January 2007

I see, via Chris Brooke, that those of you who live in the South East of England (and many of you who don’t, but live in bits of the Midlands that have been desginated as part of the South East) are now represented by an “Independent” MEP, which must be a bit of a shock. The question is, which is worse?

1) having an MEP who is a member of UKIP

or

2) having an MEP about whom rumours that he has joined the BNP are suffiicently believable that he has to deny them in a stop press on his website?

BTW, his biography is well worth a read; I was especially glad to see that he regarded Jeremy Thorpe was an acceptable leader for one of his previous parties. No playing of the pink oboe in the BNP, I’d hope. Commiserations to the lot of you. (Creepy link for Shane Warne fans)

Update: I don’t know why I’m even more interested in this than Chris Brooke, but there you go. The delighful Mr. Mote is quoted in this article as saying:

The formation of a genuine centre-right multinational group in the European Parliament is long overdue. So is the need for the clear expression of the views held by millions of European Union citizens who profoundly disagree with the federalists and their vocal left-wing

Le Pen and Mussolini are on the center-right?

Henry’s post below reminds me of one of the 50,000 completely ridiculous things that have happened to my sister in her day. She went to a Christian day camp in Sewanee one summer when she was about 11. They all set out for an overnight camp-out, and decided upon a meadow of tall grass. The camp’s faithful golden retriever promptly got bitten by a copperhead. Now, for the benefit of our European readers, I will disclose some wisdom from the South, and that is, where there’s one copperhead, there’s another. The only solutions are either to get the hell away, or, if it’s your own yard you’re talking about, stalk around nervously with a gun until you’ve shot both of them. (I did once watch my mom chop the head off a snake with a hoe and some vigorous action, but that was only a rat-snake. It had just swallowed “Quing-Quack”, my newborn duckling friend, who unfortunately did not survive. The life of a hippie farm is not necessarily a placid one.) [click to continue…]

“Scott”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/10/mclemee has an interesting new column up at _Inside Higher Ed_ suggesting (not entirely tongue in cheek) that George W. Bush may qualify as being a great man under G.W.F. Hegel’s definition of what a great man (sexism direct from the original source) is [click to continue…]

I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.

_Analysis_ publishes a lot of relatively short papers, but this one — by G.E.M. Anscombe — from 1966 seems close to the limiting case. The link goes to the JSTOR copy, which requires a subscription. No matter. I shall reproduce the paper in full here, including notes:

*A Note on Mr Bennett* _By G.E.M. Anscombe_

The nerve of Mr Bennett’s argument is that if A results from your not doing B, then A results from whatever you do instead of doing B.¹ While there may be much to be said for this view, still it does not seem right on the face of it.

¹‘”Whatever the Consequences”‘, Analysis, January 1966, p. 96.

That about settles it. (Indirect hat tip: Carolina Sartorio.)

The fact that people are so willing to support war is a puzzle that requires an explanation. After all, war is a negative-sum activity, so war between rational parties doesn’t make sense – there’s always a potential settlement that would leave both sides better off*. And empirically, it’s usually the case that both sides end up worse off relative to both the status quo ante or to a possible peace settlement they could have secured at a point well before the end of the war. Even the observation that rulers start wars and ordinary people bear the costs doesn’t help much – leaders who start losing wars usually lose their jobs and sometimes more, while winning a war is by no means a guarantee of continued political success (ask Bush I). All of this suggests that looking for rational explanations of war, as in the ‘realist’ tradition (scare quotes indicate that this self-ascribed title has little to with a reality-based focus on the real world) is not a good starting point.

So it makes sense to look at irrational sources of support for war. In this pice in Foreign Policy Daniel Kahneman (winner of the economics Nobel a couple of years back) and Jonathan Renshon start looking at some well-known cognitive biases and find that they tend systematically to favor hawkish rather than dovish behavior. The most important, in the context of today’s news is “double or nothing” bias, which is well-known in studies of choice under uncertainty as risk-seeking in the domain of losses (something first observed by Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their classic paper on prospect theory).

The basic point is that people tend to cast problems like whether to continue a war that is going badly in win-lose terms and to be prepared to accept a high probability of greater losses in return for a small probability of winning or breaking even (terms which are somewhat elastic in this context). So we get the Big Push, the Surge, the last throw of the dice and so on.

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Thanks to everyone for the suggestions concerning anti-same-sex marriage readings for my contemporary moral issues course. I was quite nervous about the topic, because I anticipated very strong feelings among the students, especially because we discussed it in the wake of the entirely unsurprising to me but shocking to many of them success of the anti-same-sex-and-civil-unions amendment in November. I emphasized at the beginning of the segment that I wanted the full space of reasons to be explored, and encouraged them to look for both anti- and pro- arguments, and reminded them that when someone argues for a claim in class they should be taken just to be exploring a reason, so there should be no presumption that they are committed to an undesirable conclusion. All to no avail. Not one student was willing to speak up against same-sex marriage, despite the fact that an anonymous survey revealed that 15% of them are strongly opposed. Interestingly, and in my view rather optimistically, conversations that I had with a number of pro-same-sex-marriage students coming from the Wisconsin heartland revealed that their views were completely at odds with those of their parents (well, their fathers) but not those of their fellow high school students, including those who remained in the towns from which these students came. Is there good survey data about the distribution of opposition to same-sex-marriage across age groups?

I used Margaret Somerville’s The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage, Lee Harris’s The Future of a Tradition, and Stanley Kurtz’s The End of Marriage in Scandinavia. And the truth is that the case against same-sex marriage seems pretty weak, unless someone can come up with some much better papers. Fortunately, I had some disagreements with Ralph Wedgewood’s excellent pro-same-sex-marriage paper which we also used. But the anti-papers are not very strong at all. I’ll focus mainly on the Somerville paper, then make a couple of comments about the others.

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Kieran’s quip that “They look like the apes in 2001 gazing at the monolith” becomes YouTube reality. And it’s rather brilliant that the device is showing Zoolander.

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“This thing”:http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/ just arrived from the future.What can I say? if this is the “RDF”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field, sign me up.

_Update_: If you think _I’m_ a Mac fanboy, check out “these photos”:http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/9/6547 of the faithful worshipping the holy relic (it’s behind glass, naturally) at the convention. A Durkheimian moment for the brushed-metal set. They look like the apes in _2001_ gazing at the monolith.

dsquared’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/01/08/trust-in-me/ below reminds me of this “post”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_10_29_atrios_archive.html#116222547954644309 that Duncan Black wrote last year, which I meant to write something about, and never did.

[Mallaby] starts with the basic premise that well-functioning societies require a degree of trust, something I agree with … But then he moves from the issue of shared social capital – trusting each other – to the need for people to have faith in the ruling class … Mallaby’s arguing that society functions much better when the ruling class is unfettered by the pesky masses. Yes, yes, the ruling class shouldn’t abuse its trust – that would be wrong – but when it does the real tragedy is that then they get subjected to pesky oversight from the dirty fucking hippies which prevents them from achieving their true awesomeness as our unaccountable overlords.

A lot of my “academic work”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/distrust.pdf is on the relationship between trust and interests. Like much academic writing, a fair amount of it consists of spelling out the obvious at laborious length, but given how badly notions of trust are abused in current debate, perhaps it isn’t entirely useless. Simply put, the political argument that you should trust people who don’t have a good self-interested reason to behave trustworthily is at best naive and at worst dishonest apologetics. In particular, powerful people by and large don’t have much interest in behaving trustworthily to weaker ones in the absence of external sanctions; while in some cases they may be trustworthy nonetheless (perhaps they’re genuinely noble and disinterested types), you wouldn’t want to count on it. None of this is exactly rocket science, but given the amount of guff from pundits about social capital, loss of trust in government etc, you wouldn’t know it.

In comments on an open thread on my blog, Michael Greinecker points to a truly strange response to arguments for a zero rate of social time preference.

Crucial quote

I found myself becoming very curious whether economists who support Sir Nicholas’s social discount rate of zero, such as econ bloggers John Quiggin and Brad DeLong, identify themselves as pro-choice or pro-life, and whether they had considered the Stern Report from this angle.

My response has been anticipated by a commenter who observes

Strange as it may seem to Economist writers, there are phenomena in the world that aren’t particularly illuminated by applying economic concepts. Attitudes towards abortion have nothing at all to do with discounting rates.

Others in the comments thread spell this out.

One odd feature of the Economist blog is that contributions are anonymous. I know that Megan McArdle (aka Jane Galt) has something to do with the site, but I have no idea whether she wrote this piece. While I’m used to pseudonymous commenters, most economics bloggers are (as Matt Yglesias puts it) proudly eponymous, or at least easily identified, and I find this a more satisfactory mode for arguing about issues like the Stern Review, though can’t exactly say why.

I’m rather glad to see that Hilary Benn is the bookies’ favourite for the Labour party deputy leadership. I have no real knowledge of the state of internal Labour party politics, or of what Hilary Benn’s actual policies are. But on the other hand, neither is my support for him[1] based on pure sentimentality about his dad. Nope, I’m a Benn man for the simple reason that I think there ought to be some earthly reward for a political career that has been marked out by honesty and competence. If only for novelty value. After the disgrace that was Clare Short’s term as Secretary of State for International Development[2], Benn was a breath of fresh air. He was (and remains) utterly essential to the peace talks in Sudan. And he was the only major World Bank shareholder to stand up to Paul Wolfowitz and say what needed to be said about Wolfowitz’s utterly bogus “I Can’t Believe It’s Not An Anti-Corruption Policy”. My only reservation in voting Benn is that, to be honest, the developing world needs him a lot more than the Labour Party does, and that the SSID job is cleaner, more honest and more important than turning himself into the thinking man’s John Prescott.
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During the discussion of discounting and the Stern Review, I got an email raising a point that I had already been worrying about. In discussing costs and benefits in 2100, I and others routinely refer to future generations, and in a sense that’s right, since the people involved in the discussion won’t be around then. But, children alive now have a reasonable chance of living to 2100 – quite a good chance if life expectancy keeps rising. Economists often deal with this kind of thing by modelling a series of overlapping generations, but I haven’t seen much discussion of this in relation to benefit-cost analysis, though no doubt it’s in the literature somewhere.

I finally got around to thinking about this, and in particular the following question. Suppose we accept an ethical framework in which everyone now alive matters equally. Suppose also that as individuals we have a consistently positive rate of time preference, preferring to have higher utility now at the expense of less in the future, that is, more when we are young and less when we are old (this isn’t obvious by the way, but I’m assuming it for the sake of argument) . What is the appropriate pure rate of time preference for society as a whole?

My preliminary answer, somewhat surprisingly to me, is “Zero”. I’ll set out the outline of the formal argument over the fold, but the simple summary has two parts. First, since generations overlap, if, at all times, we treat all people now alive as equal then we must treat all people now and in the future as equal. Given this equality, positive individual rates of time preference translate not into a social preference for the present over the future but into a social policy that consistently puts more weight on the welfare of people when they are young than when they are old.

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Imagine, 45 years after Britney Spears dies, some young kid mimicking her on Stars in Their Eyes. You can’t. Madonna? I’d be surprised. Jagger, Springsteen, Dylan? Ephemera. Hendrix and Presley? Perhaps they are as great as George Formby. Perhaps.

So a treat for the fans amongst our readers (and I know there are some). Scroll down toward the bottom of this page and click “Watch in real media”, and about 3 minutes in you’ll find a lovely little lad playing “My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock”. He doesn’t quite get how dirty it is (thank goodness) and he’s not yet got quite the presence of the master, but it is wonderful. And heart warming. The curious can see the master himself here, here and here (is that the marvelous Beryl there with him?).