A quote to remember

I find it obscene that western nations tell developing countries to democratize while at the same time denying poor farmers proper access to export markets by subsidizing domestic agriculture.

--Economic Logic

No need to starve the beast

Some people are concerned that the EU is quickly becoming a superstate, an artificial, elitist structure that will basically rule over its member nations.

Look. The EU budget hovers around 1-1.5% of combined member GDPs. You call this a superstate?

Elections bring out the stupid in people

So, elections are upon us. Ever heard the phrase "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain?" Always uttered with much self-righteousness and absolutely no reflection, it's one of the most blatant non sequiturs in circulation at the moment. There's absolutely no logic to it. The probability that your particular vote will be pivotal in terms of the outcome of state or national elections is so small that it's essentially zero. Given the fact that multiple millions of other voters turn out at the polls, the influence that your individual vote has on the outcome is zero, which is about the same as the influence you have on the outcome if you don't even bother to vote in the first place. Ergo, either everyone has the right to complain or no one does.

At any rate, I have recently stumbled upon an original rephrasing of this peculiar argument due to a Marc Hedlund writing for O'Reilly.com. Hedlund starts with a simple paraphrase of the original:

Once, many years ago, I was waiting in line at the Post Office on election day. One postal worker asked another if she had voted, and the second responded, "Hell yes, I voted. If you don't vote, you can't bitch, and I am not giving up my right to bitch!"

So far so bad. Therefore, Hedlund decides to make it worse by inventing his own analogy of the problem:

I was thinking about that the other day when trying to decide whether to buy a new iPhone 4 or wait to see what happens with Verizon at some point in the future (...) If you're buying an iPhone 4 tomorrow, you already know AT&T is almost universally considered the weakest aspect of the phone's experience. You're signing up for that (...) So here's the deal: if you buy that phone right now, you're giving up your right to bitch about AT&T for the next two years. No, I mean it! Complaints will be returned to sender unread.

(...)

I'm undecided about what to do, myself. I'll probably cave. But if I do, I won't bitch, and you shouldn't either. The single strongest message you could send to Apple and AT&T would be to vote with your wallet against AT&T's crappy service. If you don't vote, then you're getting what you paid for.

OK, so this is actually a slight variation on the original, because what Hedlund seems to be saying is that you have the right to complain about Obama if and only if you voted for McCain. If you voted for Obama, you can't complain because you got what you've signed up for, and if you didn't vote at all, you can't complain because blah blah blah whatever (I'm not sure what the argument is there).

However, none of this changes the fact that Hedlund's is one of the worst analogies in the history of bad analogies. If I decide to buy an iPhone instead of a Verizon-based smartphone, i will have an iPhone. If I decide to buy a Verizon phone, I will have that. See where this is going? What happens to me phone-wise depends on my decision and my decision only. By contrast, if I decide to vote McCain, I may get McCain for president, but then again I may not. I may get Obama. What happens to me president-wise depends not just on what I do, but also on what about 215 million other people do. 215 million people on whom I have no influence whatsoever. In other words, while I decide what type of phone I will use (or if I will use any type of phone at all, for that matter), I do not decide what type of president I will use. That is decided for me. Sometimes I will like the outcome, and sometimes I will not, but either way the fact is that I did not choose the outcome. Tell me again, then, what exactly does the act of voting have to do with the right to complain?

Now because people have full control over what phone they use, they tend to choose between phones based on which one they think will be best for them. In other words, if they buy an iPhone and not a Verizon phone, they do it because they like iPhone's features so much that they are willing to get over its inferior signal reception; if they buy a Verizon phone, they do it because they value signal reception so much that they are not willing to sacrifice it for additional features. Hedlund suggests a novel reason for making a choice like that: if you don't like Apple's crappy phone service, buy Verizon in order to induce Apple to change their strategy. Actually, perhaps this is a good analogy of voting after all: thinking that your individual decision as to where to allocate $300 can change the behavior of a corporation whose annual revenue is some $43 billion is just as delusional as thinking that your individual vote matters for an outcome of an election with over 200 million participating voters. If you're forgoing iPhone 4 because you want to change Apple's strategy with respect to phone service, you have a serious problem with respect to your grip on reality.

"An intelligible picture of the world"

First, a quote from Thomas Nagel:

A creative individual externalizes the best part of himself, producing with incredible effort something better than he is, which can then float free of its creator and have a finer existence of its own.

...and then from Albert Einstein:

(...) one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought (...) Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.

Simple escapism is a very important desire behind the creative impulse. One of the most powerful drives behind great works of science and art is distaste towards the world or one's very own self.

Interpreting simple statistics isn't always as simple as they are

Current unemployment rate is something like 9.2%. I've either read or heard somewhere that almost half of the currently unemployed have been out of a job for six months or longer. (Because whether or not that rate is accurate does not matter for this post, let's assume it's exactly 50%.) That sounds simple enough. But what does it actually mean? Does it mean that half of the unemployed are chronically unemployed? Well, in a way it does. But in another way it does not.

Suppose you've just been laid off and you want to know the crudest and easiest-to-obtain measure of the probability that you'll still be unemployed in six months. Is it 50%? No, it's less than that, and the reason is that a point-in-time measure overestimates the ratio of long-term unemployed to all unemployed, by definition: some of those who have been unemployed for a short period of time are no longer unemployed and so aren't counted. To have a better estimate of your probability of being unemployed for a long time you'd need to look at the ratio of long-term to all unemployed not on a given day, but over some period of time, say the past six months. This is called the "cohort method." You take a representative sample of all those who've lost their job, say, during the week of January 15th, 2010, and then follow them for the next six months, recording how many of them managed to get a new job during your period of study. From such data you can get an estimate that gets closer to the intuitive notion of "the ratio of chronically unemployed to all unemployed." Point-in-time statistics overestimate the number of long-termers, but also tend to underestimate the overall number of people who have experienced the measured phenomenon. For example, the rate of unemployed to labor force is now 9.2%, but if we were to measure the rate of all those who have experienced an unemployment spell last year to labor force, it would almost certainly be higher than that.

I recently quoted a piece arguing that one of the myths about homelessness is that most homeless people are chronically homeless. Perhaps one of the reasons why it's so pervasive is because whenever homeless shelters publish statistics about what percentage of their clients are long-term stayers, it's always point-in-time numbers. Cohort studies of shelter stay duration usually paint quite a different picture.

Read them their rights

The (somewhat) ethically interesting topic of in vitro fertilization is being discussed publicly a lot in Poland lately, due to the fact that the Parliament is about to vote on laws regulating the procedure (the status quo is that in vitro is legal and completely unregulated). The topic is interesting because, for some reason, it is ripe with bizarre ethical arguments (some of which I've blogged about before). Here's another one, again very common in Catholic ethics: in vitro fertilization is ethically wrong because it violates the right to be conceived through sexual intercourse, without any artificial enhancement. Why is this argument bizarre? Some (such as the legal scholar Wojciech Sadurski) criticize it on the grounds that it's incoherent to talk about rights of potential human beings, that is human beings who have not yet been conceived. I disagree with that critique; I think that, inasmuch as it's possible to talk about rights at all, it's possible to meaningfully talk about rights of potential human beings. But, I still think that the "right to be conceived naturally" argument is confused and completely wrong, for reasons I'll explain below.

First of all, talking about rights is difficult in any context because it's not clear to me what "rights" are. It's not that I think the concept is incoherent so much as it's simply redundant. What I understand about rights can be reduced to a much simpler and more fundamental concept of utility. In that view, rights are simply rules of conduct with respect to what individuals are entitled to that society has agreed to adhere by and enforce punishments for breaking. What the rules are supposed to do is delimit a certain standard of "minimum individual (expected) quality of life" that society agrees to never decrease in order to trade off against other values (such as social welfare or whatever).

Now contrary to what Sadurski claims, it's possible to meaningfully talk about the expected utility of someone who hasn't been born yet; in fact, people do it all the time. Consider, for example, a couple deciding whether to have children now or a few years later. Both partners are young and well-educated, but at this time they're quite poor. They have low-paying jobs and haven't worked for long so they don't have anything in terms of assets; moreover, they live in a neighborhood where it's not really good for kids to grow up, and are not able to move out of it at the moment. So, they decide to wait before having children for a time in their future when they're more affluent (which they expect will happen because they both have a lot of human capital, just not a lot of experience). This is a clear example of how expected utility of someone who does not yet exist (in this case, the couple's future children) can (and should) affect present choices of people who definitely do exist.

So what's wrong with the argument that in vitro violates a human right to be conceived naturally?

Well, first of all: who says there is such a right, and why should there be one? Rights are there to protect a modicum quality of individual life from being traded off against other things. For example, we protect individuals' right to life because we recognize that the quality of life in a society where people are allowed to kill others on a whim is extremely low, perhaps to the point of not being worth living. Therefore, in order to argue for protecting the right to being conceived naturally, we would have to have evidence of the fact that people who have been born through in vitro fertilization suffer because of this fact so much that they would rather not have been born at all. (Note that simply showing that knowledge that they've been conceived "unnaturally" causes some mental suffering is not enough. The burden of proof is showing mental anguish great enough to make a person want to kill themselves, because if it weren't for in vitro fertilization, those people would not have been born at all.) I think that if you surveyed all those who were born due to this method asking them if they would prefer to have had their right to be conceived through unaided sexual intercourse protected, you'd discover that enforcing this "right" would actually hurt people rather than help them.

Second, assume for the sake of the argument that potential human beings do indeed have a right to be conceived naturally. Why, then, are we talking as if that were the only right they have? If potential humans have this particular right, they must have other rights, too. What about their right to life, for example? Banning in vitro protects potential humans' right to natural conception, but it denies them a right to life. If you are a Catholic ethicist, then, you only have two logical choices. 1) You believe that potential human beings have a right to be conceived naturally but do not have a right to life. If this is the case, then your definition of a "right" seems to me to be completely arbitrary, and serving more as a rationalization of imposing your ethical preferences on those who disagree with you rather than as a way of minimizing human suffering. 2) You believe that potential human beings have both the right to life and the right to be conceived naturally but that it's more important for society to protect the latter rather than the former. If this is the case, then you're contradicting yourself because Catholic ethics claims elsewhere that the right to life is the most fundamental human right and that protecting it should always supersede all other concerns.

Being determines consciousness

Here's one of the most striking factoids in all of social science: there has never been a transition from democracy to dictatorship in a country with per capita output greater than or equal to slightly over $6,000 (1990 purchasing power parity) dollars. That's one of the findings of Adam Przeworski's research into democracy and development. Quoting from a paper in which Przeworski and Limongi observe 135 countries each year between 1950 and 1990:

The simple fact is that during the period under our scrutiny or ever before, no democracy ever fell, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6,055. Thirty-two democracies spent 736 years with incomes above $6,055 and not one collapsed, while thirty-nine out of sixty-nine democracies did fall in countries that were poorer.

And by the way, it hasn't happened since 1990, either.

If you insist on cherry-picking, at least be more subtle about it

A Polish journalist Aleksandra Fandrejewska writes on her blog:

This week, a Fiat car manufacturing plant in Tychy [that's a city in Poland--p] halted production for a few days because its warehouses are filling up with cars that Germans and the French aren't buying because of the crisis. It seems that globalization isn't all that good for the economy.

Oh come on. If not for globalization, how big would that plant be? Would it even be there to begin with?

Singularity is China

From The Economist:

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Two points. First, why is searching for the genetic underpinning of intelligence "controversial?" We know intelligence is partly hereditary (more precisely, we know that some non-trivial fraction of interpersonal variance in IQ scores is due to interpersonal variance in genotypes). We don't know exactly what the genetic mechanism behind this is, but what's wrong with trying to find out? Second, I can't get rid of the feeling that the Chinese authorities are thinking about eugenics. I have no idea what they want or what is feasible, so I can't speculate about anything. On the other hand, I can't help not to. Imagine future China in which, say, 25% of population are people with IQs of 180 or higher.

If it's illegal, it doesn't exist

Eurostat plans on harmonizing the way in which all 27 EU member countries calculate their GDP estimates, by requiring all of them to include estimates of contributions from the so-called "shadow economy," i.e. the value of economic transactions that are off the books. This is to include not just transactions that are unregistered but legal (like off the books employment, barter of goods in order to avoid taxes etc.) but also the illegal ones (prostitution, illicit drugs and weapons trade, distribution of fake merchandise etc.)

That's a good idea, but hard to execute. It's a good idea because voluntary economic transactions generate wealth regardless of their legal status, so those activities contribute to GDP whether we like it or not; it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't contribute to our measure of GDP. It's hard to execute for obvious reasons.

I thought some of the reaction of the press and blogosphere to this decision were interesting in that they often revealed profound confusion about measurements and reality and/or about what GDP is supposed to measure. For example, you see headlines like "Prostitution, drugs give a 1.3 billion euro GNP boost" or similar. That's completely ridiculous; sizing up drugs and prostitution boosts the estimate of GDP, not GDP itself. It may seem like semantics but it's not. Whether we account for them or not, drugs and prostitution are part of our economies. If those activities were to suddenly disappear, most countries in the world would suddenly become poorer (some very noticeably so; think Thailand or Vietnam). What the headlines are saying is akin to claiming that your car will go faster if you put a speedometer in it. Then, a lot of bloggers complain that the decision was made so that European governments can "spout propaganda by trying to impress voters with artificially inflated GDP numbers." First, GDP figures won't be artificially inflated. Once again, semi-legal and illegal transactions are part of the economy and any GDP estimate that does not include them is an underestimate. Second, for voters it is reality that matters, not measurements. People care about their standard of living, not about official GDP numbers. If someone is unemployed and desperately poor, they aren't very likely to think "Well, but the government is doing a good job overall because annualized GDP growth was 4% last quarter." Government statistics usually have near zero propaganda effect. Another strange reaction was a complaint that illegal activities are violent and destructive, and therefore how can anyone think they increase wealth (as one blogger put it, "What about all those people killed in drug-related violence, how do they increase GDP?") Well, what about those people? GDP is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country. Nothing less, nothing more. Construction workers sometimes die in job-related accidents. Does this mean that construction industry isn't contributing to GDP?

Superficially very stupid

Here are excerpts from an article about a New Mexico University survey study concerning personalities and sexual habits of men:

A study has found that men with the "dark triad" of traits – narcissism, thrill- seeking and deceitfulness – are likely to have a larger number of sexual affairs.

(...)

The study subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them in terms of the dark triad. They were also asked about their sexual relationships, including their attitude towards brief affairs.

In other words, narcissistic, deceitful men report that they get laid more often.

Now I admit I haven't read the actual study so perhaps this glaring problem is addressed there somehow. If it is, then it's just the summary press article that's stupid. If it's not, both the study and the summary are.

From the "I wish I'd said this" file

From the blog of Zeno:

The October 2010 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research is emblazoned on its cover with a colorful display of astronomical images, including the planet Saturn. Text is laid over the cover art, spelling out the question, “Why does the universe look so old?”

I think I know the answer to this one:

Because it's old.

Monstrous arguments

Here are some excerpts from a TV interview in which one of Polish Roman Catholic bishops Tadeusz Pieronek talks about the ethics of in vitro fertilization:

The development of in vitro fertilization methods may lead to (...) parents choosing their baby's sex, eye color, hair color, height, whether to endow it with genes of a genius or a serial killer. They will be just like the creator of the Frankenstein's monster. What is the Frankenstein's monster, a literary description of a creature brought into existence against nature, if not a premonition of in vitro? (...) Life created by in vitro fertilization is a result of artificial manipulation as opposed to forces of nature.

There's nothing about this particular quote that made me want to write about it; I've chosen it as a simple example of something larger. I'm quite convinced that future generations will be viewing such quotes with utter horror and disbelief, not so much at the ethical proposition that the speaker is defending, but at the pathetically low quality of arguments he's using in its defense. It's almost as if Pieronek thought that there's no place for reasoning in ethics and so there's no need for a logically coherent argument.

Let me count the ways in which Pieronek's arguments are too dumb to even be a start of a productive discussion. First, the part in which he compares in vitro fertilization to creating the Frankenstein's monster is not even an argument. It's a base appeal to emotions, namely to the primal emotion of disgust. That's no coincidence, because the fact is that a lot of what people consider universal moral intuitions is triggered by simple disgust that is then rationalized into a moral norm. For example, a lot of people feel disgusted at the thought of homosexual sex, and that disgust drives them to invent reasons why homosexuals are morally inferior to heterosexuals. Rationalization of disgust is a very well-know and well-studied phenomenon. There even are brain imaging experiments that vividly show the process taking place. The problem is that the disgust reflex is a very bad basis for moral judgments. For one thing, different people are disgusted by different things. For another, there exist aesthetically disgusting things that nevertheless are an unquestionable moral good, for example surgeries. Someone with a degree in ethics, such as Pieronek, should be responsible to know all this and be extra careful not to make ethical appeals to disgust.

Moving on to the parts of his interview that do contain some semblance of reasoning, by my count Pieronek manages to commit three logical fallacies in just a handful of lines of text. First, he commits the naturalistic fallacy by arguing that in vitro fertilization is morally wrong because it's unnatural. Take a minute to think about what it would mean to society if we were to apply this rule consistently. Our entire medicine, for example, is unnatural, so by Pieronek's logic we should never help anyone who's sick or injured because that would be against the will of nature. Second, there's fallacious use of the slippery slope argument when he says that the possibility of parents' choosing their baby's sex will lead to some parents wanting to endow their kids with the "genes of a serial killer" (whatever those may be). And third, there's classic cherry picking: he says that allowing parents to choose their kids' genes would lead to bad outcomes but says nothing of the fact that it could lead to good ones as well, because nature can be incredibly cruel in her own gene-picking; genetically inherited disorders cause an immense amount of suffering in the world.

People do what's expected of them. The fact that a respected public figure with an ethical authority in the eyes of many people feels completely comfortable saying things so blatantly stupid indicates that most consumers of public debate do not demand logic and reason from ethicists. That's a horrendous though, but it's obviously true, and there's much more evidence of it that than intellectually lazy rantings of a priest.

Homelessness is a housing issue

What causes homelessness? There are many well-known superficial answers to the question. For example: poverty causes homelessness. A moment's reflection will tell you this cannot be right, though: while almost all homeless people are poor, an overwhelming majority of poor people are not homeless, so poverty can be a necessary condition, but it can't be sufficient. Another answer: mental illness/drug problems/domestic violence cause homelessness. However, it turns out this answer is wrong, too; research has shown that (aggregate) changes in rates of substance abuse or mental health hospitalizations are not correlated with changes in homelessness. In other words: if substance abuse causes homelessness, then an increase in the number of alcoholics should cause an increase in the number of homeless people. But it does not. So what is the cause?

Research conclusions here are probably as clear as they ever get in social science: homelessness is caused by a conjunction of three factors, namely poverty, housing market conditions and housing policies. More precisely, people will face a high risk of becoming homeless if 1) They are very poor; 2) They live in a place where lowest available market rent is very high and 3) They live in a place where government subsidies towards rent are hard to come by. (For sources, see here, here and here.) Poverty can make you homeless only if the housing market and government policy conspire against you as well. Substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence have mostly an indirect impact, in that they cause poverty.

All of the above is summed up nicely by a homelessness researcher, psychologist Dennis P. Culhane in a short press piece "Five Myths about America's Homeless." If you don't feel like reading it, the myths are 1) That homelessness is a chronic condition; 2) That most homeless people have mental health problems; 3) That most homeless people don't work; 4) That homeless shelters are a good policy response and 5) That government rent vouchers do not improve the situation by much.

Quote of the day

"Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Source: Zombie Feynman. Hat tip to RolfAndreassen.

Non-self-enforcing

Megan McArdle asks:

(...) why can't this vast media conspiracy I keep hearing about get it together on Phelps and his rotten little band of merry madmen? Their shameful protests at funerals are condemned by, to a first approximation, every single other person in the United States of America. So why do they keep doing it? Presumably because it gets them on the teevee.

So why won't the Liberal Media^TM take away their fun? Refuse to broadcast any footage that contains their message; refuse to write about them.

The reason is, this wouldn't be self-enforcing. Assuming that news about Fred Phelps and his demented posse sells, a conspiracy of silence would create a Prisoner's Dilemma. If you're a news outlet, and all your competitors are silent about the Westboro Baptist Church, you have an incentive to talk about them. Therefore, everybody talks about them.

Where'd my social status go?

In Western societies, social status of an individual is determined mainly by her job. Naturally, the perceived status of a job is correlated with income and education it requires, though not perfectly: college professors are better educated than corporate CEOs and New York City waste collectors make about the same as New York City firefighters, for example. What's interesting to me is that some jobs change their social status over time, sometimes dramatically. For example, over the past few decades, the jobs of a high school teacher, postal worker, flight attendant or airline pilot lost a great deal of their (initially very high) status. The job of a film actor, on the other hand, moved from extremely low to extremely high status over the first fifty years of its existence. I don't know what causes these shifts or if the causes are uniform. Just pointing out the obvious.

Mourning our dead

Question: Is the fact that religious people weep at funerals evidence of their covert atheism? If they truly and wholeheartedly believe that their loved ones simply moved on to a better life, why are they crying?

The standard answer is that they mourn a heartbreaking loss--their loved ones might still exist somewhere, but they'll never see them again, at least not in familiar circumstances.

For my own subjective feelings, there's a difference. I would feel a lot better than I actually do if I were deeply convinced that my grandmother and my uncle have simply gone on a trip somewhere, even if they were never coming back. And it does seem to me that believers mourn their dead the same way that unbelievers do: as if the dead were no longer present, here or anywhere else. But maybe it's just me.