Atheism billboards: what is and what's not a good idea

There's a new billboard along I-495 on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel; here's what it looks like:

It's been put there by American Atheists. As much as I'd love to see a public campaign to de-stigmatize atheism, I'm not sure that we should be putting up billboards with slogans of this sort. Here's why. Imagine there's a country where an overwhelming majority of people are Christian but there is also a small Muslim minority. The Muslim minority is distrusted, discriminated against, and overall held in passionate contempt by most of the Christians, so some Muslim activists decide a billboard campaign could help their cause. After a brief debate, they decide on a slogan:

Look, Jesus is not God, just one of His prophets. And a minor one at that.

Would that be a good slogan, from the point of view of advancing the cause of ending anti-Muslim discrimination? I think it definitely would not be, and I also think the I-495 atheism slogan is basically just like that. The reason it's a bad slogan is not that it's offensive to religious people; I don't care about hurting their feelings. The reason it's a bad slogan is because it's trying to argue the veracity of religious claims. That's not a bad thing in itself; religions are, after all, false, and there's no harm in trying to argue that point--so long as it's done in forums that are explicitly dedicated to debating the truth-values of metaphysical claims. A public campaign against anti-atheist bigotry, however, just isn't about whether or not religions are true. It's about extending the existing norms governing day-to-day interactions in a society inhabited by people of different religious beliefs on atheists as well.

People of different religions, at least in the US, have succeeded in agreeing on such rudimentary norms. The gist of this agreement is: Inasmuch as it's possible, we live by the moral code provided by our religion, and if there's a conflict between different religious codes that needs to be resolved in order for society to function, we will try to work out a solution that does not make any assumptions as to which of the conflicted religions is fundamentally right. In a way, it's an agreement to disagree; but note that it's not an agreement to never talk about the disagreements. It's not a "don't ask don't tell" policy. If someone wants to proselytize, they can. But the agreement is that they can only do so on their own behalf, as private persons. In public sphere, trying to convert someone is seen as, at the very least, bad form, and this social norm is a great achievement. Us atheists should conform to it as well.

This doesn't mean I think billboards are a bad idea. For example, NYC Atheists (which is a New York City chapter of American Atheists) has just launched a bus ad campaign featuring the following slogan:

This is exactly what public debate needs. The problem that needs immediate fixing isn't that most people believe there's a God when in reality there isn't one; it's that most religious people seem to be convinced that atheists cannot be moral. From the point of view of efficient and fair functioning of basic social institutions, it doesn't matter if people do or do not believe in God. It does, however, matter if people believe that having certain metaphysical beliefs completely disqualifies someone as a moral person. As a matter of empirics, what God you do or do not believe in has little bearing on your moral character. If, however, you believe that atheists cannot be moral people, you very likely are a hateful person, and society should evolve a norm that would make expressing such beliefs extremely embarrassing for you, just as it has made it embarrassing to admit that you think Jews use human blood to bake Matzah. Such norms of social punishment are necessary not because they extinguish beliefs based on hatred; that is probably not possible in the short run; but because they, at the very least, make it extremely hard to act on those beliefs in an organized manner. Which, when allowed to happen, inevitably leads to lots of gratuitous human suffering.

Don't call me 'customer,' I ain't your customer

Apparently, the TSA has a "Customer Complaint" section on their "Customer Service" website.

My first complaint would be that that they call me a customer. I am not their customer. I've never voluntarily entered into a transaction with them. The only reason I've had any interactions with them is because anyone who wants to board a flight is forced to deal with them. There's a term that adequately denotes the weaker party of a relationship like that, and it's not 'customer.' It's 'hostage.'

So that would be my first complaint. As to my other complaints, I don't even know where to start.

Vote-share bonds and unintended consequences

Economist Hans Gersbach has had a creative idea how to induce more responsibility in government spending: by introducing a new financial instrument called "vote-share bonds," which are government bonds whose seniority is tied to the vote-share that the policy it is supposed to fund has received in parliament. More specifically, vote-share bonds work like this:

Each government bond is tied to the share of the votes that its underlying budget deficit adoption has received in parliament. A government bond that has a higher vote-share than another is senior. This creates a ladder of relative seniority for which the vote-share is the organising principle. At the top of the ladder are the bonds with the highest vote-share. Any government funds available for servicing and repaying government debt will always be turned first to the top of the ladder to satisfy the claims of the bond-holders with the highest seniority. The other bond-holders are served sequentially by moving down the ladder.

In other words, different bonds issued by the same government will have different yields depending on the popularity of deficit spending that they are supposed to finance. One of the desirable effects of this, Gersbach says, will be the fact that

(...) minorities opposing further public indebtedness can make it more costly for the ruling government majority to issue debt. A minority cannot prevent the issuance of new government debt, but by opposing it, it can give it junior status, thereby inducing high risk premiums. Enhanced fiscal discipline would tend to decrease the average cost of borrowing.

This is the right way to think about incentivizing deficit control, but the details are not worked out properly. In fact, due to the fact that parliament parties can vote strategically, adopting Gersbach's idea could lead to there being more debt with the same seniority than would be issued if the status quo were unchanged. How? Consider this scenario:

Suppose the Congress is split 51%-49% in favor of the Republicans. Suppose the Republicans want to invade Iran but there's no money to do it so the policy would have to be financed through issuing bonds. Suppose also that invading Iran is popular among Republican voters and no one else; that is, it would receive a 51% majority of votes in Congress but no more than that. Things being the way they are, the policy would be voted through by Republicans, and financed through bonds with the same seniority and risk premium as any other government bonds. Now suppose we're in Gersbach's vote-share bond world. Republicans know that if they pass their favorite policy just with their own votes, without any help from the Democrats, the debt issued to fund it would be very expensive. So they offer Democrats a deal: You all vote for invading Iran, and in exchange for that we will vote for one of your pet deficit-increasing projects that everyone else hates, say subsidizing auto industry.

In our world, we'd see debt being issued only to finance invading Iran. In vote-share bond world we'd see debt being issued both for invading Iran and subsidizing auto industry, and bonds used to finance both policies would have very high seniority (because, assuming both those policies are very important to their respective partisan supporters, they could both be passed with 100% majority or very close to that). In other words, the situation would be strictly worse than it is now.

Why can't we run deficits in op-ed writers and Tea Partiers

A recent poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal shows that 61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe that free trade has hurt the United States. To me this is yet another piece of inductive evidence of the fact that there is absolutely nothing good that can be said about the Tea Party.

There is also not one good thing that can be said about recent NYT op-ed that defends this particular belief. I'll quote just two sentences in which the density of confusion seems to reach its peak:

Tea Partyers also have an instinctive aversion to deficits, and they are undoubtedly concerned that our enormous trade imbalances — which require us to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in assets each year — will leave our children dependent on foreign decision makers. Indeed, the value of foreign investments in the United States now exceeds the value of American investments abroad by $2.74 trillion (...)

Sure, it may be the case that Tea Parties oppose free trade because their "instinctive aversion to deficits" makes them worry about trade deficit; but if that's the case, all it means is that they're too ignorant to know the difference between budget deficits and current account deficits. The talk of "leaving our children" with all sorts of disasters suggests that the op-ed writer shares that ignorance. And it is nothing more than ignorance. Trade deficit is not debt. It's excess of monetary value of imports over exports. It can lead to debt, but it doesn't have to, depending on how it's financed. In most general terms there are three ways of doing it. First, you can finance it through foreign currency reserves. Of course you can't do it forever as one day you'll deplete those reserves, but while you're at it, no debt is being created. Second, you can borrow foreign currency. Third (and this is what the U.S. does), you can have an economy competitive enough to induce foreigners to invest the excess capital due to their trade surpluses with you in your assets. So, businesses from countries that run surpluses with us consider it a good deal to invest in U.S. assets such as stocks, T-bills, factories or real estate, and that inflowing capital allows us to finance our current account deficits (and other things). Theoretically, this could go on forever without any danger of turning into an ever-increasing debt burden that "our children" would have to deal with. We simply import capital; that's all there really is to it.

Now the op-ed writer is indeed correct (as well as highly original) in his or her observation that importing capital makes us dependent on foreign decision-makers. Here's my question though: what doesn't? Exports make us just as dependent on foreign decision-makers as imports do. If we start running huge trade surpluses with Japan and then out of the blue Japan goes into a depression, we're screwed. Also, in free trade there really is no dependency; there's only co-dependency (or in nerdspeak, a feedback loop). Importing capital makes us dependent on foreign investors and also makes foreign investors dependent on us. In other words, it makes us dependent on each other. It is almost as if trade had created a common interest or something.

For God's sake, can anyone who writes about free trade at least understand one simple fact that in every transaction all sides are dependent on one another? If you don't want to be dependent on foreign decision-makers, there is really only one thing you can do. Stop trading anything, with anyone. See where that gets you.

Now look at the second sentence in the quote: "Indeed, the value of foreign investments in the United States exceeds the value of American investments abroad by $2.74 trillion." This, according to the writer, is another fact showing that we're increasing our "dependency on foreign decision-makers." Note what an absurd metric this is though; if you're worried about all them foreigners buying your country out, you should be looking at foreign-owned assets in the U.S. as a fraction of total assets in the U.S., shouldn't you? (About 11%, in case you were wondering.)

To sum up: the writer would like the U.S. to run current account surpluses and also own more assets abroad than foreigners own in the U.S. In other words, the writer (and presumably the Tea Party as well) wants the U.S. to become net exporter of capital. I'd like to point out the fact, always overlooked by those who advocate for such changes, that exporting capital amounts to shipping jobs overseas.

After reading this post you'll think it's inadequately titled

If there's a website that has a link to every website that does not have a link to itself, does it have a link to itself?

And so on. Check out item 121; brilliant!

Someone explain to me why we're supposed to abhor this

I mean newscasters and political commentators donating money to political campaigns. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has recently been suspended without pay by his employers for having donated $7,200 to three Democratic candidates (apparently NBC's corporate policies prohibit news reporters, but not "opinion program hosts," from donating money to politicians). I'm not going to argue that NBC's decision on Olbermann should be any different--he did break the rules. What I disagree with is the rule itself. I keep hearing, from pretty much everywhere, that donating money to politicians by journalists "raises conflict of interests questions," but so far no one has explained exactly what this conflict of interest is supposed to consist of.

Those who argue that large donations from corporations and individuals should be banned usually do so because they believe that it creates the possibility of "buying policies" by the rich and powerful. Suppose we agree with that argument; what we can do then is put a cap on the maximum amount a single donor is allowed to contribute, and all is well. Once that is done, what is the point of singling out journalists and banning them from donating altogether? I fail to see how Keith Olbermann could be buying anything from the Democratic Party by bribing them with seven thousand dollars, for Pete's sake. Sometimes I hear that if journalists are allowed to donate, it creates a threat to their journalistic independence. Again: how, exactly? I could see a threat to journalistic independence if the Democratic Party were found to have made donations to Keith Olbermann's retirement account; but where is the conflict of interest in a situation where it's Olbermann paying the Democrats? (Or Sean Hannity paying the Republicans, or whatever.) Is the concern here that if Olbermann is highly partisan then his newscasting will be biased and misleading to viewers? Suppose this is the case; then how is forbidding him to contribute money to the Democrats going to make things better? If a TV show is partisan and biased, making it impossible for its author to donate money to politicians isn't going to make it any less partisan and biased. In fact, I can see a compelling argument for how it could make it even more so. Suppose Olbermann has a burning desire to help the Democrats in whatever capacity he can. One way he expresses this desire is through donating money to them, the other one is through trying to "smuggle" pro-Democratic propaganda on his TV show. The latter, however, is difficult because of his employer's evaluation standards, so he's treading carefully in order not to get fired. Now suppose he finds out he can't donate money anymore. Isn't it possible that he will now try to channel a bit more of his desire to further the Democratic cause through his TV show than he did before?

On a related note, I think we're concentrating on campaign spending too much. Research shows this is not where corruption happens in American politics. Vote buying happens through barter deals being struck between legislators and various other entities (deals of the sort when, say, a corporation rep tells a Senator "So your vote is pivotal for bill A and you're trying to get perks for your district in exchange for doing what the party wants you to do. If you make your vote on bill A conditional on passing bill B, which we happen to like a whole lot, then we'll place our next investment in your state.).

It's important to argue about how to argue

I don't know specifically what Jon Stewart's "rally to restore sanity" was arguing in favor of, but still I think it was a great idea. The common complaint about it is that it wasn't really "about anything" because it wasn't arguing (at least not overtly) in favor of or against any specific ideological position or policy measure. I find it astonishing how easily people think that if an argument isn't about substance, it must be about nothing at all. There's also this thing called methodology. In order to have a rational discussion, all participants need to work out a set of methodological principles they all agree on. That is, they need to agree on universal principles of how to judge the truth/falsity/plausibility of statements (and, perhaps more importantly, how not to judge them). For example, unless every single participant of a debate agrees that modus ponens is a valid mode of inference and that affirming the consequent is not, all arguments made in the subsequent debate are useless and the debate itself is just a waste of time.

This is why Stewart's initiative is valuable: it may help some people recognize the fact that methodology exists and is important. I don't care what methodological principles he's arguing for; even if I thought they were completely ridiculous, I'd still applaud him, because no one else seems to think methodology matters at all (except for academics, of course, but who cares about them).

But then again, a plea for rationality in political debate is ultimately doomed. The purpose of discussing politics is not truth-seeking but signaling group loyalties. That's why so many people who are passionate about politics are so surprised to learn that something like methodology even exists. If what you're doing is signaling, methodology doesn't matter: you're not arguing because you think what you believe is true and you want other people to see it, but to show your fellow tribe members how committed you are to your tribe's values.

Strange beliefs involving numbers: When is a group overrepresented?

One of my hobbies is collecting bizarre and unusual examples of confused quantitative reasoning. Some innumeracies are very common (such as thinking that if an item's price has been discounted twice, first 50% and then 20%, it means that the overall discount is 70%), other ones not so much. Here's an example of the latter kind.

Poland has had presidential elections a few months ago. There were two candidates in the second (and final) round (Poland has a two-candidate runoff system). On election night, when polls were closed but votes were not fully counted, the media were of course talking about election-day polls. Those polls showed a stark contrast between the candidates' relative support among rural and urban voters. About 25% of one candidate's (Komorowski) electorate was rural, whereas the other candidate's electorate (Kaczynski) was reported to be 48% rural. The media concluded that Komorowski was overrepresented among urban voters while Kaczynski was overrepresented among rural voters. One blogger took issue with this interpretation, offering a quite creative argument against it:

The fact is that Kaczynski is represented equally by the whole country. Exactly equally. Because those 2 percent are just statistical error. Rural and urban electorates support Kaczynski equally strongly.

What's bizarre (and, to be honest, quite stupid) about this argument is the implicit assumption that a candidate's representation among different groups is equal if those group's shares in his electorate are equal. Which is absurd, of course; I mean, if some candidate's support was split 50%-50% between people under and over the age of 80, would you say that the candidate is equally supported by young and old voters? In a one-dimensional case, to claim that support is equal it has to be roughly proportional to the base rate. Since about 62% of Poles live in cities, Kaczynski is indeed overrepresented in rural areas.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), in the short passage I quote, the blogger makes two additional quantitative mistakes. First, he writes "2 percent" where he means "two percentage points." Second, he assumes that because the sampling error in the poll is at least 2 points it mean that the true rate is 50% rather than 48%. Sure, it could be 50%. But it's equally likely that it's 46%.

Three staggering mistakes in three sentences! (Yes, I do mean three. The second period mark is artificial.)

Non sequitur of the month: Stunning economics

This installment is inspired by a piece of breathtaking simple-mindedness exhibited by a writer for the Polish leftist site Krytyka Polityczna (it means "political critiques;" think of it as of Polish Huffington Post, with all applicable differences of scale of course). Some guy named Kapela has a review of the movie "The Social Network" in which he writes:

Where does Facebook's worth of 25 billion dollars come from? (...) it means that each account is worth about $50. How come I can't sell it then? I have over 1000 friends, which is more than average. So maybe my account is worth more than $50. No one wants to buy it though.

To clear things up first, the actually relevant reason you can't sell your account is that you don't legally own it; Facebook does. But let's imagine you would be legally able to sell your account. You still wouldn't actually be able to, and the reason is that your account isn't worth $50. It's worth next to nothing. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from selling ads. The possibility of reaching hundreds of millions of people is worth a lot to advertisers, so they are willing to pay a lot for it. The possibility of reaching "over a thousand" of individuals through one account, on the other hand, isn't worth a dime to advertisers, which means a single account would bring zero revenue, which means that it's worth about zero dollars. Now this isn't necessarily true of all accounts; I'm sure that if, say, Barack Obama were to sell his account on ebay, he could get a lot of money for it. But in those cases the account's worth is due in large part to things other than possible future revenue. Assuming that since 500 million accounts are worth $25 billion, 1 account is worth $50, is just dumb.