Boomerang Ideas

Sometimes a policy debate starts when people find out about something intuitively revolting. They clamor for government intervention to show it down. Academics and others who have been studying the issue for years then come out of the shadows and explain why, as bad as the picture looks, it's better than the alternative. But a few years down the road some young grad students do a study and the whole picture gets a little fuzzy--and puts the evidence half-way back on the side of the initial critics.

Sweat-shop labor is a great example of that kind of "Boomerang debate."

Most people who haven't thought much about it hate sweat shops (here defined as factories that pay, say, less than $4,000 a year to workers). Isn't it some kind of human rights abuse to ask people to work 12 hours a day for less than (the U.S.) minimum wage?

But the thing is, the people who choose to work in a factory are often choosing to because they don't want to work 12 hours a day on a farm like their parents. And they can make 5x (or 10x) as much in the factory as they could on the farm. The point is that if people are freely choosing those jobs then they've got to be better (on average) than the other horrible options they have. Benjamin Powell, guest blogging at Aid Watch, gets the debate this far--and then claims that's the end of the story.

But it's not. Not all sweat shops are created equally. Wages vary considerably, as does safety. Working in a plant making CRT monitors is extremely dangerous while working in a textile mill is comparatively safe. Some sweat shops employ children who should be in school, others only adults. And some pay their workers wages their parents couldn't have imagined--while others more or less enslave their workers, violating every labor law on the books.

Taking that to heart that while it's very, very clear sweat shops are good on the whole--and we're probably better off (in the words of Jeff Sachs) worrying why we don't have enough sweat shops as opposed to why we have too many--labor activists targeting the worst abuses are probably part of the solution, not the problem. This, indeed, is what recent research has revealed: "anti-sweatshop campaigns led to large real wages increases . . . but [no] significant effects on employment."

In so many words: anti-sweatshop activism would be bad if it reduced the number of sweatshops, but since it doesn't it's great--improving labor laws (or enforcement) without harming labor.

Quote of the Day

Candidates who can commit to summer 2012 are strongly preferred.

I read that and thought "I can't risk being out of the country--I need to see Batman 3 opening night."

Then I pitied myself.

Quote of the Day

[D]o we have a greater chance at improving welfare by importing poverty, or exporting assistance? I’m not sure.

from Aid Thoughts.

If you could invent one vaccine it'd be for . . .

AIDS? Carcer (pretend it's possible)? Heart attacks?

I was talking to friends yesterday and I said that the next frontier in human welfare is dealing with the problems that are all in people's heads. We've eliminated most communicable diseases in the United States and met our basic needs. Not a lot of people die young, and those that do often die in accidents that are hard to prevent. As the rest of the world develops (China and India will both be like the U.S. in 50 years or less, it appears) this will come to be true worldwide.

At that point we can continue to worry about marginal gains to life expectancy from inventing cancer drugs and treating heart disease. And we can worry about priming the engines of growth with education so that 50 years hence our grandchildren can each have $150,000 in income instead of $100,000. Or we could worry about ensuring that 10,000 people don't die prematurely from lack of health insurance.

Or we could look at what the next frontier. Here are projections for 2030 and statistics for today, restricted to the high income countries that most of the world will resemble in 50 years:

Note: I don't know how these numbers are calculated in details. I don't put a lot of stock in exact predictions like these, nor do I like the methology here in particular (I suspect). But I think the general pattern should ring true for anyone living in the United States or Europe and paying close attention. Also, I'd like to emphasize that, while the study thinks of "unipolar depressive disorders" are something that either affect or don't affect people, I think (esp. in the future) it's better to think of them as something to affect everyone to a greater or lesser extent. Some bridges are "unstable" but every bridge has a breaking point. Some roads are bumpy, but every road could be smoother. Some people are a wreak, but everyone gets down when they probably shouldn't.

Also, this doesn't fit anywhere but I know that just because something is a big problem doesn't mean it's the most important problem to work on. The best problems to work on are both big and tractable--is immunizing kids with coping strategies and a healthy outlook tractable? I think so. We immunized most kids against smoking and that alone probably accounts for 90% of the DALY drop we've caused in the past 40 years (in the U.S.)

Normative and Descriptive: Update

I don't put myself high above others. Now, by personal experience, I mean I'm a musician. By knowledge, I mean I'm a musician who knows how music works. I know quite a bit of music theory to tell you the simplicity of the song, but I wouldn't be able to put it in lament terms. Also, you can listen to her, but to act as if she's some kind of musical genius is idiotic. [She] isn't creative. [This song] is hardly even intelligent or charming.

That's a direct quote from a (judging from tone) very reasonable person writing about Lady Gaga.

But being reasonable and knowing the obvious--that tastes are subjective--doesn't stop this person from, at least appearing, to make statements about what music is objectively good. The progressive use of the terms "simplicity," "creative," "intelligent," and "charming" show a drift some adjectives that could reasonably have an objective meaning (if you put a song on paper in some encoding scheme, some would be easy to compress due to repetition etc. thus simple) to code words for good and bad (people are charming, songs aren't).

Maybe he or she did intend all those adjectives to be seen as objective descriptions. Maybe he likes Lady Gaga, but thinks she lacks charm, intelligence and creativity. But I wouldn't put money on it. Those things, like beauty, are largely in the eye of the beholder.

More on Inception

Written 7/23, but on delayed post avoid spoilers.


In a famous experiment subjects were asked for rank 5 jams. Their rankings were pretty consistent, most people preferred one of the two jams you'd expect since they were the most expensive and best-selling. Another set of subjects were asked to rank the same jams--and explain why they preferred their favorite. Same results? No. When people had to think about which jam they liked they couldn't pin down what was so great about the two the first subjects preferred. Instead they tended to pick one of the two jams that were particularly sweet as their favorite, despite the fact that these jams ranked 4th and 5th in the first experiment.

Sometimes it's easy to know the truth about how you feel--as long as you don't think. Your subconscious supercomputer just knows. But you can short that circuit and let your conscious brain take over. And when that happens your liable to "overthink."

I think that's what happened to nearly half the population that saw the end of Inception. You can intuit that the ending is a happy one--your brain knows Cobb is reunited with his kids. But it can't explain why. So some people let their rational brain take over and start spinning yarns. The result:

So with that said here are some thoughts (written after my second viewing) on points of contention in the blogosphere and with things I felt were muddled or confusing.

1. Cobb did get out of the dream at the end. The top was just about to fall. The audience's totem is Cobb's wedding ring. Watch closely and you can see that whenever it's a dream he's wearing it and whenever he's in reality he's not. Also apply Ockham's Razor.

2. Where does Ariadne get the dream machine in the hospital dream? Is it there just in case?

3. I don't think the hospital dream having gravity is a plot hole. There's no acceleration on Eames. The fact that the hospital collapses when it appears the character are accelerating in the elevator may be a plot hole. The throughout the movie the synching of the dream's time is a bit fuzzy. Lee "I'm the best editor of all time" Smith and co. needed some leeway.

4. Some people say that the top spins for an inordinately long period of time at the end. But it spins forever earlier in the film, when Cobb is in his hotel room.

5. When Ariadne and Cobb enter "limbo" they are really in a shared dream with Fischer. They don't lose their minds because they aren't in Limbo, and what happens to Fischer in the hospital affects their world because they are in his dream. That's why when they try to resuscitate him it starts lightening and why when he wakes up the dream collapses. Cobb dies and goes to the real limbo, where he does start to lose his mind, as Arthur(?) said he would earlier in the movie.

6. If you have doubts Nolan intended the ring to be our totem consider that he placed a long shot of Cobbs fingers at the beginning of the movie when he's eating rice. When he wakes up and has his hand resting on the arm rest we get another long shot of his fingers.

7. I don't understood why the dreamer can't just do whatever he wants as Ariande does in her dream. It risks turning Fischer's subconscious against them, but that happened already. Shouldn't Yusef be willing to take a risk and bend the dream rules to get security off his ass in the city? And in the snow fortress level Fischer knows he's dreaming so what is the risk? Then again, Eames does seem to have superpowers in that dream . . .

8. I don't think there is a clear explanation for why Saito is so much older than Cobb. He entered limbo a few seconds or minutes later in Hospital level-time. I think time is just meant to move super fast.

Has fast do immigrant assimilate?

A great post from Bill Easterly.

This is something I wonder about. The first big wave of immigrants to the U.S. were from the British Isles and didn't need to learn English. Many of the Irish who came in the next wave also spoke English, but the Germans didn't. It's obvious today though that their descendants learned English just fine. But how long did it take? How many generations?

My intuition is that concerns that Mexicans (and other Hispanic) immigrants today will never assimilate are overblown. But there are a two things that have changed that make me worry. It's possible that the pattern of Hispanic immigration in more concentrated than German migration. The more Spanish-speakers that cluster in one area the less there is an incentive to learn English and the greater the probability that such areas will turn into de facto two-language states. Similarly, the government is (as far as I know) much more accommodating of non-English speakers due to multiculturalism: state tests are in multiple languages,, translators are mandated in hospitals, and there is a general emphasis on teaching English-speakers Spanish in the hope that it will make life easier for native Spanish-speakers.