Super-Economy on Nordic inequality

From super-economy, hat tip: Tyler Cowen

Sweden is known for income equality. Increasingly, studies also point to Sweden as a country characterized by high intergenerational mobility of income. Income-distribution and wealth distribution are however not the same thing. What some may not know is that wealth-inequality is relatively high in Sweden. The top one percent own around 35% of wealth in the United States. In Sweden, because of extensive tax evasion, the number is harder to calculate. When including estimates of wealth held outside of Sweden, Roine and Waldenström estimate that the top one percent richest Swedes own 25-40% of total wealth, not far from American inequality levels, and increasing more rapidly.

At the same time, the intergenerational mobility of top wealth is chokingly low. A recent studyfound that a astonishing 80-90% of inequality of top wealth is transmitted to the next generation in Sweden!

According to one study the share of the richest Swedes who inherited their wealth is around, 2/3 with 1/3 being entrepreneurs, while in the United States it was the opposite, with 1/3 of the wealthiest inherited their wealth while around 2/3 are entrepreneurs.

It is popular to cite startling facts about wealth inequality, but few actually know what they mean. “What does it mean?” should be question #1 for anyone who takes this stuff seriously (few people). It becomes worse than ignorance when they switch between wealth and income depending on if they want to scare people with absolute figures (use wealth), or compare them to Nordic countries (use income). This stupidly popular video commits this sin worse than ignorance. What people think they’re citing is the standard of living of the rich vs. poor, which in fact is captured by the stat that’s virtually never cited – consumption inequality.

RationalWiki on Political Demographics of the Academic World

Here is some more political demographic data from the academic world. It was derived from rationalwiki, a site which treats conservative dogmas with crude hostility, and generally treats liberal dogma with emotionless factuality (see creationism or anti-vaccination vs. GMOs or the Jesus Myth). Still, they’re fairly rational, even if they treat what they see as irrationality in different ways depending on who’s saying it.

University of Toronto survey

This survey asked 1,634 full-time employed faculty members at four year institutions across the U.S. However, the sample was largely limited to full-time social-science and humanities professors, which skewed it:^[2]

All professors - Ivy League professors

Liberal 72% - 87%

Moderate 13% - 0%

Conservative 15% -13%

Liberal professors by discipline

Humanities - 81%

Social Science - 75%

Engineering - 51%

Business - 49%

According to Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe, a 2001 survey carried out by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute "identified a distinct leftward tilt in academia, but a smaller one than you might expect."^[4] It further indicated that extremists on either side of the spectrum make up less than 6% of all professors, although the vast majority of these were left-wingers.

All professors

Far-left - 5.3%

Liberal - 42.3%

Moderate - 34.4%

Conservative - 17.7%

Far-right - 0.3%

[edit]Carnegie University survey

This 1989 survey is somewhat dated. Libertarian Peter G. Klein used this article for his rant on socialist economists, which placed liberals and communists in the same camp.^[5] It indicated that over 70% of tenure-tracked professors were liberal, while less than 20% were conservative.

Liberal professors by discipline

Public Affairs
88%

Ethnic Studies
76%

Anthropologists
72%

Political Scientists
72%

Economists
63%

More political demographic information here.

Reason Magazine on GMO Safety

This is a decent article -- Why Do These Well-Fed Anti-Science Activists Oppose Safe, Cheap Food For Poor People? Although the title is the kind of cheap shot I more often see in liberal journalism.

Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project responds: "We've eaten about 7 trillion meals in the 18 years since GMOs first came on the market. There's not one documented instance of someone getting so much as a sniffle."

Given all the fear from media and activists, you might be surprised to learn that most serious scientists agree with him. "There have been about 2,000 studies," says Entine, and "there is no evidence of human harm in a major peer-reviewed journal."

Nature is terrible at feeding people, and genetically modified foods have been a safe and effective way of escaping nature’s cruelty.

Racism Paranoids

Shit Rich College Kids say, (not my title)

White men make up approximately 36% of the population, but commit 75% of mass shootings. What would be called terrorism by any other skin tone is suddenly some mysterious unnamed disease. We as a society are perfectly happy to further stigmatize mentally ill people, who are far more likely to be victims of violence than commit violence, in the service of protecting white supremacy and male entitlement.

here’s another blog stating,

Black Crime =Gang Violence. Arab Crime = Terrorism. Hispanic Crime = Illegal immigration. White Crime = No crime, he was just insane.

here we go again. white kid carries out plan to murder people and already the mainstream media is going through with the “he was disturbed,” “he was mentally ill” and “he was insane” spin on the story. gotta protect that image of white purity and innocence no matter what.

1. I've never met anybody who thinks that people who kill in mass must have some unnamed disease.

2. I've never met anybody who blankets terrorism over mass killings, no matter what the race. What is unique to terrorism is the pursuit of political aims.

3. I've never met anybody who is perfectly happy stigmatizing people with mental disabilities.

4. I think most people define gang  violence as violence done by a gang, not violence done by black people.

5. I think most people define Terrorism as violence in pursuit of political aims, not Arab crime.

6. I think most people define Illegal immigration as moving to a country in spite of laws stating they can’t.

7. I think most people define insanity by severely abnormal mental and behavioral problems.

8. I think it is at least possible that the kind of violence predicts the race of the person committing it. E.g. gang violence is committed disproportionately by black people. That is not the same as the race being a strong predictor of whether they’re criminals. E.g. Black people are not all committing gang violence.

9. I’ve never met anyone who systematically excuses white crime for insanity.

10. I think that a racist culture or racist society doesn’t need to pretend like it’s not racist. The fact that racism paranoids have to crack the secret language of the our white supremacy society indicates that it is not really a white supremacy society. Racists in a racist society don’t need to hide.

Politics of 6 Professional Academic Associations

The Brookings institute got 550 responses from professional associations concerning their political affiliations. The Republican to Democrat Ratios were as follows:

Economics 3.7 - 1

History 4.1 – 1

Political Science 4.8 - 1

Sociology 47 – 1

Labor Economist 4 - 1

Public Economist 3.2 – 1

The Sociology ratio is not a mistake. It is not 4.7 to 1 but 47 to 1. In comparison Economics is labeled the “right wing social science” where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.7 to 1. This is interesting especially since Economists and Sociologists basically study the same thing – society. I see the political diversity of economists as a reason why it performs better than sociology at answering tough questions. Not because they’re more right wing, but because both left and right hold biases that hinders their ability to criticize research that confirms what they always knew deep down inside.

Jonathan Haidt on Ideology affecting Science

The Single Greatest Cause of Atheism?

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
-Brennan Manning

Sounds good. Is it true? My experience is that most atheists don’t make the intellectual mistake of gauging the truth of claims by the behavior of the claimers. The Christian lifestyle is no evidence one way or another of whether God exists. It just isn’t. I suspect; however, that religion is often accepted for expressive and social reasons. People become Christians because they like they like associations that come with it. “I’m a Christian” is not about what you believe, it’s about who you think you are or who you want others to see you as. They believe what they have to in order to in order to achieve a social or self-expressive end without feeling cognitive dissonance from inconsistency.

This is how I see all political groups and religions by the way, it is not unique to Christianity.

What is the single greatest cause of atheism? My experience is that theists have failed to “give a reason for the hope that is in them” It’s in the bible might be “a reason” literally, it’s not an intellectually satisfying reason (a sounds argument). Faith is not an intellectually satisfying reason if one is a fideist (Faith over and against Reason). We should have a good and proper reason for believing what we believe, and we should have a good and proper reasons for the new beliefs we take on. Surrendra Gangadean does this in A Philosophical Foundation.

Bryan Caplan’s Response to Climate Change Comic Writer

Here is Bryan Caplan’s rejoinder to Yoram Bauman, who wrote A Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change. The whole thing comes from Bryan’s critique of the comic.

Bryan, as always, is civil, logical, and to the point.

Yoram Bauman:

“"Insurance is NOT a no-brainer." You're absolutely right that buying an extended warranty for a toaster is a bad idea, but the cartoon book repeatedly emphasizes low probability outcomes that are catastrophic, which is a pretty good focal point for insurance.”

Bryan:

No, it's a terrible focal point for insurance.  Most people fail to insure against many low-probability catastrophic events - and you probably don't want to call them fools.  Just one example: Costco.com sells a year's supply of dehydrated food for $1499.99.  This product provides excellent insurance against a long list of natural and man-made disasters.  Question: Have you bought it?  If not, why not?  The same goes for what you drive (probably not the safest car), where you live (probably not the safest neighborhood in your area, much less the country or world), where you travel, who you sleep with, and so on.  Low-probability catastrophes lurk around every corner, but the standard response seems to be, "Until I see concrete dangers, I'll take my chances."

Bryan has made comments on several educational comics, including:

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

Climate Change

and Jonathan Gruber’s comic on Health Care

Krugman’s Quote on the Internet

This is a Facebook meme floating around libertarian circles. Here is also an article from The Examiner website which points out how off the mark Krugman was. The meme seems to be passed around as a response to Krugman’s skepticism toward Bitcoin.

It doesn’t take much effort to google the quote and find out where it came from. Krugman explains here,

First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

It reminds me of how groups discard or accept evidence based on how well it fits with their meta-narrative of how the world works. Paul Krugman is a negative icon in the libertarian narrative, so when they hear that he said something totally wrong they accept it without looking at where it came from. If a quote like this was attached to Milton Friedman’s picture and hovering around, I suspect libertarians would look beneath the top layer.

Cardboard Box on Money overcoming Democracy

I worry that society now gets its facts from Facebook pictures of protesters holding sharpie written cardboard boxes.

A couple obvious points: People who are better at attracting political contributions are better at attracting votes.

People who are more politically savvy make more money in their furthered political careers and are also more likely to win an election.

Some serious people actually do very serious work to try to figure out how important money is for causing election outcomes. We should not ignore them.

I know this is low hanging fruit for criticism, but 1,000+ shares on Facebook? Really?

John Cochrane on Krugman on Reading

Krugman sometimes reminds me of the Dawkins of economics. They’re both very smart, but their raging tone communicates that they’re more interested in building an army than furthering truth. I find this kind of head-first for good against evil attitude in political pundits, not academic intellectuals. I have a very hard time reading him because his economics is over my head, and his lay speak is about whipping liberals up into outrage.

Here is John Cochrane’s response to Krugman’s charges.

Was George Cuvier trying to Reconcile Science with the Bible?

From Education Portal:

Cuvier contributed a lot to our knowledge about the Earth. But the funny thing is, Cuvier also believed that Earth was only a few million years old! That's a big deal, considering we know now that the Earth is over four billion years old. How could a guy who knew so much about the Earth, who studied rocks and fossils and contributed so much to science, be so drastically wrong about the age of our planet?

As we'll see, it had a lot to do with Cuvier's upbringing and the scientific atmosphere that existed in his time. Let's look deeper into our geologic theories and see how they have changed over the last few hundred years.

George Cuvier lived in France right at the turn of the century, from 1769 to 1832. At that time in history, European scientists had a very strong habit of interweaving their studies of the Bible with their studies of natural science. When it came to Earth's history, they looked to the biblical story of the great flood to help them understand the geologic events of the past.

Combined with his impressions of the violent natural disasters recounted in the Bible, Cuvier's observations made him believe that most of Earth's history was characterized by geologic catastrophe.

So the story is that Cuvier’s bible fundamentalism got in the way of his usually high quality science. Except, according to Wikipedia,

The concept (catastrophism) was first popularized by the early 19th-century French scientist Georges Cuvier, who proposed that new life forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings…

The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. His motivation was to explain the patterns of extinction and faunal succession that he and others were observing in the fossil record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low-lying areas by the sea, he did not make any reference to Noah's flood. Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following the extinction event. In fact Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the intellectual climate of the French revolution, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.

Cuvier also believed that the earth was millions of years old, not six thousand, so why did his bible fundamentalism conflict so hard with a billion year earth, but he accepted a million year earth just fine?
 
What evidence is there that he was actually interweaving the biblical story with natural science? He didn’t say anything like that. He didn’t say anything that implied that. The fact that he disagreed is not justification for assigning him secret motives and dismissing him for religious bias. That is not how serious intellectual debate is done.

Bryan Caplan is in the Movies

Some very standard economic points in cartoons:

Foreigners are our friends

 

Usual Objection: You're assuming that trade is 100% equal. In the real world it is not.

Response: Economists don't assume that trade is 100% equal, they assume that it is mutually beneficial until someone gives them a reason otherwise. Poor labor from the third-world accepts low wages because their alternatives are awful. Taking away the best of their terrible options is not doing them any favors. Rich first world countries import from elsewhere usually because it's cheaper than producing it domestically. Taking away lower prices is not doing consumers any favors (for concern about the competing workers, see Make Progress not Work).

Make Progress not Work

Usual Objection: Unemployment is a real problem. I always thought economists understood that but I guess they don't.

Response: Of course economists care about the unemployed, but they distinguish between natural unemployment (also called frictional), and cyclical unemployment. Natural unemployment is when capital, technology, or trade finds a way of doing something that requires fewer inputs from workers, and those workers have to go and find something else productive to do. That takes time and effort. But economists are concerned with cushioning the blow of this kind of unemployment or making the transition as rapid as possible; not preventing it. Because there has been an efficiency loss, keeping a worker employed producing less than they cost helps a few, but disproportionately impoverishes others. Because there is always natural unemployment, you will never hear an economist say that we need to get unemployment down to 0%. Cyclical unemployment occurs during recessions. There is disagreement about it's causes and solutions, but long story short; it's needless and wasteful.

Markets Solve Problems

Usual Objection: Of course economists love markets, they're a bunch of right wingers.

Response: The typical economists is a moderate democrat. Liberal economists outnumber conservative ones by about 3 to 1. And if you ask economists about market failure, they'll easily list examples on the spot. Economists only fit the right wing depiction when their mostly liberal standard is contrasted with the near universally liberal standard of most other social sciences.

It's not that bad

Usual Objection: People can't be wrong about how well they're doing.

Response: "People" are not a person. An individual person can only know from observation how themselves and those close to them are doing, but they don't know how society, the country, or the world is doing. They also can't compare it to the past unless they've been there. For that they need data, and the typical person almost always underestimates how optimistic that data is.

Manipulated Definitions of Rape

Consider this education website’s definition of rape.

Rape and/or sexual assault is forced, manipulated, or coerced sexual contact by a stranger, friend or acquaintance.

Okay, that’s a definition a normal person would give. But notice the word coerced. It does not mean force or threat of force. According to the same website it means,

Coercion
Coercion is the use of emotional manipulation to persuade someone to something they may not want to do – like being sexual or performing certain sexual acts.  Examples of some coercive statements include: “If you love me you would have sex with me .”, “If you don't have sex with me I will find someone who will.”, and “I'm not sure I can be with someone who doesn't want to have sex with me.”  Coercive statements are often part of many campus acquaintance rapes.  Being coerced into having sex or performing sexual acts is not consenting to having sex and is considered rape/sexual assault.

Making someone want to have sex with you is emotional manipulation. Looking sexy, speaking smoothly, and seduction generally manipulates the emotion of another so that they want to have sex with you. Under this definition, I don’t understand why Sam Malone is not a rapist (or anyone within the playa culture). They give examples. Those examples try to capture a much narrower idea than their definition. Besides that, one example in particular, “I'm not sure I can be with someone who doesn't want to have sex with me,” can just be an honest plea. Many see sexual relations is an integral part of a loving healthy romantic relationship, and without it they don’t want to continue that relationship. Why is that rape?

One more definition to look into. The definition of coercion used the word “consent” as in, “not consenting is rape”. How does the website define it?

Consent
Consent is clear permission between intimate partners that what they are doing is okay and safe.  To consent to something – like being sexual – means you confidently agree to do it based on your own free will without any influence or pressure.

No influence or pressure. Can you think of some things a normal date could do to influence whether you have sex with them? Like coercion, their definition of consent is extremely counter-intuitive. Nobody can ever be influenced into legitimate consent. Everywhere else in the world, people who are verbally persuaded into doing something are still doing it of their own free will.

It is annoying to run into totally bogus rape statistics because they define rape in such a way that anyone can be a rapist. Data on rape is almost never collected by asking, “have you been raped.” Instead what is asked are questions like, “did he say or do anything to influence you to have sex with him?” Or, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol?” Sure if you buy a girl a drink you “administered” and “intoxicant”, but if she regretted it the next night it doesn’t mean she was raped.

It gets much scarier when it starts creeping into the legal definitions. I would consider myself doomed if I was merely accused of rape even if I knew I didn’t do it.

I know scary statistics accumulated by open definitions of rape are supposed to whip me into a state of moral outrage with a fervent desire to fight back against rape culture. What it actually does is makes me have to trek deeply into their studies before I can take their facts seriously. Who has time for that? So I have to discount what they have to say. An intellectually dishonest faction within feminism undermine their credibility with me by manipulating definitions to promote their cause. I wish I could hear a story about a rape and say, “oh my god that’s horrible,” rather than have to remain totally indifferent until I accumulate more facts. I know when my heartstrings are being manipulated.

 

Also see Christina Sommers on rape culture

An Open Letter to Traditionalists

An Open Letter to my Traditionalist Friends, written by Glenn People’s, is a brutally honest letter accusing traditionalists of not exercising intellectual discipline when defending their view. Intellectual discipline which, in other contexts, they have a fine time exercising.

Traditionalists believe that scripture teaches that hell is eternal conscious torment. Glenn people’s is an annihilationist. He believes that scripture teaches that hell is eternal annihilation.

A Little Radiation is Good for you.

Here is one of the most interesting things I’ve read all month; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, EPIDEMIOLOGY, AND THE DEMISE OF THE LINEAR NO-THRESHOLD HYPOTHESIS. The author is from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the article is cited 52 times according to Google Scholar.

First things first, what is the linear no-threshold hypothesis? According to Wiki it is a model which says:

radiation is always considered harmful with no safety threshold, and the sum of several very small exposures are considered to have the same effect as one larger exposure (response linearity)

The abstract of the paper also contains a definition:

The LNT hypothesis is the basic principle of all radiation protection policy. This theory
assumes that all radiation doses, even those close to zero, are harmful in linear proportion
to dose and that all doses produce a proportionate number of harmful mutations i.e. miss or unrepaired DNA alterations

In contrast is the scientific view (he mentions studies later on)

High-dose radiation injures this biosystem with associated risk increments of mortality
and cancer mortality. Low-dose radiation stimulates DNA damage-control with associated
epidemiologic observations of risk decrements of mortality and cancer mortality, i.e.,
hormesis.

Hormesis? What is that? Back to my good friend Wiki:

the term for generally favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors. A pollutant or toxin showing hormesis thus has the opposite effect in small doses as in large doses.

Rule of thumb: the dose makes the poison. Interpretation: nothing is poison until you consume too much of it.

How did we get it wrong? He gives two answers – Democratic irrationality and special interests.

How can this 40-year-old LNT paradigm continue to be the operative principle of radiation protection policy despite the contradictory scientific observations of both molecular biology and epidemiology and the lack of any supportive human data? The increase of public fear through repeated statements of deaths caused by “deadly” radiation has engendered an enormous increase in expenditures now required to “protect” the public from all applications of nuclear technology: medical, research, energy, disposal, and cleanup remediation. Government funds are allocated to appointed committees, the research they support, and to multiple environmental and regulatory agencies. The LNT theory and multibillion dollar radiation activities have now become a symbiotic self-sustaining political and economic force.

Now the body of the paper. This is a bit longer, so hold onto your hats.

Obviously high doses are dangerous. The best example comes from the radiation from the atomic bombs,

The best scientific evidence of human radiation effects initially came from epidemiologic studies of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While no evidence of genetic effects has been found, these studies showed a roughly linear relationship between the induction of cancer and extremely high dose-rate, single high doses of atomic bomb radiation…

This hypothesis that all radiation is harmful in linear proportion to the dose, is the principle used for collective dose calculations of the number of deaths produced by any radiation, natural or generated, no matter how small.

Note to self: be skeptical of “official” data on deaths caused by nuclear radiation.

Our bodies are adaptive to low doses of radiation, actually making us healthier, even though high doses break our bodies apart.

For several decades increased longevity and decreased cancer mortality have been reported
in populations exposed to high background radiation. Established radiation protection authorities
consider such observations to be spurious or inconclusive because of unreliable public health data or undetermined confounding factors such as pollution of air, water and food, smoking, income, education, medical care, population density, and other socioeconomic variables. Recently, however, several epidemiologic, statistically significant, controlled studies have demonstrated that exposure to low or intermediate levels of radiation are associated with positive health effects.

A natural experiment from the Soviet Union after a thermal explosion in 1957: (A cGy is a unit of absorbed radiation dose equal to one hundredth (10−2) of a gray):

7852 persons living in 22 villages in the Eastern Urals were divided into three exposure groups averaging 49.6 cGy, 12.0 cGy, and 4.0 cGy and followed for 30 years. Tumor-related mortality was 28%, 30%, and 27% lower in the 49.6 cGy, 12.00 cGy, and 4.0 cGy groups, respectively, than in the nonirradiated control population in the same region. In the 49.6 cGy and 12.0 cGy groups the difference from the controls was statistically significant

There was a thermal explosion. 7852 people in villages nearby were effected by radiation. Those people were less likely to die from tumor related illness than in populations in the same region not exposed to radiation.

He cites another one from Japan after the Atomic bomb detonation. He also brings up radon dial painters and radon spas. Radon is highly radioactive according to wiki.

Included are the apparently
beneficial effects of low doses of external gamma rays on the life span of radium-dial painters and the significantly lower mortality from cancers at all sites of residents of Misasa, an urban area with radon spas, than residents of the suburbs of Misasa

From what I read the Radium Dial Painters were working women who painted hands and faces of clocks with radium paint. It turned into a big workers rights scandal after several of them died early deaths. Of course, they were licking their paintbrushes, so we’re not talking about small doses anymore. For radium dial painters in general, Kohen found the opposite effect.

On a side note, I’m not sure it is the employers fault for not warning their workers not to eat paint. I’m just saying.

More studies showing benefits to low rates or radiation:

The 1601 counties selected for adequate permanence of residence
provide extremely high-power statistical analysis. After applying the National Academy of Sciences BEIR IV correction for variations in smoking frequency (NAS 1988), the study shows a very strong tendency for lung cancer mortality to decrease with increasing mean radon level in homes

A 13 year nuclear shipyard worker study:

From the database of almost 700,000 shipyard workers, including about
108,000 nuclear workers, three study groups were selected, consisting of 28,542 nuclear workers with working lifetime doses >5 mSv (many received doses well in excess of 50 mSv), 10,462 nuclear workers with doses <5 mSv and 33,352 non-nuclear workers. Deaths in each of the groups were classified as due to: all causes, leukemia, lymphatic and hematopoietic cancers, mesothelioma, and lung cancer. The results demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in the standardized mortality ratio for the two groups of nuclear workers for ‘death from all causes’ compared with the non-nuclear workers. For the
>5 mSv group of nuclear workers, the highly significant risk decrement to 0.76

The non-nuclear workers and the nuclear workers were similarly selected for employment, were afforded the same health care thereafter, and performed the identical type of work, except for exposure to 60Co gamma radiation, with a similar median age of entry into employment of about 34 years. This provides evidence with extremely high statistical power that low levels of ionizing radiation are associated with risk decrements.

Another study from nuclear workers in the U.S. Canada and Europe concludes,

“There was no evidence of an association between radiation dose and mortality from all
causes or from all cancers. Mortality from leukemia, excluding chronic, lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)... was significantly associated with cumulative external radiation dose

He also quotes a breast cancer study which includes 31,000 women. Based on the linear model, the author of the study “includes only non-significant data and excludes the data with the highest confidence limits”, and in so doing comes to the conclusion that low radiation exposure has mortality effects. But,

The observed data, however, demonstrates with high statistical confidence, a
reduction of the relative risk of breast cancer to 0.66 (P = 0.05) at 15 cGy and 0.85 (P = 0.32) at 25 cGy. The study actually predicts that a dose of 15 cGy would be associated with 7,000 fewer deaths in these million women.

The concluding paragraph:

Scientific understanding of the positive health effects produced by adaptive responses to low-level
radiation would result in a realistic assessment of the environmental risk of radiation. Instead of
adhering to non-scientific influences on radiation protection standards and practice (Taylor, 1980) that impair health care, research, and other benefits of nuclear technology, and waste many billions of dollars annually for protection against theoretical risks, these resources could be used productively for effective health measures and many other benefits to society.

Bryan Caplan on the Difference between Econ and Physics

There's a key difference between econ, and say, physics: While they're both perceived as hard and boring, few laymen have passionate opinions about physics.
Economics is another story.  The man in the street can't draw supply-and-demand diagrams, but when the price of gas goes up, he blames business conspiracies.  He knows nothing about comparative advantage, but he's an avid protectionist.  He can't define marginal productivity, but he's sure that downsizing is bad for the world.  If you tell him that we're far richer in 2010 than we were in 1990, he'll roll his eyes.
Bryan Caplan

Argument from the Moral Permissibility to Immigrate

Consider this:

Actor A does nothing wrong
Actor B does nothing wrong
Direct violent conflict occurs between actors A and B necessarily results.

Most people should have a problem with this. And most people do. How can two different actors not do anything wrong, but it still lead to fists and guns? I certainly don’t think that all suffering is an inherent result of doing what is wrong, but with the case of direct personal violence I think one or both of them must be wrong. A world of morally perfect actors still scrape their knees and get cancer, but they do not go to war with each other.

So we can rephrase it in a way to test what we believe for consistency:

If direct violent conflict between actors A and B necessarily results, at least one of them did something wrong

Applications? I’m thinking in terms of immigration and military warfare. These are particularly quality places to look because so many people hold that the way we treat other human beings is dependent on which side of the border they live on. The popular view is that one’s moral obligation to abstain from violent conflict against a foreigner is much more lax than violent conflict against a fellow citizen (if terrorists were hiding in Bowling Green, Kentucky we wouldn’t bomb them). Since we’re all foreigners to each other, we often feel that violence is morally permissible because we’re working under different sets of rules.

Immigration:

Immigrants often come from heart breakingly poor countries, and they have families to feed. They have no power to change the economic system of their own country. They have no way of finding a job in their own country, especially one that pays more than scraps. Some of them have an opportunity to move to a developed country. It is illegal in the developed country. Is it wrong to take that opportunity?

If they were on the other side of the fence, I think that not only would most people take that opportunity, but wouldn’t feel like they were doing anything immoral at all. The idea that one is morally obligated to stay in a desperately poor situation just because they were born there is very disconcerting. On the contrary, if their situation is desperate enough and their families are on the line, many would say that it is not only morally permissible to move, but morally obligatory.

Who is actor B? Immigration enforcers! How are they going to get all these illegal immigrants away? With hugs and lectures and an infinite succession of one more chance? Nope, with violent conflict. If immigrants aren’t doing anything wrong, and its leading to violent conflict with immigration enforcers, the only logical option is that immigration enforcement is wrong. Their wrongness spreads to their supporters of course. Universally, one who supports another’s moral wrong is also morally wrong.

People will try to squirm their way out of the conclusions they don’t like. Inevitably, they have to say one of these easily refuted things.

A) Immigrants are morally obligated remain in their horribly conditioned countries.
B) Immigration restrictions are not enforced with violence
C) Direct violent conflict results even when nobody did anything wrong.

Bryan Caplan on Discipline

Since Bryan Caplan believes that parents don’t make their children into who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives, people sometimes interpret Bryan as saying not to discipline. But this is a misunderstanding. Twin and adoption studies only show that parent’s long term effect on their children is negligible. So discipline effects children with the short term in mind. Make them good housemates. Sure kids aren’t like clay, but they are like a flexible plastic – they respond to pressure, but don’t expect them to stay that way forever.

Caplan has a good post on discipline at Econlog. It is also in his book, Selfish Reasons to have more Kids. In a nutshell, discipline is about clarity, consistency, and consequences. Adopt firm rules, clearly explain the penalties for breaking the rules, and impose promised penalties to the letter.

If you're skeptical of the wisdom of the ages, there is solid experimental evidence in its favor. When parents ask psychologists to help control their children's disobedience, tantrums, and aggression, psychologists often respond by training the parents.They call it "behavioral parent training," but it's Clarity, Consistency, and Consequences by another name.[i] Researchers have run dozens of experiments to see whether behavioral parent training actually works. It does. Suppose you have a list of parents who want help with their problem children. You randomly train some, and leave the rest on a waiting list. Experiments typically find that the average child of the trained parents behaves better than 80% of the children of the parents on the wait list. [ii] The main weakness of behavioral parent therapy is parental backsliding: Once parents tire of Clarity, Consistency, and Consequences, their kids go back to their old tricks.[iii] Discipline is like dieting: It works when tried.

What about when other people undermine your parenting method? Children learn that their relationship with different people will be on different terms. In the words of Princess Arendelle, “Let it go.”

When you're trying to improve your kid's behavior, other authorities - teachers, grandparents, nannies, and so on - often frustrate you by undermining your rules. What good is it to practice the Three C's if no one else does? Selfishly speaking: Plenty of good. Kids quickly discover that different people have different rules. If the typical teenager treated his friends the way he treats his parents, he wouldn't have any friends. A central criticism of behavioral parent therapy is that it "only" improves children's behavior in the home.^[iv] But an optimist would draw a different lesson: Parental discipline is enough to make children treat their parents decently. If other authorities in your child's life have lower standards, that's largely their problem.

 

 

Here is a parenting website that disagrees with Caplan. I disagree with them.

Here is Bryan Caplan on Econtalk discussing Selfish Reasons to have more Kids

 

Save Lives by Feeling Disgusted

What If You Could Save 250 Lives By Feeling a Little Disgusted?

Would you trade the lives of 256 people in order to ensure one million people won't feel disgusted?

In Canada, that's what we do every year. Every year, we decide that we'd rather let about 250 people die than have to put up with feeling repulsed.

There are about 4,500 people waiting for organs in Canada. Most of those waiting -- nearly 80 per cent -- are waiting for a kidney transplant. In 2012, 256 people died on the waiting list. In the U.S., there are now 120,990 people on a waiting list for organs. 99,201 are waiting on kidneys. Last year, 3,381 people died waiting on a kidney transplant.

Also see how a panel of economic experts are much more receptive to kidney sales than the general public.

Don Boudreaux on Donald Sterling’s Racism

Here Don Boudreaux makes a point regarding the currently popular Donald Sterling controversy. Apparently the Clippers owner is on record (didn’t know he was on record) saying some pretty racist things.

Regarding the privately recorded racist remarks by L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling (“NBA’s Sterling hypocrisy on racism,” May 4): There’s an important angle to this story that everyone but a few economists on some blogs (such as David Henderson at EconLog) is missing.

All agree, with good reason, that Mr. Sterling is a racist in private.  Yet Mr. Sterling acts like a non-racist in public. Counting Blake Griffin – whose father is black and mother white – 86 percent of Mr. Sterling’s team is black (with, of course, Mr. Sterling paying all of these players salaries that are extraordinarily high).  And Mr. Sterling has also made sizeable contributions to the NAACP.

Why does Mr. Sterling only talk the racist talk but not walk the racist walk?  The reason is market competition.  Were he to act like a racist in public – say, by employing only white players – his team would be worse on the court and worth less on the market.  Mr. Sterling can either make as much money as possible or he can indulge his racism, but the market prevents him from doing both.

Because Donald Sterling chose not to act​ publicly like the racist that he is, we have here strong evidence that the competitive market is a powerful force for reducing racism by confronting racists every day – rather than only occasionally, such as when disgruntled mistresses leak private recordings to the media – with the costs of their prejudices.

David Henderson makes the same point on Econlog.

Nobody summarizes clear economic points to the public like Don Boudreaux. The libertarian labor economics point is valuable, and true, but it feels a little bit non-sequitur, did anyone ask whether the markets pressures racism into the closet? The point is separate from the controversy itself -- the racist comments and the league’s reaction. I just prefer to hear a more neutral discussion of these kinds of things, rather than seeing every situation as an opportunity to explain what valid libertarian conclusions we can draw from it.

Parenting Website Critiques Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to have more Kids

Here is a parenting website (Dr. Laura… how many Dr. Laura’s are there out there?), it attempts to refute Bryan Caplan’s parenting advice in Selfish Reasons to have more Kids. She’s a bit condescending, which makes me feel better when I point out that she doesn’t seem to understand the nature/nurture problem that twin (and adoption) studies try to solve.

Now, a research team at the University of Washington in Seattle has found that four year olds who watched 3.5 hours of TV per day were 25% more likely to exhibit cruelty and meanness to others (as reported by their mothers) between ages 6 and 11 than those who watched none. That's a far-reaching, big effect.

Were half the kids randomly assigned to watch 3.5 more hours a day? Or could we just as well say that parents who let their kids watch more television (and pass on genes that influence children to want to watch more television), also pass on genes that positively correlate with violent behavior?

while previous studies have linked television to aggressive behavior in older children and adolescents, this is the first time the association has been firmly established for four-year-olds…

Zimmerman's team also found that children whose parents regularly exposed them to ideas by reading aloud, eating meals together, or taking them to museums, for example, were a third less likely to become bullies.

Nobody doubts links and associations, the question is whether they are linked causally or by a confounding variable – genetics. The research being cited doesn’t solve that problem. It doesn’t even try to, and the researchers who are giving parenting advice based on it should know better.

Lets state clearly what I think she and other people miss -- whether nature or nurture is effecting children is not observable phenomenon in normal children. Any time there is a positive correlation between parenting and long term differences, we don’t know whether the parenting caused it or if genetics caused both. Good thing there are two special kinds of families, twin and adoption families.

Twin studies looks at two kinds of twins (fraternal and identical), measures if how much difference in life outcomes there are between them. Since identical twins share 100% of their genes, and fraternal twins only share 50%, we can see how much genetics matter by measuring how much more alike identical twins end up being than fraternal twins. The answer: identical twins are a lot more alike.

Adoption studies are easier to understand for some people. They notice that children end up a lot more like their genetic parents than the parents who raised them.

I did get one good thing from her post, a link to this paper criticizing twin research. It’s locked, so I’ve only read the abstract. But it calls into question the equal environment assumption. I would like to know how. I don’t suspect fraternal and identical twin sets are raised in radically different ways.

 

Here is Bryan Caplan on Econtalk discussion Selfish Reasons to have more Kids.

IGM Experts on Net Neutrality

Here we have the latest poll from a IGM’s diverse panel of economic experts. They try to be current, so with talk about net neutrality so popular right now, it is interesting to see what economists think.

A few comments from the panel:

“High bandwidth traffic imposes externalities on other users.”

“If all qualities sell at the same price, markets cannot allocate quality efficiently. Works for soap, wine, and haircuts; why not Internet?”

“Answer obvious on efficiency grounds. On distribution, use other means to redistribute to poor--not covert internet cross subsidization.”

“Seems like those who cause congestion should pay more. I know some worry that ISPs will play favorites, but that should be preventable.”

The case against Net Neutrality is the normal economic logic that pricing higher valued goods at a higher price allocates resources more efficiently. Make people pay for what they use. Otherwise, other people end up paying for what they don’t use. This is how almost every other market works.

I think the popular non-economic view is that net neutrality is keeping internet service providers raising their prices. No, it is keeping them from selling different products at different prices. We can just as well reframe the question this way and get a very different reaction from the public (and maybe some economists!),

Considering both distributional effects and changes in efficiency, it is a good idea to let companies that don’t send video or other content to consumers pay less to Internet service providers than those who want to send that traffic using faster or higher quality service.

As usual, the non-economists have no idea what they’re talking about. But there was some dissent and uncertainty considering the proposition among economists. What economic reasons could they have? The most popular cause for uncertainty,

The broadband industry does not seem to be very competitive, so allowing it to charge more to content providers may not improve the market.

This is a total side issue. The central issue is the perennial last-mile problem--the market power of the cable and phone companies.

Letting price vary with quality is good if there is enough competition. I don't know if that's true here. If not the answer is less clear.

This would be a great idea if the market for service provision was competitive, but is less obvious with our current market.

In the absence of robust competition in broadband, regulation is needed to help new applications, services and content.

There were a few other considerations, but this one by far was the most common.

The panel answered another question on net neutrality a few months back.

Social Science doesn’t talk about Asian Differences like other Race Differences

Why do Asian Americans outperform their piers? Discrimination I tell you!

This article points out that Asian Americans are awesome academics. Why? One answer you could give is discrimination. But that would be a silly answer since nobody finds it plausible that white employers, teachers, and mortgage lenders would be discriminating against other whites in favor of Asians. That answer can properly be dismissed.

You can’t be dismissive of the possibility that white achievement in contrast to blacks and Latinos is because of discrimination. That could be a part of why there are differences in outcomes, or it could be the whole thing.

Here’s where sociologists and social science generally stop being objective researchers, and start being liberals. You could never ever write the same article about why white’s outperform blacks and Latinos. The article cites conscientiousness as the main driver for Asian academic success. The idea that the same reason could be the driver for other race differences is simply dismissed without discussion. If we’re going to say that Asians outperform Whites because they work harder, don’t we have to at least consider the possibility that that’s why whites outperform blacks and Latinos, instead of assuming that in a non-racist world race outcomes would all be the same?

By the way, conscientiousness is heritable… Oh no, that might mean (dun dun dun!) natural differences.

Conservatives and libertarians would be doing the same thing if either of them owned social science. And they would all do good work up until their work brushed up against the sacred laws of their ideologies. The least left-wing social science is economics, and liberals still outnumber their counter-parts 3-1 in economics.

The article and researchers revert back to liberal suppositions by the end.

the team says Asian-American students reported lower self-esteem, more conflict with their parents, and less time spent with friends compared with their white peers.

We have a negative Asian American outcome. The obvious explanation is people who work harder at achieving academic success have to make tradeoffs with having a social life (friends), or need to attain a higher standard in order to feel fulfilled (self-esteem). But,

The team suspects the high academic expectations or their "outsider" status in American society could be to blame.

Of course.

 

The article came from Skeptical Libertarian.

Social Scientists Ignore Asians (when convenient)

Lucifer isn’t the Devil and the Devil was never an Angel

In popular Christianity, Lucifer has become the name of the devil. So it’s a little surprising that the name is only mentioned in the bible once.

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High".
Isaiah 14:12-14:

This is the also the passage where popular Christianity gets it origin of the devil. The devil was once a high-ranking angel who was originally perfect in all his ways. At some point in the past, he was overcome with pride and instigated a large rebellion against God. The Lord reacted by kicking the devil out of Heaven.

From this text alone, I gather a meaning that is nothing like the story Christians tell the devil’s origin, or any reason to interpret Lucifer as a name for the devil.

Here is a site that covers the passage more thoroughly, and offers alternative explanations. The one I find most convincing is that Lucifer was a King of Babylon:

Remember that this is a "proverb (parable) against the king of Babylon" (v. 4). "Lucifer" means "the morning star", which is the brightest of the stars. In the parable, this star proudly decides to "ascend (higher) into heaven...exalt my throne above the (other) stars of God" (v. 13). Because of this, the star is cast down to the earth. The star represents the king of Babylon. Daniel chapter 4 explains how Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon proudly surveyed the great kingdom he had built up, thinking that he had conquered other nations in his own strength, rather than recognizing that God had given him success. "Thy greatness (pride) is grown, and reacheth unto heaven" (v. 22). Because of this "he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws" (v. 33) This sudden humbling of one of the world's most powerful men to a deranged lunatic was such a dramatic event as to call for the parable about the falling of the morning star from heaven to earth. Stars are symbolic of powerful people, e.g. Gen. 37:9; Is. 13:10 (concerning the leaders of Babylon); Ez. 32:7 (concerning the leader of Egypt); Dan. 8:10 cp. v 24. Ascending to heaven and falling from heaven are Biblical idioms often used for increasing in pride and being humbled respectively

Verse 3 and 4 of the chapter reads,

On the day the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and turmoil and from the harsh labor forced on you, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon:

And then begins the text within which Lucifer is referred.

Sam Harris on how Science can Answer Moral Questions

Here is a Ted Talk on how science can answer moral questions. I wanted to post it alongside a few thoughts.

Can science solve moral questions?

A paper was published in psychology about the WEIRDest people in the world. Their point was that researches oftentimes draw their sample sizes from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, populations and generalize the results to any population. But WEIRD populations are oftentimes outliers. They think what they're discovering is what it means to be human, but they're actually finding is what it means to be in a WEIRD society.

This relates to this kind of benthamite utilitarianism that Sam Harris talks about. WEIRD populations oftentimes don't see more to morality than care (and fairness). Intellectuals are oftentimes the WEIRDest people of WEIRD cultures, leading so a much less thick sense of morality. I can only imagine someone from India listening to this TED Talk thinking, "this guy doesn't capture morality AT ALL."

Throughout the world and throughout history morality has been about rocks. And not because they got morality from a voice in a whirlwind, but because it feels right to them. Paul said the law is written on their hearts, and this sits well with Christians because they look at their hearts and they say, "yeah, that feels right".

Morality is oftentimes about sanctity. People with a strong sense of sanctity think homosexuality is wrong. You can see it in the type of language they use. It's unnatural, perverted, disgusting, and degraded. The less common answer is that a voice in a whirlwind said so. People with weaker senses of sanctity think that it must have come from a whirlwind because they just don't get it. But they can get it. It's still there. Look at environmentalism which goes far beyond concern for animals and pollution which might hurt other people. They like to rationalize it down to care when you press them, but the language they use is all about concern for rocks; destroying the planet, staining the earth, mankind's blotch on the environment, its about sanctity.

In fact, if you try to build any kind of thought experiment that tests for moral senses other than care, they almost always rationalize for why what they're really doing is caring for other life. So naturally you can change the thought experiment to eliminate any potential for the right answer to help another. What happens? They get frustrated reject thought experiments all together.

Take loyalty. Adultery is betrayal. What reasons to people give for disagreeing with adultery? "It hurts the person being cheated on." Okay they both take pills that wipe their memories of the event so neither can confess, and they're in a completely secluded area. What reason? "because they might get pregnant" Okay, neither person is capable of having children. What reason? "this is stupid, thought experiments never happen in real life" Ugh.

Interestingly, nobody ever feels the need to give reasons why care is good. Care is the only socially approved moral foundation that one doesn't need to rationalize for. Other moral foundations are rationalized down to care, and care just stands there invincible. Is there any more reason to believe in care than in sanctity or loyalty?

This guys just says of course care is morality, and that's it. It's just not true that for most people morality doesn't capture concern for non-living rocks. And his care for human life is no more or less arbitrary than concern for things like sanctity, loyalty, fairness, liberty, authority.

ChristsWords on the Kingdom of Heaven

I’ve mentioned the problems with the popular Christian view on heaven and the Kingdom of God before. A blog I regularly browse mentions the same topic. The blog is Christswords.com, and I’ve found it very impressive and insightful every time I’ve been there. Here is his post on the Kingdom of Heaven, the emphasis is mine:

Did Christ refer to the the afterlife as “the kingdom of heaven?” Was he describing the community of Christians? Or was he describing our increasing understanding of the natural, social, and personal nature and the healing of the divisions within them?

There are several statements that Christ made that seem to indicate that the “kingdom of heaven” is not merely the afterlife or the Christian community, but the entire social order of the world as established by God. For example, Christ said: Mat 11:12 “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”

He asks,

How does this statement make any sense of the kingdom of heaven is the afterlife or the community of believers?

Also, if Christ was referring to the afterlife, how can the afterlife change in the way that Christ describes the kingdom of heaven? How can it start small and grow like a mustard see? How does it get mixed through everything like the dough?

Mortician Adams on Normal

This showed up on my Facebook feed. Morticia Addams, of course, is the mother on the Addams Family (snap snap).

We should be careful not to confuse the elegance of a phrase with the truth of one. This quote is an especially clear example of elegance without truth, that’s why it floats around Facebook.

The second sentence assumes that there is a normal for the spider, and a normal for the fly. They’re different, but the next question should be, am I a spider or a fly? If you’re a spider, then don’t think that the fly’s normal is your normal. If you’re a fly, don’t think that the spider’s normal is your normal. This doesn’t mean that there is no normal, it means that what is normal is dependent on who you are.

Human beings are not rocks. A rock’s normal is not a human being’s normal. And a human being’s normal is not a rock’s normal. None-the-less, human beings have a normal. What is normal will be broader or narrower depending on the group we’re talking about. What is normal about an African is oftentimes not normal for the American, and what is normal for a hippie is oftentimes not normal for a businessman --“oftentimes”, but not universally. There are still normals that transcend those groups. It is normal for both a hippie and a businessman to like ice cream. If either of them didn’t like ice cream one would say, “that’s weird” (not normal).

I think what I’ve said here should go without saying if the world were a more thoughtful place. What I’ve said is true, clear, and I don’t think can be argued with. The only thing left for Morticia Addams to say is that I’ve misinterpreted her. But everything I’ve said clearly contradicts her first sentence. Normal exists in relation to the categories we’re talking about, but it exists, and it exists in each and every category.