A Low Bar

I read this as another mockery of the sillyness of the revealed preferences method. Sounds to me like Gerard probably shouldn’t have been fired, so Rasmussen is on the right side. But he still can’t reason his way out of a paper bag.

Well, yes. Nonetheless, to focus on Rasmusen’s known prejudices and weak reasoning and to follow that with Henry’s attack on Erin O’Connor’s poor literary judgment seems to me to deflect attention from a real undermining of tenure in the Penn State system. I haven’t the faintest idea what Professor Gerard’s politics are, but on the net her clearest support seems to be coming from the right. That strikes me as unfortunate.

I like. I like. Except that the second half of your post, followed by Henry’s, focus the issue away from the substance of the matter. It’s rather like saying “I know these people are correct about the matter, but there are all these things about them that give me pause.” I can assure you that, had we done that sort of calculus when I was active in the civil rights movement, we’d have had a much more difficult time keeping the picket lines up every night. I walked them with people I’d perhaps not want to be seen with otherwise. There’s a sort of cause-destructing purism on the left which sunders it repeatedly and particularly so when it ought to be striking alliances with folk on the right who happen to be correct about a particular issue.

Hey SH –

Of course this post is not really a serious comment on revealed preferences. (This has been happening to me a lot, lately.) RP is the idea that whatever it is people are observed doing must reflect their preferences, because otherwise (given that people are rational utility maximizers) they wouldn’t be doing it. The danger is that you assume what you need to prove — ie, that people are rational utility maximizers — or otherwise infer panglossian conclusions. At worst, you tread a tedious little circle whereby your assumptions are validated by the data in virtue of futher use of these assumptions to interpret the data.

In this case, a bit of evidence (about people’s reactions) was used to validate the initial assumption — that the accused’s criticisms of her colleagues were justified[1] — on the basis that the assumption had to be true. A similar circle, that’s all.

fn1. NB a different question from whether it was right to fire her.

OK, I see how the circular logic is similar. Sorry for the confusion.

Isn’t revealed preference just the economic version of “actions speak louder than words”.

Revealed preferences are much more interesting than stated preferences in economics, because economists are usually interested in how people actualy act, not in how they’d like to act or how they think they’d act. They’re not normally in the business of trying to proved that people are rational utility maximisers.

The idea that people are rational utility maximisers only really runs into problems when the technical sense of “preference” – how someone would actually act – is confused with the day-to-day usage, in whichs its quite normal to say “I’d prefer not to be doing this”. I suspect economists do get this mixed up occasionally, but there doesn’t seem to be any real problem with the idea of revealed preferences.

Matt, I’m glad to see the left finally clocking in in defense of a tenured left lesbian professor. I also appreciate the fact that the right on the academic net beat it to the punch.

Just an observation, Matt.