If you are one of those who believe that men are congenitally disposed to prefer working with things and women to prefer working with people, these numbers offer some support for your position.
Some support? If you go to his post, you will find that every single one of the top male occupations involves things, and the top 9 female occupations involve people. This has to be one of the most powerful separations in all of social research.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.
Of course, for Brooks to say this is dog-bites-man. When Paul Krugman says it, it will be news.
I remain extremely pessimistic about the political outlook.
only two fifths of those convicted of felonies in state courts are actually sentenced to prison. Of the rest, about half receive no incarceration (mainly probation) and half are sentenced to a short term in a local jail. Indeed, at any one time there are more than twice as many convicted offenders on probation or parole—that is, not incarcerated—as there are in the nation’s prisons or jails.
Read the whole thing. It is a review of two books that reject the comfortable progressive/libertarian narrative that our jails are filled with harmless folks who took the wrong recreational drugs in the wrong place. The books argue that in order to reduce incarceration you have to do less imprisonment of violent offenders, and they are not afraid to advocate for that.
I have no expertise in this area whatsoever. My thoughts.
1. Prison seems quite inhumane. I can understand why people would like to see less imprisonment.
2. But releasing violent offenders may not be such a great approach. It would seem likely to me that they would wind up in high-crime neighborhoods, where they help neither themselves or the neighborhood.
3. I am curious about what the books say about alternatives to imprisonment and how well they work. The review does not touch on that topic.
4. It is easy to imagine something like a “virtual parole officer” inside a smart phone that a convict is required to have with him or her at all times. It could send alarms to police based on indications of the convict’s degree of agitation or somesuch.
Possibly related: Alex Tabarrok writes,
Using these new estimates of the effect of police and crime along with estimates of the social cost of crime they conclude (as I have argued before) that U.S. cities are substantially under-policed.
Crediting Frans de Waal, Sapolsky writes in Behave.
“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means.
I guess that is close to my preferred definition, which is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”
I am about half way through the book. I have two nits to pick.
One nit is that he says that when behavior correlates with a gene in one setting but not another, that proves gene-environment interaction. An example would be that a gene correlates with violence in people who were abused as children, but not in people who were not abused as children. In my view, this might be gene-environment interaction. But it also could be gene-gene interaction. That is, the behavior might be influenced by a gene other than the one on which you are focused, and that gene correlates with whether the person was abused as a child.
Another nit is when he talks about gender and math ability. First, he points out that the very top percentile in math is dominated by males (the fact that Larry Summers was fired for pointing out). Then, he reports on a study showing that male-female math differences are less in egalitarian cultures. However, that is only relevant to the Larry Summers issue if that study refers to the very top percentile. As I read the study, by Guiso, Zingales, and others, it is about averages, not the very top percentile.
The way I see it, a lot of academics are dogmatically insistent that genes matter little and the environment matters a lot. Sapolsky is not one of those, but these examples suggest that he is somewhat biased in the direction of the prevailing dogma.
Both the supply curves and the demand curves for labor have been undergoing substantial transformations that may simply have shifted the economy to a new equilibrium. Which is an economic jargonish way of saying this may be the new normal.
The new normal is slow wage growth.
I think that one should watch what is happening to non-wage benefits. Anecdotally, I keep hearing more stories about very generous family leave policies. With things like health care benefits and (401) K matching policies, firms have a lot of ways adjusting compensation that do not involve wages. Many of these are difficult for government statisticians to track.
Stefanie Haeffele-Balch and Virgil Henry Storr write,
Moderation does not necessarily mean adopting moderate policy positions. [Adam] Smith is not suggesting we compromise our political views and values. Instead, he is suggesting that we think about how we present these views and values to others and how we characterize those who disagree with us. It’s a reminder to think of our political opponents as human beings, seek connection and embrace comity.
Pointer from Don Boudreaux.
My sense is that we have seen a decline in thinking about politics as a tool for problem-solving. Instead, we act as if our main goal in politics is anger validation. The stories that get the most prominent coverage are not necessarily the ones that deal with the most important topics. Instead, they are stories that encourage people to validate their anger. Unfortunately, we live in a TLP world.
1. Interpretive Charity
This is Jeffrey Friedman’s term. I think that it means trying to understand someone else’s point of view before criticizing it. It means trying to set up the strongest case for the opposing point of view for counter-argument, rather than attacking a weak or straw-man version of the opposing point of view. In Bryan Caplan’s terminology, try to pass an ideological Turing test before you engage in debate.
2. Asymmetric insight
This is David McRaney’s term. It is close to the opposite of interpretive charity. It means taking the view that you understand the other side’s true motives, which they themselves do not understand.
Pete Boettke would say that public choice theory is symmetric, in that it takes people to operate under the same incentives in politics as in the market. But that is a different meaning of “symmetric.”
Many people would deny that their political motives are dominated by the pursuit of material advantage. Thus, when you claim that they are pursuing material advantage, you are claiming to have insight into their motives that they lack. That is asymmetric insight, and it is the opposite of interpretive charity. Of course, on occasion asymmetric insight is accurate and interpretive charity is too kind.
A commenter points to a passage from Dan Klein.
We just need to make clear that when we offer a description based on assumptions of self-seeking behavior, we present the description as one, simplified description of the matter, and not the one that the political participants themselves believe.
Describing behavior in ways that participants themselves do not believe is uncharitable–although, again, it might turn out to be correct. Medical professionals genuinely believe that licensing requirements protect the public. It is the economist’s task to show that this is incorrect the net effect on the public is negative, regardless of motive. Trying to ascribe self-seeking motives to the medical professionals is at best beside the point and at worst uncharitable.
Finally, let me return to the idea of interpreting “self-interest” broadly, so that it need not be limited to material advantage. . A man sacrifices his life to defend his country? Well, he had an interest in acting honorably. A man advocates for a policy that hurts his own business? Well, he had an interest in being well thought of.
If there is no limit to the breadth of your definition, then “people act in their self-interest” is a tautology. It is always true, and that makes the statement uninteresting. If you want to make an interesting statement, you have to take the risk that your statement will be false. Saying that people make choices to try to maximize material advantage is an interesting statement. It risks being false, and indeed it often is false. However, it is true in so many contexts that it is quite useful.
Public-choice theory rules out interpretive charity in advance. All that is left is the imputation of bad motives to one’s political opponents.
. . .Actions may be objectively evil, but subjectively, everyone is doing what they think is somehow justified. Attributions of (subjectively) evil motives end the process of scholarship before it can begin. In studying politics, we want to know (among other things) why evil results may flow even from good motives—as an unintended consequence.
Read the whole post. There is a strong temptation to believe in asymmetric insight, meaning that you claim to know the other person’s motives better than they know themselves. This is a temptation that one ought to try to resist.
Friedman is somewhat hard on public choice theory. I have been hard on it myself. Still, it has some value, as when it predicts that public policies in areas like housing or health care will tend toward subsidizing demand and restricting supply.
In the course of the podcast with Russ Roberts, Tyler Cowen says
I think that a Harvard/California could work. I believe normatively Harvard should do it. I see zero signs they are about to. It would mean a dilution of control, a lot of headaches, a lot of new legal issues. You know, some reputational risk. But you could increase the number of people getting into some version of Harvard by really quite a bit. And that would be a wonderful thing for the country. And the world.
This is during a long digression on whether elite colleges could expand by orders of magnitude.
Suppose Harvard set up branches around the country, thinking that it could use its brand name to expand to, say, 250,000 students. Think about how this would play out. Many more students could get into Harvard. Assuming that other elite schools did not expand, Harvard would become by far easier to get into than Princeton or maybe even Maryland. So I think you ruin the Harvard brand.
It seems to me that this is an example in which value depends on scarcity.
He discusses it with Russ Roberts.
I claim we should use an intergenerational discount rate of zero. That is, the distant future we should not discount at all. There’s positive time preference within a life, but over the course of generations no one is sitting around impatiently waiting to be born. And once you adopt that move, the further-out future becomes very important for our deliberations. And then the gains from getting this higher compound rate of economic growth, they really do just overwhelm anything else in the calculation.
It is an argument for thinking about long time horizons when making economic policy. That is easier said than done, of course.