Category Archives: Jeffrey Friedman is provocative

Paternalism is a dominance move

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Robin Hanson writes,

Like most animals, humans strive to dominate each other, in order to rise in the local “pecking order”. And control over ourselves and others is widely taken as one of the strongest signs of dominance and non-submission. But unlike other animals, humans have norms against overt dominance and submission, and norms promoting pro-social behavior, that helps others. So we do push to dominate, but we pretend that we are actually just trying to help. And as usual, we are typically not consciously aware of our hypocrisy. In our mind, we are mainly aware of how they are doing the wrong things, and how they would be so much better off if only we could make them do things our way.

I am fond of the dichotomy between prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. You get prestige by being good at something. You get dominance by imposing your will on others. For me, it’s pretty simple. Yay for prestige moves, boo for dominance moves. Actually, it gets complicated because the process for creating norms for prestige can involve dominance moves.

As an aside, a reader points out that Robin Hanson engages in asymmetric insight, which means not taking people at their word. An essential part of Robin’s outlook is his view that people’s true motives differ from what they themselves claim or even believe them to be. I would love to see a debate between Robin and Jeffrey Friedman on this issue. Jeffrey thinks that not taking people at their word is a violation of intellectual charity.

Me vs. the DISC

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1. One of Eric Weinstein’s catch-phrases is the DISC, which I think stands for the Distributed Information Suppression Complex.

2. Recently, I was asked if I want to contribute some sections to a guide for college students of first-year economics. In looking at the guide, I was reminded of my frustrations with mainstream economics. The GDP factory. The failure to appreciate intangible factors. The failure to incorporate the business problems posed by the Internet into mainstream courses. My seemingly hopeless moonshot to overthrow neoclassical economics. My attempt with Specialization and Trade that fell with a thud. etc.

3. One idea that I extracted from Jeffrey Friedman’s turgid prose is that the economics profession probably selects for those who believe in and desire technocratic power. That seems to me what drives the DISC in economics. It leads to things like Raj Chetty’s project.

A central part of Opportunity Insights’ mission is to train the next generation of researchers and policy leaders on methods to study and improve economic opportunity and related social problems. This page provides lecture materials and videos for a course entitled “Using Big Data Solve Economic and Social Problems,” taught by Raj Chetty and Greg Bruich at Harvard University.

Gosh, if you were to just link data from tax returns, credit bureaus, and Google searches, imagine how well “seeing like a state” could work. Ugh.

4. Unfortunately, I am Bill. Let me tell you the story of Bill. In 1990, I was promoted to a low-level management position in charge of five people inside Financial Research at Freddie Mac. One of the staff I inherited was Bill. Bill was a very bright guy, the sort who is called a “computer genius” by people who are intimidated by computers, and even by some who are not intimidated. He was older, in his fifties, with the title of “economist” but doing the work of a glorified research assistant. Bill had bounced around different departments at Freddie Mac, as one supervisor would unload him for his performance issues and another would pick him up for his potential and background.

Bill was very popular with the other staff. When they had a gnarly problem in SAS or with installing new software on a PC (this was a challenge in those days), he would help. Unfortunately, he found these problems so interesting that he would gladly drop whatever assignment you gave him in order to work on the tech issues. So if he was supposed to run a report that I needed for a meeting with top management the next day, I could not count on him to do it. He was very distractable.

One day, he distractedly wandered through the tape library for Freddie Mac’s mainframe computers. I have no idea why. He pulled down a tape and, lo and behold, he found data that had been missing for years. It was data from loans that were originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The data was no longer needed for processing the loans, but it was priceless for research purposes. We could now correlate default rates to data from loan applications, such as the original loan-to-value ratio.

I soon hired another research assistant, Sudha. She was far from brilliant, and her computer skills were weak, but she was meticulous and organized. The other staff, who loved Bill, resented Sudha, especially because Bill always ended up doing the work for Sudha’s memos. But when I left my position, my replacement soon said to me, “Now I understand what you were doing. You needed Sudha in order to get Bill’s projects done.”

So I am Bill. I am distractable. That is who I am. That is where I live. Being distractable perhaps enables me to discover insights. But it also is a weakness. If I were like Bryan Caplan, I would spend several years delving deeply into a topic and come out with a compelling book. Maybe somebody needs to find a Sudha to pair with me.

Jeffrey Friedman on expertise in public policy

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The abstract says,

How can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the sense that the answer to them is self-evident. But to the extent that political problems are complex, expertise is required to answer them—although if such expertise exists, we are unlikely to know who has it.

Why people distrust government

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Jeffrey Friedman’s answer:

In principle, people might have responded to accumulating perceptions of government failure by dialing back their expectations of government performance. But in practice, this would have violated the tacit assumption that justifies government’s attempt to solve social and economic problems to begin with: the assumption that modern society is so simple that the solutions to its problems are self-evident.

In the earlier essay, Friedman coined the phrase “epistemological utopianism.” I think we need to come up with a catchier phrase to describe the belief that modern society’s problems are easily solved by people with the right motives. I nominate “oversimplification bias,” but I welcome other suggestions. Provisionally, let me work with that term.

1. Friedman’s thesis is that oversimplification bias leads people to expect government to solve problems that it cannot solve. When the problems persist, distrust in government rises.

2. This leads people to hate those with whom they disagree. After all, if you believe that your side has the solutions, then you must assume that the other side does not want to solve the problems.

3. It also leads people to be arrogant about their own side. If the problems are simple, then our solutions must be correct, and that makes us really superior. (Note: an anti-Bobo Trump supporter can be just as arrogant in this sense as a Bobo elitist.)

4. I am afraid that mainstream economists are often afflicted with oversimplification bias. Reducing the problems of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade to monetary policy. Seeing health care policy in terms of mathematical and statistical models, ignoring all of the cultural baggage that we inherit. etc.

Jeffrey Friedman’s best essay (so far)

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One random excerpt:

Citizen-technocracy is not only impossibly demanding; it is highly paradoxical.

As a citizen-technocrat, I can participate in politics, whether by voting or through more persistent activism, only if I am first convinced that I know the truth about the social and economic problems facing millions of anonymous fellow citizens (or if I think I can learn the truth through political participation). But if citizen-technocrats took the full measure of the knowledge they need, either (a) they’d recognize that as a practical matter the truth is unobtainable, leading them to select themselves out of the electorate; or (b) their political participation would consist of handing power over to experts (or people who strike them as being experts). In the latter case, citizen-technocracy would turn itself into epistocracy. In the former case, citizen-technocracy would perpetuate itself, but only by weeding out the most sophisticated citizen-technocrats, leaving the most simplistic and thoughtless to make decisions. People who (overall) don’t know what they’re doing would end up running the citizen technocracy. And among them, disagreement would congeal into mutual hostility.

I strongly recommend the entire essay.

Populism, progressivism, and the Trump phenomenon

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Jeffrey Friedman writes,

The Populists had inadvertently added, to the traditional democratic tenet that power should be in the hands of the people, the sociotropic tenet that the government should use this power to serve the people’s interests. These two tenets have been all-but-universally accepted ever since—although the sociotropic premise can be turned against the democratic premise, justifying government by experts, whose knowledge might serve the people’s interests. . .

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Populists’ Progressive successors widened and deepened the new understanding of the purpose of government. Progressives tended to be relatively well-educated and urban, producing an elitist image that’s largely inaccurate. They actually favored a massive expansion of democracy, including the direct election of presidents and senators; primary elections to choose the candidates and weaken party bosses; initiative and referendum elections; recall elections; the election of judges; campaign-finance legislation; and congressional reforms that would expose back-room dealings to “sunshine” and popular accountability. Each of these political reforms was designed to enable the people to enact far-reaching social reforms to solve problems caused by industrial capitalism. As Theodore Roosevelt memorably put it, political reforms would be “weapons in the hands of the people,” enabling them to enact minimum wages, worker’s compensation, food and drug regulation, antitrust laws, and the rest of the endlessly proliferating measures that have, ever since, been the routine business of government.

Mencken said that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Populism re-emphasizes that theory. In some sense, Mr. Trump represents the culmination of progressivism. That is the irony which Jeffrey Friedman would have us appreciate.

Sociotropic voting

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Jeffrey Friedman writes,

The assumption of self-interest does make sense as a starting point in analyzing economic behavior, because in modern societies, people are taught that self-interest is acceptable in their employment, business, consumer, and financial affairs. But they’re taught the opposite when it comes to government affairs. The standard, culturally accepted view is that public policy should advance the common good. So it’s not surprising that when non-economists talk about politics, the common good is what they talk about.

The essay is a valuable lesson in political science. Some key points.

1. People vote for what they think is best for the country. Of course, their thinking may be off base.

2. Ideas matter. Political scientists, like all social scientists, are prone to treating people as machines, so that only tangible things influence votes. But in fact people vote on the basis of ideas in their heads.

Tendencies in voting by age, class, or ethnicity are mediated by ideas. It is not that African-Americans are genetically disposed to vote for Democrats. They are acculturated to ideas that make it right to vote for Democrats.

3. People’s ideas about politics are influenced to some extent by the media. Of course, the causality runs also in the other direction–people’s choice of media is influenced by their political inclinations.

4. One study that Friedman cites suggests that the increase in polarization in recent years can be explained entirely by changes in the media environment.

I think that these observations tie in with the negative feelings that Russ Roberts and I have about the political environment. We agree that ideas matter. And the trends there look bad to us. First, a lot of bad ideas are gaining currency about economic issues. Second, people on both right and left have the idea that they are certainly right and that those who disagree are certainly evil, and the media environment is serving to reinforce this. Third, the ideas that seem to be prominent on college campuses seem particularly worrisome.