Should we celebrate bin Laden's death?

Osama bin Laden was murdered while resisting detainment by the U.S. armed forces. Of course, when President Obama authorized the "raid" on bin Laden's hideout he knew that bin Laden would be killed with high probability. If not, the U.S. would kill him by the death penalty.

Opponents of the death penalty are responding with some sense of outrage. You see it on Facebook and Twitter where "murder is never the answer even for Bin Laden" is the slogan by chanted.

I don't understand that.

First, isn't it good to murder people responsible for 3,000 deaths? Isn't it more likely that a political leader will sentence 3,000 people to death if he thinks that the worst that will happen is that he will be sent to a nice jail in old age, rather than be killed? (The incentive effects are more complicated, but I just want death penalty opponents to acknowledge that the death penalty may save lives. In fact, if you ask most people for their prior on this question, most people implicitly believe the death penalty saves lives.)

Second, murdering bin Laden made a lot of people, esp. in the US very happy. Twitter lit up in celebration and fans at stadiums across the country cheered. The net utility, any way you measure it, was probably positive when you consider that bin Laden was a miserable old man, likely to die soon anyway, so the utility loss from the murder was low, while the benefits were small but for hundreds of millions of people.

Now, I should stop. I know a lot of people will reply "but that is exactly why the utilitarian calculus is wrong. It's actually a famous example." The famous example is that, suppose an innocent man were going to be killed so that a rowdy mob will gain utility. Suppose they gain more utility than he loses. Here the mob has 300,000,000 members in it, give or take, and the innocent man isn't innocent, but its similar. But that's the catch: utilitarianism isn't wrong.

We kill innocent people so that lots of people can gain small sums of utility on a daily basis. Consider highway safety. If we lowered the speed limit it would force people to drive slower and thus there would be fewer fatal crashes. But we choose not to lower the speed limit because we would rather have a few people die than have everyone commute for an extra 10 minutes every day. When two economists, Orley Asherfelter and Michael Greenstone, quantified the dollar value we place on a human life, it was something like $500,000. Now let's consider the Osama case. We are willing to let an innocent American die in a car crash so we can each get to work faster and we'd be willing to collectively pay $500,000 for the privilege. That is completely moral. But if I could collect a dollar from half of Americas (surely I could) to murder Osama, showing that his death is worth at least $150,000,000 or 300x as much, and knowing the cost of his death is not as bad because he isn't innocent and he is old and will die soon anyway, it's immoral.

In summary:

Moral: killing an innocent child on the highways so everyone has as shorter commute
Immoral: killing a mass murdered to generate 300x as much joy

Whose theory of ethics doesn't make sense?

And to answer the question in the title: The best response to any situation is to make the best of it. You can't change the fact that he's dead and sucking the joy out of the event for others or sulking in misery isn't helping anyone.

Are "tolerant" people bigger bigots?

I grew up in middle America, but I've lived in Cambridge, MA for the past 3 years.

And I'd venture a guess that the typical person in Cambridge is more prejudiced than the typical American. But I hadn't seen an experiment demonstrating an overt prejudice in "tolerant" people until today.

Read about the study here.

Now here's the rub. Suppose you live in Cambridge with the kind of people they found in the study. Do you point this out to them and hope that being conscious of their prejudice will make them a little more tolerant or is the truth not good enough? I'm not sure. I'm inclined to think the later. (Edited: 3/9/12)

How bad is it to drink milk and eat eggs?

How many dairy cows are forced to live a miserable existence if you drink milk?

We can estimate that using a simple formula that uses a few numbers we can research on line:

Cows/Year = (Cups of Milk per day * 365 days) / Cups of Milk produced by one Cow in a Year

The average dairy cow produces 2,320 gallons per year according to the National Agriculture Statistics Service or about 37,120 cups. The average person drinks probably no more than 5 cups of milk per day. So plugging in those numbers we have:

Cows / Year = (5*365) / 37,120 = 0.049 cows

So going from being a vegetarian who drinks milk to a vegan who doesn't will save about 0.049 cows.

But that estimate is too high because it's not obvious that farmers are going to see a demand shock of 5 cups of milk and attribute it to a decrease in demand. They might understand the decline as an unexplained shock and not let it influence their production decision. In that case not drinking milk has no impact on the cows.

A similar calculation on eating eggs yields:

Hens / Year = (5 eggs/week * 52 weeks/year) / 300 eggs per chicken/year = 0.86 chickens

Note: that is probably a high estimate on egg consumption.

Now here is an interesting twist. Let's say we think cows are worth 1/100th of a human. How many people would we have to save to cancel out the damage we've done by drinking milk?

It'd be the 0.049 cows divided by 100, or 0.00049 people. We can save people by donating anti-malarial bed nets which have been shown to reduce the mortality from malaria by about 44% in children under 5. We could donate them to children under 5 in Sierra Leone where the under-5 mortality rate is 193.6 per 1000 and where about 33% is attributed to malaria. When we multiply that out we have 193.6/1000*.33*.44 = 0.028 people saved per net. So we have to donate 0.00049/0.028 = 0.0175 nets to cancel out the impact on cows. Since nets cost $10 we have to donate 18 cents.

That doesn't sound too bad.

Reality

Abstract: Inception is not a smart movie because as far as I can tell the director intended it to "blow people's minds" with a focus on the metaphysical themes. But that debate is old hat. Fortunately, with art you get out what you put in--in garbled form. For me, it is a movie about ideas and purpose. It's a morality play about not living in the past and about choosing what to make of your future.

Inception ends on an intentionally puzzling note. Is Cobb in the real world or not? If it's a dream (almost) anything can happen, so the hypothesis (effectively) can't be falsified. The one piece of evidence that could possibly lead us to reject the theory is the top falling down, but we don't know if it does. If he's not dreaming it is strange that the kids are close to the same age and wearing very similar clothes, that he wakes up without cords attached, that he somehow woke up at all, and that everyone nods at him but no one talks to him, etc. All of this seems left intentionally to draw into question the reality of what we see.

Nolan is drawing our attention to the reality, but he should be hoping that we're mindful enough to draw our attention away, to acknowledge we'll never know if it was real of not--we can't--and that we shouldn't care. We shouldn't care because we don't want to live a life that's "real," we want to experience a certain kind of life: one filled with love, compassion, family, sacrifice, and pleasure. That is the life Cobb finds (we believe) at the end of the movie and the life we should leave the theater intent on creating (not having).

The reality, no pun intended, is that the entire movie is an inception on us. It's a "dream" that helps us to discover the importance of living as opposed to obsessing over trivialities. Much of the movie doesn't make sense (why is Cobb being chased by corporations? where did it start? why do the rules change all the time? and why is the ending ambiguous aside from one hard-to-spot clue?) and we're meant to learn that doesn't matter. We learn movies don't have to be realistic to be thrilling. (They just need copious amounts of violence and explosives. Inception would be a bad movie without them.) We learn that your life might be a computer simulation or a dream, but that doesn't imply it can't be meaningful.

Things matter because we make them matter. The movie is a movie--it isn't real. But we argue about how it "really" ended because we choose to make that important, to make it "real." Inception isn't about metaphysics, it's about ethics. It should be about seeing the world is new ways. It's should be about the power of ideas (our mind) to shape our reality, about how our choices determine what is important and what feels real. We understand on a visceral level that the ending is a happy ending whether it's "real" or not.

Despite the comparisons to The Matrix, Inception is really a counterpoint. The Matrix, like Nozick's experience machine, is about how we live for more than just pleasure (or happiness), and about making the right choices to become the kind of person you want (are meant?) to be. In contrast, Inception shows how what is "real" isn't important. We don't want to be in the "real" world so we can see our "real" kids and have "real" accomplishments. We want to live in the "real" world because the people we care about are there. The real Mal is dead because her projection lacks her vitality, Cobb learns. Limbo (like the experience machine) becomes hell for Mal and Cobb because we need social connections--friends and family--to be happy. We don't need them because they are "real" but because that is how we want to experience life. That's why Cobb needs to be with his kids and why, though the camera draws us to the totem and our frontal lobe draws us to hackneyed metaphysics, we are really being guided toward the inception of a novel idea of why and how to live.

Paths to Development

I'll write more about this in the future. Below is my taxonomy for approaches to development. Each includes an example of an effective practitioner who takes (primarily) that approach. There are plenty of hybrids, so I'll list some of my favorite examples of those.

All the names are a little mocking and irreverent because I think setting a tone of being both unserious and critical is important. Too many people are critical (which is important), but dead serious and rigidly ideological, when talking about different approaches to doing a project.

1. The Beggar (Lobbyist)

The beggar lobbies governments for money and legislation. For example, the Live8 concerts, organized by Bob Geldof, lobbied the G8 countries to commit to doubling funding for foreign aid. The NGO ONE in the United States, and its celebrity spokesman Bono, lobby for legislation on debt relief (Jubilee Act), cutting farm subsidies (FRESH amendment), trade reform (GROWTH Act), and providing funding for the treatment of AIDS (PEPFAR).

Examples: Bono and Bob Geldof, ONE Campaign

The appeal of the beggar is plain enough: governments have a lot of money and can use it to solve social problems. We spend a lot of time campaigning for our political parties in the US because we believe their approach to health care or education will improve our systems here. Since many problems in the developing world are likewise problems of education and health care, doesn't the same approach makes sense?

The main criticism of the beggar is that he or she usually doesn't understand the complexity of the issues. Lobbying for bad policy can hurt on a massive scale the same way lobbying for good policy can help on on a huge scale. Also, many intellectuals in the countries receiving the aid the beggar lobbies for think that the aid is paternalistic and encouraging laziness and outright corruption in the receiving country.

2. The Policy Entrepreneur (Academic)

The policy entrepreneur is usually a professor or other academic working for a think tank. They argue for policy reforms based on their research. Esther Duflo, co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, is a prime example of an effective policy entrepreneur. Her and her colleague's research has shown which interventions in education, water infrastructure, health and microfinance have the biggest impact. Based on that evidence they have worked to reform policy in both the developed world (foreign aid policy) and the developing world (domestic policy).

Examples: Esther Duflo and co., Santiago Levy and Jose Gomez de Leon, Michael Clemens

The appeal of the policy entrepreneur is straight forward: policy decisions have a much bigger impact than small projects, so making good policy decisions should do more good than doing good small projects. The problem is this can work in reverse. Some policy entrepreneurs turn out to be wrong about issues in the long run and thus each runs the risk of making policy worse, not better. Also, many policy entrepreneurs never have much impact on policy.

Hybrid: Jeff Sachs is both a grade A beggar and policy entrepeneur

3. The Mad Scientist (Inventor)

The mad scientist is focused on technology. There are a lot of mad scientists at engineering colleges such as MIT and in universities with Engineers without Borders chapters. The mad scientist thinks primarily on a small scale, hoping to invent neat new technologies that solve basic problems at low cost. Many of these technologies are directed at income generation, but some are also useful for improving health (e.g. delivering vaccines more effectively).

Examples: Amy Smith

The biggest problem for the mad scientist is that their technologies rarely reach the field after endless prototyping. Economists also often question the utility of this approach by noting that all the technology needed for development already exists and arguing that the problem is how the resources are utilized and distributed.

4. The Dentist (Behavior Change)

The dentist focuses on behavior change. In many cases people in the developing world have poor health or education outcomes because they don't make much effort in school or practice basic sanitation practices. The work of the dentist is difficult--like pulling teeth--hence the name. Particular examples of dentistry are total community-led sanitation, which encourages villagers in rural Asia, to take responsibility for their community's sanitation; hand-washing programs world-wide which encourage people to wash their hands; similar problems encourage the use of condoms and boiling water before drinking it.

Examples: TCLS, Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap

The main complaints about dentistry are that the dentists are trying to tell people what to do with their lives and that their projects tend to be very slow moving, with only incremental successes. The later tends to be valid while the former is not necessarily a fair representation of dentistry, see TCLS.

Hybrid: Paul Polack of IDE is a Dentist mixed with a Mad Scientist. His organization develops technologies for use by rural farmers, but spends at least as much time convincing farmers to take a risk and buy them.

5. The Santa Claus (Charity)

The Santa Claus has the most basic approach: hand out gifts. This approach is almost too simple to comment on, so I'll just throw in that it's my favorite. The Measles Initiative, which vaccinated millions of kids against measles (and other diseases); Partners in Health, which provides free medical care; and Nothing But Nets, which hands out bed-nets, are three of my favorite development projects.

Examples: Paul Farmer

The Santa Claus, while often the most effective development practitioner, and in rare cases the most celebrated (Paul Farmer), is far and away the most criticized. The Santa Claus is accused to eliminating intrinsic motivation, creating learned helplessness and a culture of dependency, and in general being ineffective as resources are (according to one theory) better allocated using the price system. For people who see development as capacity-building the Santa Claus is repulsive for ideological reasons, whereas pragmatists focused on improving health and quality of life, tend to appreciate some aspects of the Santa Claus approach.

Hybrid: Nearly every development practitioner plays the Santa Claus from time to time, often without noticing it.

6. The Petty Bourgeois (Small Business)

The petty bourgeois are businesspeople who espouse the virtues of microfinance and other private sector (but small scale) interventions. They tend to like projects that start restaurants, small service businesses or cottage industry manufacturing.

Examples: Jacqueline Novogratz, Iqbal Quadir

The main criticisms leveled at the petty bourgeois is that they aim too low. If you help someone making $500 a year to make $550 how much good does that do? What does that person spend the money on? Booze, parties or education? Economists have pointed out that because the poor tend to have little human capital and can only acquire small amounts of physical capital with small loans, they will never be able to earn large profits. Economists have also noted that many people who extend microcredit to the poor have enabled the poor to get deep into debt without necessarily raising their income, which might be a bad thing.

Opportunity Costs

I've reluctant to write this because I think the way of thinking I'm going to argue for here is depressing. It will make you think that you're having less impact on people's lives--which gets distorted into feeling that you are less important. That is most people's visceral reaction. But the upside is that when you use this method to count costs and benefits you (should) be able to better limit costs and create benefits.

Let me start with a story. Angela held a fundraiser at her high school. She and her friends sold 500 cookies for $1 each after school and then sent the money to an NGO that used it to buy 50 children anti-malaria bed nets. Bill wanted to do more. Fundraisers at his school were never going to generate more than a few hundred dollars. But he noticed that there was a competition for high school students to propose a way to "Do Good" and the winner would get $5,000. Bill wrote a proposal to use the $5,000 to buy 300 nets and use the rest to pay to fly to Ghana and distribute them. He won the grant in a close vote over a proposal to spend the money deworming children in Ghana.

Who did more good?

Bill got 300 people nets. Angela only got 50 people nets. Isn't it obvious? No.

If it seems like the statement about the number of nets is the end of the story then you've fallen for one of the most pervasive problems in debate. That statement just listed the benefits--and completely ignored the costs.

And in this case that makes all the difference. The real cost of something is the value of what would have happened otherwise. If Angela didn't organize the bake sale she might have spent the extra time playing volleyball. She also might have prevented the Girl Scouts from selling cookies that today. Compared with the value of saving a (many?) lives, those costs are negligible so maybe it's safe to ignore them.

Bill, though, caused the proposal for deworming not to get funded. The deworming plan was probably of comparable value (perhaps more, perhaps less) meaning that while Bill "saved" perhaps 2 lives he also caused 2 lives not to be saved. The benefit was 2 lives, the cost was 2 lives, and the net benefit (benefit - cost) was nothing. Bill's plan may have done nothing make the world a better place, while Angela's almost certainly did.

Angela, by construction, did more good.

That story is just meant to be an example. Of course it's fictional. And of course the assumptions matter. But it's illustrative. Whenever you apply for a grant you're causing someone else not to get it. The net benefit is only the good from your proposal minus the good of the one that would have been funded. If you open a Fair Trade store right next to another store, and you decrease the business of your neighbor by $5,000 a month while only doing $7,000 yourself, then you've only netted $2,000 in Fair Trade sales for the world. (Of course the distribution of the money could be important too--maybe your suppliers are more desperate and benefit more.)

Too much of the time we don't think at the margin.

Do we really believe all people have the same rights?

Jay Mathews posted two good essays from teenage illegal immigrants on why they have a right to federal financial aid money for college.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the first essay uses "undocumented people" and "Latinos" interchangeably. I'm glad she is Latino or that would be racist. (I also wonder if she thinks illegal immigrants from Haiti deserve the same rights.)

My intuition is that I'd vote to give these kids financial aid. I have serious reservations endorsing financial aid in general and I think there is a small risk Latino students may well be crowding out other students (either for spots in college or for aid money). But on the whole that is probably tax money better spent than the marginal dollar would be, esp. because there might be positive externalities to education.

But what I think is more interesting here is how Patricia structures her argument. The basic idea is that education is a right that Americans have--Americans have a right to a Pell grant if they qualify and to enroll in community college, etc. And since Patricia lives in the United States she deserves a Pell grant and a chance to enroll too. But, interestingly, if Patricia grew up in Mexico, we wouldn't have a problem with the fact that she might not have money to go to high school, much less college. We might not even have a problem if she were malnourished as a kid. Or maybe we'd have a problem, but we wouldn't think it's the U.S. governments' responsibility to pay for it.

Why is that? Why do we implicitly allow where people are born determine what we think they have a right to?

Local Eating

I liked this op-ed in the New York Times on "locovores."

Stephen Landsburg comments on his blog. (I highly recommend both the blog as two of his books: The Big Questions and The Armchair Economist.)

Landsburg's point is very valid and to often ignored. The Soivet Union collapsed because planners can't get enough information to decide who should get what, where and when. Prices, miraculously, do the work of the planner fantastically. They are signals that tell let everyone make individuals choices and when those choices get added up in the market, everyone gets what they want--with a few exceptions.

Exception one is that if people don't make smart choices then they aren't going to get what they want. That sounds stupid to say but its the basis for a ton of experiments in behavioral economics exploring why and when people make bad choices.

Exception two is when the prices don't reflect the real cost of something. For example, the price of gasoline doesn't reflect the cost (externality) of pollution to everyone who likes clean air.

So I disagree with Landsburg that prices are good signals in this case. The price of food doesn't capture the externalities from energy use because there is no carbon tax, so in a way it makes sense to try to "correct" the prices for energy use. That said, my guess is that Landsburg and I would agree locovores (and the op-ed author) don't approach that calculation properly because they don't even attempt to weight the costs of global warming against the happiness from consumption.

Random Thought

Here's a thought on why it's so hard to think about trade-offs between health and happiness: people think about different risk very differently depending on the situation. An increased chance of death from 4% to 5% this year is very different from an increase from 1% to 3%. Or consider:

Fishermen (think "Deadliest Catch") have a 1.1% chance of dying on-the-job each year (granted that's not really an increased risk of dying by quite 1.1%) and they make about $13 an hour, which is next to no premium over many other unskilled laborers. But suppose they make $5 more per hour and work 2000 hours a year more than someone at Wal-Mart. That means they'd being compensated for the risk by $10,000.

Now consider that you've been impressed into the English army for an amphibious landing in France. Your risk is dying that day is 2% (ignore non-fatal injuries) and they say they'll let you go after they establish a beachhead. How much would you be willing to escape 2% chance of sudden death? If they above scenario is any guide (or this valuation from speed limits) you should be willing to pay about $20,000 but no more.

Descriptive and Normative

I will never understand why the difference between descriptive statements and normative statements is so hard for people to understand.

David Berri once wrote a post on The Wages of Wins blog about who was widely considered an "MVP-candidate" but wasn't actually playing well. He was obviously making the normative statement "if you're not playing well, you don't deserve the MVP award. These guys aren't playing well [... you infer the rest]." But commenters objected, writing that Dave shouldn't title "Who is not the MVP" if he wasn't making a descriptive point about who is not the actual MVP. Yet we know that is a disingenuous point because if you take the title "Who is not the MVP" literally when the MVP won't be award for 5 months, then you expect the post to include every name in the NBA.

Still, you might be willing to cut the commentator some slack since writers often try to pass off normative statements for facts. Nicholas Krisftof wrote the worst op-ed he's ever written a few days ago. It's an opinion column celebrating wider availability for an abortificant that is very safe to use. It's obvious he's pro-choice and celebrating this fact because of the way he places facts in the article and the language he uses: "Up to 70,000 women die from complications of abortions . . .  last year the World Health Organization expanded it's uses as an 'essential medicine.'" But it's painful to read because, while this is an opinion column, Kristof is trying to hide his opinion and manipulate the reader by telling the story of a pill (with selectively chosen facts) as if it were a news story.

One of the most painful areas where people mix up normative and positive statements is when they talk about the arts. A third of the time when people say "that was a great movie" they mean that lots of people like or that on average people like it (descriptive), another third of the time they mean "I like it" (normative) and another third it's hard to know what they mean but it's something along the lines of either "this movie is widely praised by the elite" (descriptive) or "I think this movie will be widely praised by the elite for its structural properties" (normative). When I tried to write all of that I started to understand, just a little, why people can be so confused about whether people are saying something about what is or what should be. Look at this story where the author makes a statement of fact "Inception is ranked #3 on IMDb" but presents it in a warped way "Inception is the third greatest movie of all time." It certainly is not the third greatest movie of all time by any reasonable metric, so does he really just mean he liked it a lot? Or does he think IMDb is a representative poll? (This would make a nice post on why people need to learn statistics in high school.)

The most painful area, though, where people confuse the normative/positive distinction, is ethics. People often use "legal" as a proxy for moral, as in "well it ain't illegal" which is meant to imply it's acceptable and you shouldn't complain. To this day, despite being reminded a hundred times, my dad still thinks that say "the Supreme Court ruled [insert ruling, say that abortion is legal]" is a good argument for why I should think killing an infant is acceptable. Philosophers often confuse what is "natural" with what is right. This comes up often in relation to utilitarianism, where philosophers argue that because utilitarianism places too much of a burden on people to do the right things all the time that it's the wrong moral philosophy. If ethics had a low point of complete intellectual abdication in the past 50 years, it might be that debate. Yet, somehow, a related debate is starting to drag things down even further. As scientists have understand more about people's moral intuitions and it's become clear that, like how all languages are related and share a similar structure, all the rules different societies develop to regulate behavior share similar structure. Someone this has evolved into "morality is a product of evolution" becoming a catch-phrase that is meant to be taken as a normative statement--whatever your brain tells you to do is acceptable because your brain evolved to know right from wrong. Or something. It doesn't make any sense to me, but I've heard people I'd consider pretty smart and reasonable try to make that point.

All of that was cringe-inducing to write.

Commit in September

The Quote of the Day goes to Invisible Children for this Facebook status:

Our friends at the Millennium Campus Network need your help to get 72 million children in a school.

They're going to achieve Millennium Development Goal #2 and set a World Record by having 72 million children in one school.

Joking aside, I do highly recommend singing the petition at Commit in September.

A lot of people don't like these things because they seem useless. Does it really matter that one more person signs the petition? Probably not. But even if there is a tiny probability that one extra e-mail, call, meeting or signature makes a difference, the payoff is massive. When you multiply a tiny number by a massive number you get . . . well, it depends on how tiny and how massive. So you might as well sign because it might be massive. (These models are hard to calibrate so I won't try. But here is an irrelevant fact I will mention to bias your views: based on a model estimated by Gelman et al. though, the expected payoff to voting in a swing state is at least on the order of $10,000.)

Another reason people don't like to sign these things is that they don't think these policy issues matter. Foreign aid doesn't work right? The only way to make a difference is to get your hands dirty, they say. But most small projects are utter failures. If I had to put money on it, your money and time would be better spent dealing with (and preventing) mental illness in the U.S., unless you're working on vaccinations or clean water. In contrast, PEPFAR has put 2 million people on ARVs for several years. That's means that an investment of a few hundred thousand signatures, letters, and calls yielded about 10 million life-years or about 100 life-years per signature. If the average impact of signing at Commit in September is something like 100 life-years isn't it worth 2 minutes?

Is affirmative action a distraction?

Note: When discussing affirmative action, everyone I've ever met that argued for it for the sake of diversity later admitted or showed they were being disingenuous. I'm just going to ignore the diversity argument.

A friend of mine had to write an essay about affirmative action for class, but she had a hard time figuring out what to write. She had mixed feelings, like most Americans do, caught between the value of "fairness," which affirmative action promotes, and an intolerance for racial discrimination, which is an unfortunately by-product.

She asked some friends for their opinions. I said I think in practice it's such a mess that it's not worth waxing philosophical on the theory. I pointed out that at our school two races were vastly underrepresented (vs. the U.S. population) while the two other large racial groups were overrepresented, one marginally so. The underrepresented groups were, of course, Blacks and Hispanics, except for the fact that they weren't. Hispanics were marginally overrepresented, while Blacks and Whites were underrepresented. Is the goal of affirmative action to give extra weight to one group (Hispanics) until it's relatively easy to get in at the expense of making is substantially more difficult for another (Whites). And wasn't affirmative action started to help Blacks? You wouldn't know if from the numbers, which look even worse under a microscope. It turns out that 35-40% of blacks were the children of highly educated Caribbean and African immigration, not disadvantaged decedents of slaves.

I've since changed my mind. The fact that affirmative action is so bad at getting the intended effect is probably only a marginal concern. The real questions are:

1. Does going to a more selective college even promote happiness (help people)?

2. What is the opportunity cost of affirmative action activism? Are there other reforms that could help more people?

The answer to is probably a conditional "Yes." Kruger and Dale found that going to more selective colleges increases earning for students for low-income backgrounds. Financial aid is more generous (as a rule of thumb) at more selective colleges too, and students are less likely to drop out, probably due to peer effects. Income, however, is only loosely correlated with happiness, and every student admitted on affirmative action likely crowds out almost one student, so the costs may wipe out the vast majority of the benefit. Furthermore, as discussed above, many (perhaps most) people who benefit from affirmative are not from low-income backgrounds. The benefits, then, seem modest but real.

The opportunity cost for activists, on the other hand, is probably substantial. Lobbying for universal pre-K, simpler financial aid forms, against credential inflation (which affirmative action may contribute to), for more Pell Grants, or implementing value-added models for teachers would all probably provide a bigger return (on time invested) of helping disadvantaged people improve their lot in life.

So, yes, affirmative action is a mess. It might even be harmful, but those costs are hard to quantify. But it does seem to improve the lives of a few thousand beneficiaries each year. The question is whether the real cost of helping those thousands is ignoring millions of others.

Update: One obvious question is why affirmative action (AA) became such a big rallying point for activists in a way that, say, universal pre-K didn't. Isn't the fact that people are willing to fight "by any means necessary" for AA, but not for pre-K, evidence that AA is more worth fighting for? No. AA is in the spotlight because it is controversial. Controversial issues always attract more attention even if they effect few people and only in marginal ways (e.g. gay marriage). Furthermore, the beneficiaries of AA have political clout. Educated blacks and self-righteous elites in Ivy League schools have a lot more political clout than single moms in Harlem and Roxbury, and the former are naturally more interested in AA because it benefits them directly and because it's under their nose. The fact that many people, like Lee Bollinger, are in favor of AA because of self interest is probably an uncomfortable thought. But that doesn't make the claim false.

The Epistemic Problem

I just read a good paper by Tyler Cowen on "the epistemic problem" for consequentialism. The problem is that it's hard to predict the consequences of actions, esp. over a long time horizon, and we are meant to infer that this implies consequences can't be a good basis for deciding how to act.

If that sounds like a stupid argument, it is.

Unfortunately, philosophers have constructed sophisticated examples to help pull the wool over their own eyes. Take this example, discussed in Cowen's paper. You are a general deciding where to invade France to ensure victory over the Nazi's. You can land at the Pas-de-Calais or in Normandy and have no good reason to prefer one over the other. You do know, however, that if you land in Normandy you will break a dog's leg during the landing. (Ignore how implausible it is that you could know something about the dog but nothing about the beaches.)

A utilitarian would land in the Pas-de-Calais so as not to harm the dog. But that is stupid, we're supposed to say. It's patently so stupid the utilitarian must be bonkers and we shouldn't be utilitarian's or we risk being thrown in Arkham. And you don't want to be thrown in the asylum, do you? I didn't think so.

But here's the catch that got swept under the rug. If we didn't know about the dog we wouldn't have a way for deciding on Calais or Normandy. We'd just pick one of the beaches randomly, probably by flipping a coin. Is getting in touch with our inner Two-Face a better way to decide? I guess some Very Serious Philosophers think so.

Thoughts on Ethics

Ethics is one of my favorite topics. If philosophy departments weren't so full of quacks, the grading wasn't so subjective, and the requirement's didn't include so much tripe, I'd probably be a philosophy major. (More thoughts on philosophy in one of my two Amazon.com book reviews.)

Warning: This is the customary warning that someone has probably made these points before.

Consequentialists think that the right thing to do is the action with the best consequences. Utilitarians are the most common type of consequentialists because they specify an intuitive criteria for "best:" whatever generates the most happiness is best. Of course, what exactly that means is a subject of much debate.

One "refutation" of utilitarianism is this reductio ad adsurdem argument. Consider a scenario where a million people will be happier by blaming and punishing a scapegoat for their problems. A slight increase in happiness multiplied a million times over could easily cancel out a ton of misery for one scapegoat. So the right thing to do is punish the scapegoat. But we know that isn't right. You can't punish someone for crimes they didn't commit.

But who says the utility function should just be the sum of happiness in the universal minus the pain in the universe. The point is that the distribution of happiness could matter. The utility function could take the happiness of each individual into account separately. One idea for how to do that would be to think of all possible words and rank them according to which one you'd want to live in if you didn't know who you'd be. This utility function captures the value of original position and veil of ignorance from John Rawls without the weaker parts of his theory of justice. This gives the utility function a much more natural, and less grand, interpretation too.

If we apply this utility function to the scapegoat case we find it gives the "right" prediction. If the risk of being that scapegoat is large enough no one would choose to live in that world. On the other hand, if everyone gains a lot and the risk of being the scapegoat is small, then the theory says punish the scapegoat. That makes sense. We don't want to lower the speed limit even though we know it would save a few lives because we all want the little bit of extra happiness from a shorter commute. Those who die in accidents are de facto scapegoats.

The interesting thing about this theory is that is changes the utility function from being concerned with the nature of "the good," i.e. with the meaning of a good life is. It punts on those questions and simply assumes that whatever we prefer is a good life. There's a large literature on this "good life" question, the debate largely revolving around the issue of whether a good life is one with satisfied preferences, happiness, or "virtue" (whatever that is).

An interesting property of this utility function, though, is that everyone might end up with different rankings of preferences. I might be risk averse and hate worlds with lots of inequality while you might be risk-neutral and just prefer the happiness world. How should we decide what the "actual" best world is? We'd have to know that to know what the true "best action" is. (Ignore the fact that it's already impossible to do this thought experiment and rank all possible worlds on our own, much less for everyone!)

One idea is that you could just take everyone's ranking of all possible words (suppose there is a finite number) and use them as some kind of vote. Whichever world wins the vote is the best world and the corresponding action is the best action. The problem with this is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem applies which means, under some basic criteria, there is no fair system for deciding which world is the best.

The lesson I take from this is that ethics is really a game where we make the rules and it's important not to over think the significance of these rules. When you try to make them consistent and sensible things start to fall apart, even on a purely theoretical level. When the utility function represents something objective (e.g. happiness, brain states, activity in pleasure sensing areas of the brain) then you're left asking why should ethics be concerned with that quantity? Is the purpose of the universe really to maximize the activity in pleasure sensing areas of the brain? But if you go with a less meta-physically grand strategy based on preferences, things fall apart. I ignored two even more basic problems with preferences. First, they may not even be transitive (e.g. A > B, B > C, yet C > A). Second, people are bad predictors of what they like. The lotteries will likely be heavily influenced by cognitive biases, like focusing too much on small changes of a miserable life.

Theoretical ethics is a mess, yet the alternative of having ad hoc rules for living seems equally unsatisfying.

Update: Related thoughts from Bryan Caplan.

Should our politics be predictable?

Mike Huckabee doesn't think so:

[Huckabee] finds it “repulsive” when people assume that they know his mind simply because they know his affiliations. “I was never that predictable,” he said with satisfaction. “. . . I was never one to just pick up the company line and recite it. I hate that . . . And politics is becoming more and more where you’re handed this script and told, ‘Don’t improv.’ ”

I think it's fair to say that toting the party line is not a good thing. If that's why you're predictable you shouldn't be proud of your ignorance.

But, in general, we should have predictable political positions.

Someone who knows you well should have a good sense of your fundamental ethical beliefs. You think such and such criteria are what makes the world a good place, so given policies A, B, and C you would pick the one with the best consequences. (This assume you are some kind of consequentialist. And you should be.)

This doesn't mean people won't be surprised by your position on things. You probably have read articles and know statistics other people are unfamiliar with, and that evidence might be why you prefer B to A.

But if someone looking at the same evidence as you can't pretend to be you and derive your opinion, you're probably letting emotion color your opinions. And that's usually a bad thing in politics.

Digg Random

HT: Digg Random

I don't know whether to file this under "Asian people are crazy" or "Why reparations are a bad idea."

Maybe she's just impressed with the high savings rate in China.

What I'm wondering is whether Taiwanese students count. China was still part of Taiwan in the 30s and 40s, so I think they should.

Never ending backlog of links

1. Political economy of education (never finished reading this)

2. Second best commencement speech I've read (on positive psychology)

3. Death by Caffine

4. Maybe we should just let Africa host more World Cups instead of sending aid

5. Glaeser on climate change legislation

6. Charter Cities

7. The "ethicist" at the New York Times gives horrible, unethical advice about kidney donations

Is it rational to vote?

Does it make sense to vote?

The short answer is "probably, since you'll feel better about having done your civic duty." But when people ask this question I think what they mean is "the cost of voting is about 10 minutes of your time, the benefit is a tiny probability multiplied by something huge--is that tiny multiplied by huge a big or small?

Gelman et al. estimate the probability your vote would have mattered in the 2008 election. The probability varies by state so they plot by state in this graph:

These probabilities are tiny. (And I think they are vast overestimates.) But look at the historic average growth rates for different income groups when Democrats are in office vs Republicans. The fact that Democrats have higher growth rates for all groups probably has little to do with policy. Democrats just happened to get voted into office at the right times of the business cycle. The fact that the growth is relatively even (and somewhat convergent) is possibly also an artifact of the Democrats being in office when there was a lot of growth in college and high school education, while the Republicans have presided during a period of more rapid technological change (or some such narrative).

But it's definitely possible that Democratic and Republican policies have something to do with the fact that income growth lags for the poorest under Republicans and is greatest for the poorest under Democrats. Suppose that we adjust the growth rates so the means are the same; then, by eye-balling, it looks like growth would be around 1% greater per year for the poorest income deciles. Using the numbers in this graph that means about $144 billion in value over 4 years for the bottom two income quintiles.

Suppose your time is worth $20 an hour. It takes ~10 minutes to vote. The value from voting is $144 billion worth of aid to the poor and working class. What would the probability need to be (at least) for the expected benefit of voting to exceed its cost? If you weight income to yourself and to others equally then it's just 1 in 43 billion.

Which means it rational (in the sense of expected value), for Democrats at least, to vote in almost every state in the union. That's definitely not a result most philosophers intuit (and is probably an artifact of greater overestimated probabilities).

But what if these numbers are right? Shouldn't the possibility be widely noted in the literature? And shouldn't estimates of the probability of your vote mattering note that there is a big difference between a 1 in 10²⁰ chance, which implies voting is irrational, and a 1 in 10⁹ or 1 in 10¹² chance, which may imply voting is rational?

Whither Democracy?

I read this story in my local paper today.

People tend to have three responses. One group complains that these kids aren't focusing on poor American people. Those people are idiots. A second group says "that's nice" but thinks it's a lost cause. The writer expresses that side of the story at the end, noting that all they have to show for their efforts is a form letter. A third group believes in what they're doing. I'm in the third group.

These kids aren't working in isolation. They were inspired a few years back by a Invisible Children, a movie about the kids abducted by and living in fear of the LRA in Uganda. (It's a great documentary. Two of the directors went to USC for film school.) As the Invisible Children site notes, President Obama just signed a bill that allocates around $40 million to supporting reconciliation and rebuilding in the area and requires the bureaucracy to formulate a strategy for achieving peace. Will it work? I have no idea. I shy away from foreign policy issues like this because I don't think anyone knows. But it's worth a shot. (The benefits are hundreds or thousands of deaths prevented, thousands spared violence, and millions of lives returning to normal. Even is the probability of success are tiny the expected value is HUGE.)

But why did the President sign the bill? Did it have anything to do with the erasers? No. The erased were mailed too recently. But it did have something to do with the thousands of kids (including kids from Nature Coast) who turned out for Invisible Children's events over the years. Events like the Global Night Commute and Displace Me. President Obama invited the CEO and two of the founders of that non-profit to the signing ceremony--a good indication the White House and Congress were paying attention to their movement.

Still, there were thousands of people involved in that campaign. Did it make a difference that 50 kids from Nature Coast went to Displace Me? Probably not. Like any political action, the chances some individual was the difference between success and failure is microscopic. But if we use that criteria then we should never vote. What are the odds my vote is going to matter?

One of the comments on that article complained that these kids should being spending time learning American history. Don't they need to know the difference de jure and de facto segregation and who won the Battle of Bunker Hill? No. Not really. But someone really does have to learn about performing their civic duty, taking part in the public discourse, and making democracy work. Economists and political scientists have show how there is a natural tendency for important issues that no one has a vital interest in to fall by the wayside. It's not that these issues aren't important--they're often critical--its just that everyone else hopes someone else will take care of them. For us to keep our priorities straight--e.g. putting the lives of millions of people who might be exterminated by genocide toward the top--we need a lot of people to make some small sacrifices to keep these issues on the agenda.

Otherwise they'll disappear. And a lot of lives will be snuffed out too far to soon. No one will notice. But it'll be just as tragic all the same.

P.S. Watch the Displace Me video. It has RFK quotes. My mom shook his hand when he campaigned for a senate seat in 1964.