The Opportunity Cost of Suicide

Anyone who has studies economics had learned reasons why third world sweatshops might not be bad for their workers. If the workers are choosing to work there it's probably better than their alternatives. This is very different from if they were forced to work there. If you have to force them to do it their alternatives must be better.

Eliminating the option they choose is no way to help them. Instead, keep the sweatshop option open and try to create better alternatives.

Some people want to argue over the semantics of choice. "Do they really have a choice if their only alternative is starving to death?" It doesn't really matter how you want to use the word choice. What happens when you take away their crummy third-world sweatshop job? Well in this scenario they starve to death.

But to a more interesting point:

The exact same argument for tolerating sweatshop labor can be used to tolerate suicide. When someone chooses to commit suicide, it's probably better than their alternatives. The solution then, is not to take away the option of suicide, but to create better alternatives.

Perhaps we should legalize suicide machines to make it as quick and painless as possible (or exciting if you prefer).

We should stop talking people down from jumping off cliffs or buildings. Be sad that suicide was the best option for them, but don't keep them from it.

I also wonder about how much of suicide is messaging. And how much of that messaging is diminished if we simply tolerate suicide instead of making it a big deal. We might end up with a lower suicide rate.

SlateStar on Public Food

SlateStar's most recent post is gold. He defends school vouchers by analogizing it to food stamps.

First, vouchers + taxes/subsidies let the rich and poor participate in the same system...

Second, vouchers + taxes/subsidies balance the government’s interest in preventing mis-alignment with poor people’s ability to control their own lives. If I love soda, and it’s the only good thing in my life right now, and I’ve thought long and hard about how unhealthy it is, but I’d rather improve my health some other way and stick with the soda – I can. I can buy soda (at slightly higher price) and compensate by cutting back on something else – maybe Twinkies. If I’m stuck going to the government cafeteria which only serves healthy foods, I’m out of luck.

Third, under vouchers + taxes/subsidies, everyone could eat in their own kitchen, with their own family, on their own time. Under a public option, rich people could eat in the privacy of their own home, but poor people would have to go to the centralized cafeteria.

SlateStar provides examples of government subsidizing the least healthy foods (High fructose corn syrup and pizza) and restrict production of the healthy ones. He also provides examples of government spreading misinformation about a healthy diet.

Given our existing government, it shouldn’t be let within a light-year of getting to determine anybody’s diet.

SlateStar then transitions into the public choice argument,

Because the whole “public food” argument hinges on a giant case of double standards. 

Presented with evidence that corporations do bad things, it concludes that the inherent logic of capitalism demands badness. 

Presented with evidence that governments do bad things, it concludes that if we just put some nice people in power, everything would go great.

Why is that? Could someone with the opposite bias propose that Coca-Cola Inc would be fine if it just got a socially responsible CEO? But that the inherent logic of government demands that people who focus on electoral demagoguery and bureaucratic empire-building will always outcompete the altruistic public servants?

The best defense of the private sector is an attack on government. David Friedman would be proud.

Pro-Choice is Broad Pro-Life is Narrow

I've had trouble defining my view on abortion. Am I pro-choice or pro-life? Or is it some funky middle ground?

I used to pick the middle ground option, but recently I realized that pro-lifers and pro-choicers define their positions the same way. Pro life means life starts at conception and not a moment later. Pro-choicers believe that life begins at any point after conception. I think both sides would mostly agree on those definitions.

This puts me under the umbrella of pro-choice. It's hard not to be since the pro-choice side has cast such a large tent. I think I have a lot of differences with what almost all pro-choice people believe, but that's a debate within the tent.

How do you make me pro-life? Well, cast a wider tend and stop staying with 100% certainty that life begins at conception and not a moment later. Or give me a reasonable explanation of why life does begin at conception, and I'll change my mind. As it stands, it seems to me that the only reason Evangelical Christians in particular are so enamoured with pro-life is because its a sacred belief they use to determine membership in the Evangelical Christian Ring. That kind of magic doesn't work on the anti-social like me, so I need another explanation.

The bigger lesson to all this is that when one side has taken one sliver of the possible answers, and the other side has taken everything outside of that, baseline assumption is that the other side is right.

Lee Jussim on Liberal Bias in Social Science

From Lee Jussim, a blogger at Psychology Today:

Citation counts are one very common measure of how “important” a scholarly publication is. When others cite one’s work they are usually acknowledging its importance and drawing on its ideas. More citations, more influence and importance.

Now consider the storybook image of the scientist as someone who strives for objectivity. If it were true, studies of comparable scientific quality will be similarly influential, even if they produce different outcomes, because they both have comparable claims to reveal something true. But this is not the case. Papers in my home discipline of social psychology that can be used to craft narratives advancing social justice are generally cited far more than papers of equal or even higher scientific quality that contest those narratives. Here are two concrete examples. 

When a paper finds stereotype bias, it gets nearly 1,000 citations but when a failed replication of that same study gets published, it gets 30.

When a paper reporting a single study finds evidence of bias against women in STEM it gets 600 citations; when another paper reporting five studies finds gender bias favoring women, it gets 70 citations.

See this paper for several other examples.

Meaning of Invalidating My Existence

"Invalidating my Existence," is a term I've been hearing a lot lately. It's hard to discern what it might mean exactly.

One way of understanding it is in the context of how it is actually used. I hear it used to mean, "invalidating the existence of a category I put myself in" (e.g. transgender). Taken that way, there's no reason to think invalidating someone's existence is a bad thing. I call myself a martian, and when someone says martians don't exist it's nothing personal. Whether the category I put myself in exists is up for debate. After all, I don't know through sheer introspection whether or not martians exist.

How about a real life example? Supposed I call themselves one of God's chosen people like many others. Now, if you claim atheism you must be invalidating my existence. If there is not God, then there are no chosen people, and I cannot be one. By being an atheist, you've destroyed the category of being I have placed myself in - thereby invalidating my existence.

That definition won't do.

Another way of interpreting the term is as, "making me feel like nothing." This is a deep problem we all face, where we tie our identity up with an idea and when someone challenges the idea if feels like they're attacking us. How do we get past this?

One way is for us to stop talking to each other. If you have a different worldview from me we can't talk about it because by doing so we're invalidating each other's existence. Which is unfortunate because there are a lot of ideas it might be useful to talk about. Like if you met a racist you can't really call him wrong because you'd be invalidating his existence.

I don't think the people who use the term care to understand it that way. They wish to understand it in a way that allows them to invalidate the existence of others but ban the invalidation of their own existence. Meaning, "you can't challenge the ideas I'm attached to, but I can challenge yours." This seems like a serious failure of empathy to me.

The other way of getting past this is by untying ideas and identities. Some might call this an aspect of maturity - the ability to talk coherently about an idea without getting personal about it. Alas, it seems like we've been moving backward in this regard.

The Partially Examined Life Interviews Russ Roberts

The tables are turned on Russ Roberts as he is interviewed by Philosophy Podcast The Partially Examined Life. They talk about emergent order, the invisible hand, free trade, and how wealth isn't the only or most important thing in life.

Russ comes off very well. He speaks fluently and articulately. You can tell that over his many years hosting Econtalk, he has honed his ability to offer long insightful monologues. His speech is filled with analogies and examples.

Trend Eady on Everything is Problematic

Here is an A+ article on escaping the grasp of the far illiberal left.

My politics still lean to the left, just not quite so far, and now I view economic and political systems with an engineer’s eye, rather than in the stark colours of moral outrage.

This line really sold me. Understanding needs to come first, then change. Filtering the world through a logical, descriptive mindset before setting off on an activist crusade is the difference between adolescence and maturity.

Also on the subject is Jonathan Haidt's talk on Two Incompatible Values at the American University.

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

This part demonstrates what a non-rant this article is. She's systemizing the problem, breaking it down like an engineer. But also speaking with flourish and power. It's what happens when you get English major and humanities types combined with strong analytics. Not art vs. science. Art and science.

Anti-intellectualism is a pill I swallowed, but it got caught in my throat, and that would eventually save me. It comes in a few forms. Activists in these circles often express disdain for theory because they take theoretical issues to be idle sudoku puzzles far removed from the real issues on the ground. This is what led one friend of mine to say, in anger and disbelief, “People’s lives aren’t some theoretical issue!” That same person also declared allegiance to a large number of theories about people’s lives, which reveals something important...

Anti-intellectualism also comes out in full force on the anti-oppressive side of things. It manifests itself in the view that knowledge not just about what oppression, is like, but also knowledge about all the ethical questions pertaining to oppression is accessible only through personal experience. The answers to these ethical questions are treated as a matter of private revelation.

The church of left wing extremism parallels the church of right wing extremism. If we don't want Trump to get reelected, the liberal side need to strongly disassociate itself with these kinds of people. When voters think "liberal" a picture of angry, anti-intellectual social activist can't come to mind.

Corporate Tax Cuts Increase Investment

This from Tyler Cowen:

I think the currently circulating versions of the tax plan are unwise. They increase the deficit too much, don’t have the right kind of distributional consequences to prove stable, and they might eliminate the Obamacare mandate without a planned stabilizing replacement. Those and other more technical reasons are enough to bring at least parts of these proposed laws back to the drawing board.
But when the critics allege that corporate tax rate cuts won’t boost investment, that’s going against basic economics.

Lots of Reasons Trump Won

Here are 24 possible reasons why Donald Trump won.

If I had to pick three they would be, 4, 12, and 14

If I had to add a few it would be,

25. Because of the electoral college (although I tend to discount how important it is compared to some others)

26. Because he struck a home run on Nationalism. Most of Trump's "racism" is nothing more than innocent nationalism (nationalism is a synonym with Xenophobia by the way)

27. Because the left got too associated with the far left social justice and Bernie Sanders types. Bernie wouldn't have won, he wouldn't have even come close. Bernie is political poison and most voters don't want anything to do with it.

Essentially, Trump is a branding machine. The brand voters were faced with Trump = America and Democrat = Bernie/Social Justice. Obama took over the liberal brand far better than Hillary did.

Steven Pinker's One School Course

Pinker states that if there was only one school course it should be,

Critical thinking course that would be informed about what we know cognitive illusions, in order to inoculate people against the kind of illusions and errors that our unaided mind left to its own devices would make.

That seems to be what LessWrong, Braindebugging, Rationally Speaking, Overcoming Bias, and the entire rationalist blogosphere are all about.



I hope my kids grow up to understand such things. I wonder though, how well can it can be taught to people who aren't predisposed to this kind of thinking? It seems like 99% of the population think what cognitive science brings to the table is kinda neat, but don't appreciate how vast the applications are and how serious this all is. You can't trust your brain!

Hillary Clinton on $15 Minimum Wage

"Substantively, we have not supported $15 – you will get a fair number of liberal economists who will say it will lose jobs," is what Hillary Clinton's advisers said about minimum wage in e-mails.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2893

I don't know exactly how much faith to put in Wikileaks, but given what I know about economics and Hillary Clinton's proximity to them, I find it likely she said this.

The Democratic Choice

Who named the $287 million polar research ship Boaty McBoatface?

Don't Vote, have Lunch Instead

There are 2 major political parties, and you may have friends on the other side. If so, do yourself a favor and don't vote. Instead, grab your friend on the other side and have lunch. If you both vote, your votes will cancel each other out, so save yourselves some time and agree to do something fun instead.

Bryan Caplan's 10 Parenting Tips

From Bryan Caplan's 10 Things I Learned My First 10 years of Parenting:

7. Mild discipline, mechanically enforced, deters bad behavior far more effectively than harsh discipline, arbitrarily enforced

I remember us moving a new shelf into our home. Our 2 year old almost immediately tried to pick it up and move it. Of course, he couldn't but he tried again. Eventually he gave up, which is unfortunate because it was funny watching this little guy try to lift a bookshelf 4 time taller than him.

He figured out something about the way the physical world works. When he tried X he always got result Y, and he adapted to that paradigm. I think that's how you have to parent. If you don't want him to do something, pair it with an undesirable consequence. And do it consistently, because if its not a very predictable result, the child will play the odds. Children are little gamblers.

Also,

9. Expressing anger at your children is counter-productive. It undermines your authority and gives wayward children hope of besting you.

I've known a lot of parents who treat their anger like it is parenting. Getting angry is like the punishment. Well I hate to tell you, it's really lousy punishment. The child doesn't care that you're mad. They can get mad too. It's not a trump card for them and it's not a trump card for you.

Instead of acting like getting mad is tactical, admit that its purely reactive. When I see parents get mad, and when I reflect on my getting mad, I see a white flag. You're no longer the adult, there are just two people crying at each other now. Instead, be the adult and use incentives to influence their behavior.

I recently had one parent share with me her parental insight, "I've found that incentives work well on kids." If you think about it, incentives are the only way of influencing anybody's behavior, ever!

Babylon Bee

Another Actress Accuses Kirk Cameron.

Cute.

More news from the same site: an atheist somewhere did something.

I'm not as amused at that one.

Lenore Skenazy Podcast on Hyper Protection

Here is a podcast with lenore Skenazy. She talks about child hyper protection - how we parent too scared and need to leave our children alone more.

The podcast is good, but you have to skip the first ten minutes of monologuing about unrelated issues.

The worst part is when the interviewer asks how we get bad parenting laws if parents are also voters. There is this assumption that Democracy scoops up some aggregate "will of the people" and turns it into policy. David Friedman calls it the middle school civics class view of Democracy. More sophisticated analysis of Democracy isn't nearly as pretty.

She's worth following on Twitter. I'll keep a link to her blog. The article she co-authored with Jonathan Haidt is awesome. And I might try the podcast again.

Crime a Day, Every Day, Forever

This guy posts a federal crime every day on Twitter. I checked a few and they're real.

A few examples

21 USC §461 & 9 CFR §381.125(b)(3)(iii) make it a federal crime to sell uncooked chicken without a picture of a skillet on the label.

— A Crime a Day (@CrimeADay) 30 October 2017

21 USC §333, 21 CFR §139.140 & 139.110(c) make it a federal crime to sell wheat and soy spaghetti if it's not tube-shaped or cord-shaped.

— A Crime a Day (@CrimeADay) 15 October 2017

21 USC §§610, 676 & 9 CFR §319.307 make it a federal crime to sell "spaghetti sauce with meat" if it's less than 6% meat.

— A Crime a Day (@CrimeADay) 12 September 2017

Opposite of Trump

Silver lining to Trump's misunderstanding trade & trade deficits: 63% of American people now think the opposite of Trump's view probably right.

— Russell Roberts (@EconTalker) 9 November 2017

Bryan Caplan on Blame the Republicans

Bryan Caplan encourages us to blame the republicans. And while we're at it, blame other irresponsible people too.

Personally, I strongly favor blaming Republicans. I think 80% of the blame heaped on Republicans is justified. What mystifies me, however, is the view that Republicans are somehow uniquely blameworthy. If you can blame Republicans for lying about WMDs, why can't you blame alcoholics for lying to their families about their drinking? If you can blame Republican leaders for supporting bad policies because they don't feel like searching for another job, why can't you blame able-bodied people on disability because they don't feel like searching for another job?

SlateStar on Does Age Bring Wisdom

From the most self-reflective man on the internet:

First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of “low-status” and “bad and wrong” have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it’s true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question.

He makes reference to Chesterton's Fence, which Wiki describes as,

the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

3 Videos from the edge of the internet

I have three videos from the edge of the internet. Controversial themes. Beware.

First is Steven Pinker on Jews, Genes, and Intelligence




Jonathan Haidt interview on The Saad Truth




And Bryan Caplan on Anarchy

How Adults Talk about Guns

There was a shooting in a Baptist Texas church that killed 26 people. A 'Good guy with a gun' fired at the killer and chased him away into the next country.

Donald Trump says that tighter gun laws would have left "hundreds more dead."

Interesting.

Hundreds seems like a large number. How many shootings that aren't stop by an armed civilian reach hundreds? Not many. I am willing to concede that some extra people may have died in absence of the 'good guy with a gun'. And with tighter gun laws that good guy with a gun may just have been a 'good guy without a gun' and more people would have died.

So what?

I think we're at a terrible point in gun control discourse where every incident - every shooting, has to be proof that our side is 100% right and the other side is 100% wrong. In a country with 33,000 gun related deaths / year, and 300 million guns, every single instance of a gun death doesn't need to be fuel for your political belief.

The news is reporting another shooting in the U.S. Prepare ye facebook for the gun memes.

 I'm not one of those people who believe guns never save lives. They do. I'm just extremely skeptical that there are enough 'good guys with a gun' to counteract the bad guys with a gun.

I know I know, bad guys with a gun will get guns anyway. Sometimes. I am also of the belief that when you make something harder, more difficult, more expensive - people do it less. It's not like these random gun shootings are done by hardcore criminals who know the ins and outs of the black market. They're done by this guy,

The harder it is to get a gun, the longer it takes, and the more time you have to realize what you're doing is a bad idea. And it's not like all guns are the same either. In a competitive market for guns the price of better killing machines is pressured downward. In a black market - if you can even get access to the black market - it's far more expensive. You might just say screw it all and use a more convenient weapon instead. I've never heard of a school stabbing that took down hundreds of people.

Back to the 'good guys with guns' thing.

I don't think 'good guys with guns' are all that common. Even in States where gun ownership is very loose, is every attempted mass shooting being countered by a 'good guy with a gun'? We don't live in the wild west. We live in meeker times, and giving everyone a gun doesn't make them any less meek.

Surprisingly, the wild west had a very low homicide rate. All those movies were wrong. Yes that had a lot to do guns being everywhere, it also had a lot to do with the kind of people who lived there.

Step back. This is a more general problem. We have a way of thinking that the laws create the culture. I don't think so. I think the culture creates the laws.

That sounds very pro-government for a sort-of-libertarian like myself, but I don't think it is. For a lot of things we need a government to counter-act the culture. Some people like to use the nordic countries as examples of tight gun restrictions and low gun death rate. That's a very nice correlation, but instead of inferring causation I think we need to look at if the culture is creating both.

Do you really believe that if Sweden had U.S. gun laws their gun crime rate would reach U.S. levels? Or if the U.S. had Swedish gun laws their gun crime rate would reach Swedish levels?

We have to recognize that cultures start out different before we even bring government into the picture. Sweden could probably afford low gun restrictions because of their culture. And the U.S. could probably use tight gun restrictions because of their culture. Neither country gets their optimal policy because culture is in charge.

See, I'm not the kind of libertarian-ish person who believes government can't, it's that government doesn't.

Aren't I arguing that the U.S. is both a pro gun culture and an anti-gun culture? Well, yes. Compared to the wild west, we're anti-gun. Compared to Iceland, we're pro-gun. No problem here.

I'm going to give a few points to the conservative view on guns now. It's not going to be very emotionally appealing, but I think it's true.

Underlying every discussion (argument ( yelling match)) of gun control, is the assumption that all that matters is reducing the gun death rate. I for one don't believe that a single human life is worth all the joy of everyone else. If you don't think so too, then some amount of joy has to be worth a human life.

I stated earlier that there were 300 million guns in the U.S. and the vast majority of them never hurt anybody. And I don't think they all bought all those guns to counter-act all the other guns everyone else has. I think people like guns. They're shiny, it's fun to go out shooting them, and I think it's a form of fashion where people who own guns like to express themselves by showing them off.

I don't. I'm more likely to get a tattoo than a gun. But I respect other people's values. And when so many people spend so much money on so many guns, and those guns aren't hurting anybody, I have to believe they're getting value out of it.

So I guess mentally my math goes like this

Number of lives gun control law would save
-Value to consumers gun control would reduce / value of 1 human life
= (if positive) pass the gun control law (if negative) don't pass the gun control law

This has always been the way I've thought about it, though it's awkward to put it into an equation. I think it is objectively the right way to do the analysis. It should go without saying that when you don't do it this way you are hurting people. It's the way every numerate adult should do it. Instead of yelling on Facebook about how every instance of gun violence proves what you always knew in the first place.

Jonathan Haidt on “Two Incompatible Values at American Universities.”

Listen to Jonathan Haidt on Two Incompatible Values at American Universities

In a victimhood culture there are only two ways to gain prestige; you have to emphasize your victimhood - to show all the cuts and bruises from all the things that have happened to you. And the more you have the more prestige you have. But if you are in the unfortunate situation of not having been victimized, all you can do to gain status is to really vociferously prosecute other people who victimize other people. 

His concluding remark is spot on:

I for one don't want anybody setting out to change complex institutions when their education has systematically disabled them from understanding those institutions.

In the Q & A section:

Asians tie their (social justice folks) in knots, because if America is so systemically racist - and the language of majority/minority... The Asians spectacular success puts the lie to that. And that's very uncomfortable.

Chewing on a Million Gumballs

He does a mathematical slight of hand just after the 2:00 mark. He goes from people making less than $2 a day - true poverty, to "how many people live in countries with average incomes lower than that of Mexico." He's taking the entire population of any country making less than Mexico's average, including a bunch of people making more than Mexico's average.

So Mexico's average income is about $11,000 / year. Chile's is about $8,000 /year. So now he's adding marbles for the entirety of the chilean population including lots of people making more than $11,000 /year and even some multi-millionaires.

The other thing I'll say about this Mexico thing is that Mexico is light years away from Ghana in terms of poverty. Lumping them together and calling them all poor seems wrong. When I think about poverty reduction via immigration I'm not thinking about people making $11,000 a year Mexicans, I'm thinking about $1/day Haitians.

He also says,

"2 million people a year would totally overwhelm our physical, natural, and social infrastructures" 

Our population is predicted to grow at about 1.6 million a year, So does that mean in two years our resources will be completely overwhelmed?

 Between 1900 and 2000 our population grew from 76 million to 282 million. There was no population disaster. There wasn't even a plan. So how did we absorb 206 million people and still grow their average incomes by 5 times and have an unemployment rate of only 4.4%?

The economy just does it naturally. There's always work to do so there's always opportunity for employment. When we have unemployment it isn't because we run out of jobs, it's more complicated than that. And when more people do more work, more gets done. The economy grows. Average prosperity increases. I like the way economist Bryan Caplan puts it:

The economy is not like a party where everyone splits a birthday cake; it is more like a potluck where everyone brings a dish

And this gets at the very last point I want to make (though I could make several more). Immigration is not charity. This idea that immigration costs us in order to make them better is inapropriate zero-sum thinking. Immigrants make us richer, so long as they're self-supporting and peaceful:

"When Danny DeVito enters a room, he reduces its occupants' average height. But he doesn't cause anyone to 'lose height.' Shortness isn't contagious, neither is low income. A janitor earns less than average, but his existence doesn't impoverish his fellow citizens."

 Immigration is probably the world's greatest anti-poverty program, and it costs less than nothing.

Inseparable Twins

If they can read each other's thoughts, how do they know they're not reading their own thoughts?

He's not me

That Eli I used to be. He's not really me.
I downloaded his memories, inherited his genes.
The cell composition decomposes and rearrange,
until the man underneath can't said to be the same.

And yet the man who consumes doesn't feel like a son

Not a cousin, or family or friend,
this continuity of consciousness turns the many into one

NT Wright gives the Good News to Google

Here is NT Wright's talk at google. He challenges modern christians to think about the gospel in a way that might be challenging for popular Christianity, while appearing firmly imbedded in evangelical tone and thought.

The "Good News" is not how to get to heaven, that's advice. The Good News is something different...

The White Minstrel Show

This is a superbly written article recommended by Bryan Caplan on Twitter.

A taste:

White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing, financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal to any person or situation, perfectly republican manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.