Sam’s Place

Ever wonder why people are not entirely rational about economics & politics?

Bryan Caplan has written about how the average person’s beliefs about economics differ from the beliefs of people who’ve studied the subject. The differences are not random. To paraphrase:

The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy finds that, compared to the experts, laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.

Paul H. Rubin explains (I’m paraphrasing from “‘Folk’ International Economics“):

Part of the reason for the relative success of protectionist arguments has to do with evolution. We have certain tendencies and beliefs that may have been useful in evolutionary times, but they are now counterproductive. This evolved belief easily translates into a fear of loss of jobs.

The human evolutionary environment was approximately “zero sum” — resources and incomes were fixed, and more for one person meant less for another.

If Mexicans are finding jobs in the United States, then it “must” be that American citizens are finding fewer jobs because, in a zero sum world, the number of jobs is fixed. Similarly, if we are importing goods from China, or outsourcing tasks to India, then the Americans who would otherwise make those goods or perform those tasks must be losing jobs.

Our ancestors were quite warlike. Our close relatives, chimpanzees, engage in genocidal behavior when possible. Humans have evolved to be adapted to this level of warfare. This high level of conflict has led to strong, evolved, in-group and out-group preferences.

Those individuals who lose from international competition can harness innate beliefs to create obstacles to competition, such as by keeping out products made by foreigners (in the case of tariffs) or keeping out the foreigners themselves (in the case of immigration). Anti-foreigner arguments resonate because they fit into evolved mental compartments.

Understanding economics is like reading, which must be taught, not like speech, which we acquire naturally with no instruction.

I recently read Rubin’s Darwinian Politics. I think he over-reached a little in trying to make policy recommendations but otherwise made a strong argument, with page after page of references to scientific studies.

Bryan Caplan has a similarly-themed book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, so can’t comment. Yet.

I commented on Annalee Newitz’s “Stop Getting Things Done.” An example of an intelligent person (AN) using “folk economics,” as far as I can tell. If AN does understand comparative advantage & still doesn’t want to outsource/offshore her life she should explain why — that would make for a more interesting column.

I had a little debate w/ David Shenk about his interpretation of an experiment described here: “Beyond IQ,” by Christie Nicholson. IMO, this is an example of how biases color interpretation.

I removed DS’s Genius Blog from the Progress Daily Blogroll today, not because I don’t like it — I do — but because he hasn’t blogged in over a month.

For the 1st time, gene therapy has been shown to work on cancer (”Immune no longer“) but, The Economist cautions:

This sort of therapy requires that every patient be treated with his own, unique medicine. Commercialising such a therapy depends on the degree to which this process can be simplified and automated.

Still, with Moore’s Law & Carlson’s Curve, it’s just a matter of time.

And, finally! (”A meaty question“): “Meat grown in vats, rather than in the form of animals, could soon be on the menu. It might even be healthier and better for you.”

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Also, IQ & Income

Speaking of Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, they were great live but just good on recordings. Similarly, I never particularly cared for Bad Manners‘ recordings, until they came over & visited my upstairs neighbor Dicky Barrett of the (Mighty Mighty) Bosstones. BM’s singer, Buster, claimed he’d never heard of Aerosmith, when Dicky & his Boston friends praised that passé band. We jammed w/ their guitarist a little & then all took the MBTA (the BM boys jumped the turnstiles instead of paying the fare) to the Channel (I think it was) where BM was playing, & they sounded great to me, & there-after their recordings sounded better than they had previously. So there’s some kind of phenomenon here.

Another example: when we were in London a number of years ago I read about a CD release party by a Brazilian singer, Ive Mendes, who’s teamed up w/ a producer of ’80s classics (Sade, Everything But the Girl, Fine Young Cannibals, Big Country, etc.) Robin Millar. (Speaking of Sade, Diamond Life — “Smooth Operator video here — album from ‘84 was everywhere that decade, but I actually prefer 2000’s moody Lover’s Rock.) Anyway, the Medes CD release party was in the basement club of a Middle Eastern restaurant, & we went by & were told that it was sold out but we could try to just turn up, which we did, & which worked, & we really enjoyed the music, but live was alot better than the recording again.

Sometimes it works the other way. In the ’80s I liked some of UB40’s dub version. I went to see them (w/ Fine Young Cannibals) at some suburban stadium, sat way back, hated the crowd, & disliked the band; & I stopped liking their recordings there-after. It was at the concert that I was criticized by a stranger for not boogeying in my seat, like the rest of the awkward (white) crowd. The only other time something like this happened to me was a few years later, when a woman concerned for the musicians’ feelings criticized me for failing to applaud between songs at an intimate nightclub in Berkeley. (I later became an applause-starved musician, perhaps an example of karma in action.)

Why a recording may be preferable is obvious: more opportunity to tweak, overdub, & collaborate. Why a live performance may be better is a little less clear: spontaneity maybe. But also there’s volume. Live music is usually amplified more loudly than recorded. Loud noises are stimulating.

Neil Todd of the University of Manchester (”Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: Or on the evolutionary neurobiology of hearing and hedonism“) suggests that

[T]here is a significant change in the quality of sensation above the saccular acoustic threshold (Todd 2001). In order to account for this I outline a new theory of the evolutionary biology of hearing. The evolutionary significance of saccular acoustic sensitivity in higher vertebrates, according this theory, is that a primitive central mechanism has also been conserved, through which vocally mediated sexual selection has continued to operate by providing a direct pathway to reward centres in the brain (which is not provided by cochlear pathways). The existence of loud vocalisations in primates is almost a universal. Such loud synchronised vocalisations in primates are considered to be the precursor of loud music in human culture. Whilst amplified music is clearly a modern invention, both human vocalisations and percussive instruments are of sufficient acoustic power to activate the sacculus (Todd et al. 2000). Thus saccular acoustic sensitivity may still play an important role in perceptual and behavioural responses to loud music.

GlobalSecurity.org (”Acoustic Weapons“):

High-intensity low-frequency sound may cause other organs [than the ear] to resonate, causing a number of physiological results, possibly including death.

The American Cancer Society (”Music Therapy“):

Loud music … has been shown to increase the amount of alcohol consumed by people in bars. Studies have also shown that loud music increased the number of seizures in mice who were given stimulant drugs.

BBC (”Loud Music Lung Collapse Warning“):

Loud [can] cause your lungs to collapse.

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And Prices http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/09/08/prices/

Back in the early ’80s we’d go visit my grandparents in New Jersey, & I’d take the commuter train into Manhattan, & once or twice I drove down w/ friends in the mid-80s, & back then it was scuzzy and crime-ridden. The subway was a spraypainted rattling cattle car with scary beggars wandering through the cars. There were heaps of trash & once I saw someone get up from sleeping in a pile. The squeegy men muddied your windshield & expected to paid for it. Rather than give the crime stats, since this isn’t my science blog, here’s Fear’s “New York’s Alright” from 1982:

New York’s alright if you like drunks in your doorway!
New York’s alright if you wanna freeze to death!
New York’s alright if you wanna get mugged or murdered!
New York’s alright if you like saxophones!

Fear was an LA band, & the joke is that LA now has a much higher crime rate than NY — LA’s murder rate is almost double NY’s, and NY is one of the safest cities in the country. Alot of people assume that NY’s crime drop was due to Mayor Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policy — subway graffiti & fare evasion were particularly cracked down on. The current (August 17) Economist (”Murder Most Common“) surprised me by stating this as fact — in an article that notes that the policy isn’t working in other cities. In the ’90s crime fell in cities all over the US. San Francisco decreased policing of minor crimes, yet SF’s murder rate fell even more than NY’s.

Steven Levitt crunched the numbers, in Freakonomics, & concluded that abortion legalization in the ’70s and increased incarceration rates caused the drop:

One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country.

In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, a woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years before Roe v. Wade. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall earlier than the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the early legalizing states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23 percent more than those of the other states.

But what if those early legalizers simply got lucky? What else might we look for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link? One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state’s abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. (This correlation exists even when controlling for a variety of factors that influence crime: a state’s level of incarceration, number of police, and its economic situation.) Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abortion rates and lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given state’s abortion rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s-when the first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime-which is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that tipped the crime scale.

Speaking of which, in the new Pew survey 46% said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, & 41% opposed the over-the-counter sale of “morning after” abortion pills. Which means what? That 1 in 20 Americans simultaneously oppose legal abortion and think that abortion pills should be sold without a prescription?

Re incarceration: the national crime rate has fallen since the ’80s but lots more Americans are in jail:

Though the Hispanic arrest rate has fallen some recently:

“they wont even dance” by paris hilton

people go crazy
they love it
everyones like
who is this?
i dont tell
because I dont want someone putting their phone up and recording it and making a ring tone off of it
i think when people dont know its me
they wont judge it
but if they know its me
then theyll be like
ugh
they wont even dance

“black holes may not exist” by ian sample

they swallow everything that comes their way
black holes
celestial menaces

might not exist at all

a universe liberally sprinkled with invisible
black holes
replaced with strange 
magnetic balls of plasma floating
black holes may not exist

the death knell for black hole theory
a quasar
lurking nine billion light years from earth
quasars have black holes at their centres
the gentle flickering
black holes may not exist

a gaping hole in a disc of material surrounding the centre of the quasar
as wide as 4000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun
the hole
a vast ejection of material propelled by a strong magnetic field
black holes do not have magnetic fields
black holes may not exist

the quasar must be powered by a dense ball of plasma called a meco
magnetospheric eternally collapsing object
the mecos existence precludes the possibility of black holes
the whole black hole paradigm is incorrect
black holes may not exist

a black hole at the centre of our galaxy
the milky way
its a minority view
its almost certainly wrong
black holes may not exist