Muslims to our standards of civilized behavior. It could be that this “soft bigotry of low expectations” comes from a deep-down instinct that predicts a lot of uncivilized behavior.

I could argue either side of this issue.

Worst News I’ve Read in a Long Time

Ezekiel Emanuel writes,

Crimmins found that between 1998 and 2006, the loss of functional mobility in the elderly increased. In 1998, about 28 percent of American men 80 and older had a functional limitation; by 2006, that figure was nearly 42 percent. And for women the result was even worse: more than half of women 80 and older had a functional limitation. Crimmins’s conclusion: There was an “increase in the life expectancy with disease and a decrease in the years without disease. The same is true for functioning loss, an increase in expected years unable to function.”

Read the whole thing. I mean it. This is an excellent and important article. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The more optimistic view of aging is represented by Gregg Easterbrook.

In your comments, please spare me the snark about Emanuel, Obamacare, and death panels. Speak to the point of what happens to quality of life after age 75. We know many examples of people for whom it was good. But on average is Emanuel correct, and is he correct that we have seen in recent decades, if anything, a deterioration in the quality of life among the very old?

Lifted From the Comments on the Craft of Education

Michael Strong referred to his post from two years ago.

An alternative interpretation for the failure to replicate pedagogical genius might focus on the fact that there are no institutions in our society that support the replication of pedagogical success. Teaching is fundamentally a performance art – real time interactions in chaotic and complex human situations. There are no institutions in our society that provide for an environment in which master practitioners of this performance art systematically transfer their expertise.

Read the whole thing. The question I have is whether it is possible for master practitioners to “systematically transfer their expertise.” Elizabeth Green offers some examples–Deborah Ball and Doug Lemov–of master practitioners trying to transfer their expertise. That was not enough to convince me that this is a scalable process.

Peter Thiel’s Interview Question

In his new book, Zero to One, he writes,

Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

My answer would be that I believe that the Fed has very little influence on inflation and interest rates. I think it is fair to say that very few people agree with me on that.

His rationale for asking the question is that if you cannot be truly contrarian, then you cannot be an innovator.

You should read Thiel along with my own Under the Radar. We are similar in our characterization of the business environment, and yet we are polar opposites in terms of where we favor positioning oneself within it. Also, perhaps read Joel Kotkin on The New Class Conflict (which I have not read) and decide to what extent Thiel exemplifies what Joel Kotkin calls the Tech Oligarchy.