Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Scott Alexander’s Conservative Rhetoric against Global Warming

I’m impressed with anyone who can pass an ideological turing test. It seems silly to me that people admit that they, “just don’t get the other side”, and yet want to argue against it. If you don’t understand something you shouldn’t be arguing against it. And if you don’t understand “the other side”, when the other side is generally rather shallow political views, then you’re just not trying very hard.

Scott Alexander (recommended by Bryan Caplan) passes an ideological turing test elegantly when he writes a case for doing something against global warming that is rhetorically geared toward conservatives. It’s so good:

In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat. Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.

Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of Russia and China continue to industrialize and militarize rapidly as part of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.

A giant poster of Mao looks approvingly at all the CO2 being produced…for Communism.

We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal government to do it for them

It’s not technically an ideological turing test because it isn’t a conservative position. It’s better. It understands  the conservative value language and meta-narrative well enough to use it to argue for something new, rather than merely repeating conservative positions with a conservative tone. Political divides aren’t about positions, outcomes, or even values, it’s about contrasting methods of spin. Abortion can be viewed as oppression against the weak (liberal), or as economic freedom (conservative). It looks like differing values, but it’s really just moral frames rather than defined principles.

Again, I’m impressed with people who can transcend these moral frames and Scott Alexander seems to be one of them.

Friday, October 10, 2014

The Nuances and Imperfections of Neoclassical Economic Rationality

Consider this cartoon. It’s funny but it also represents a leading criticism of neoclassical economics.

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The wrong lesson to draw is that neoclassical economics is false. Instead we should learn that it is nuanced, which this comic illustrated, and that it is imperfect, which is what Daniel Kahneman’s book is all about. Both lessons can be learned from psychology, and both lessons have been generally neglected by economists.

I think these kinds of psychological experiments actually do not exhibit any imperfection of the neoclassical model of human behavior. Instead it is a mistake of the economist (or cartoon writer) to apply it in a nuanced way. The question we have to ask the woman who won’t accept $5 is, “what would you be losing by taking the money?” Neoclassical model says, “something worth more than $5” the irrational model says, “something worth less than $5 or nothing”. Feelings of dignity, fairness, or pride are all answers we can insert into the model in order to make sense of the woman’s behavior. There are more values at play than money which the experiment does not apply controls for in order to determine how rational or irrational the subject is being.

By the way, I suspect most people wouldn’t give up much more than $5, indicating that these ethereal values are really skin deep. Even the neoclassical model applied in an un-nuanced way captures 90% of what’s going on.

Human value is more nuanced than dollars and cents, and in contrast to cartoonish depictions of economists, they recognize this. No economist believes that people should always take the highest wage job. They know that it is “rational” to take a lower paying job in exchange for better working conditions for example. Economists don’t treat money like it only matters, but that it always matters. The problem is when we get into the nitty gritty and the values become very subtle, as moral intuitions generally are, they become easy to ignore.

Although the cartoon doesn’t speak to it, the neoclassical model does have genuine flaws. People do make systematically irrational decisions. But people also make systematically rational decisions So the correct solution is not to discard the rational model, but to fit it into a broader framework which captures the ways in which human beings predictably act rationally and irrationally.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Checks and Balances–sounds good but how does it work?

I would like to hear a clear articulation of how the ever popular "checks and balances" are supposed to work - even just as a political theory. It's so commonly referred to, but never do I hear about the actual mechanics of it. When someone says, "we have (or are supposed to have) checks and balances", I always think, "okay, what are they?"

Separation of powers do not equal checks and balances. Each power individually can remain unchecked and unbalanced, and they can aggregate into a wholly unchecked and unbalanced system. One must explain how the system checks and balances itself - how the three branches check and balance each other instead of having three unchecked unbalanced branches doing separate but unchecked and unbalanced things. Even if it’s not functional, a theoretical model would do.

Maybe there is such a theory. I don’t know. What I know is that “checks and balances” are a major tool of popular political rhetoric while being totally content-less substantively.