I don’t think you can understand modern American discourse, most of all social media, without recognizing that “the intellectual Left” has higher neuroticism — as defined by Five-Factor personality theory — than say centrists. The Right of course has its own correlations, but that is a topic for another time.
He reproduces a chart based on a Pew survey that asks if someone was ever diagnosed with a mental health condition and breaks the respondents down by age and political orientation. I think that the main survey page is here, but I have not tried to download the data.
According to the chart, if you are young and liberal, there is a 46 percent chance that you have ever been told by a professional that you have a mental health condition (and admit it in the survey). If you are old and conservative, this chance is only 5 percent. If you are young and conservative, the chance is 15 percent. If you are old and liberal, the chance is 21 percent.
On the liberal-conservative difference: it could be that mental health conditions are equally prevalent across political orientation, but conservatives are more reluctant to seek a professional opinion and/or more reluctant to disclose to a survey researcher that they have been diagnosed.
On the age differences, the trend is dramatic. As you move from the 20-29 age cohort to the over-65 age cohort, liberals drop from 45 percent diagnosed to 15 percent, moderates go from 35 percent diagnosed to 17 percent, and conservatives go from 15 percent diagnosed to 5 percent.
Since the question is whether you were ever told that you have a mental health condition, all else equal this should go up with age, not down as in the chart. Again, there could be differences in willingness to seek an opinion or to disclose to a survey researcher.
But suppose that we take at face value the results that with each new cohort of white Americans, mental health is deteriorating. This would have a number of implications.
1. Mental health is unlikely to be mostly genetically determined. The gene pool cannot have changed that dramatically.
2. Jonathan Haidt’s claims about the harms of social media might explain the difference between the 20-29 cohort and the 30-49 cohort, but it seems unlikely to explain the trends in other cohorts. I suspect that the trend toward smaller and less stable families is the main factor in mental health deterioration.
Thanks, Arnold. You have confirmed my strong suspicion that Tyler’s posts are useless. You can read my comments to his posts in MR, including my last comments early today.
I remember well Tyler’s post you are referring to in your post. Frankly, upon reading it, I found it grotesque. First, because it’s based on a survey about mental health as if it were easy to identify the several dimensions of mental health (and measure each one adequately). Second, because he focuses on neuroticism as defined by the Five-factor Personality Theory (I remember talking to Heckman in January 2009 when he presented his first paper using this Theory and questioning him about the Theory’s foundations). Third, because he doesn’t pay proper attention to the fact that respondents were asked about if they were diagnosed with a condition, another vague idea (good to entertain people who like surveys). Fourth, because he uses the liberal-conservative difference as if respondents were asked about terms defined by just one dimension (yes, Tyer still believes that the median voter theorem is a good tool for understanding elections). Fifth, because Tyler doesn’t refer to any theory to speculate that the personality of an “intellectual left” could/should be different from that of a Right individual. And now upon reading your post, I add another reason: the failure to deal properly with age.
“You have confirmed my strong suspicion that Tyler’s posts are useless.”
I think you are being unfair to Cowen, but there is a sense in which things may have indeed progressed to the point where “Cowen Is Over”, which is probably a good time to begin panicking.
Imagine you were assessing some effort which was “optimizing subject to constraints”.
There are a few ways to be more negative than warranted.
One is to ignore or underestimate the constraints.
Another is to misjudge what is necessary for optimization, especially in the strategic, game-theoretic sense of accurately forecasting how those constraints might evolve and tighten in the future, or respond dynamically to your own efforts, both of which are sources of uncertainty that create the need for costly hedges.
This is my impression of the cause of your negative assessments of Cowen’s writings, and to that extent, they are unfair.
“Not being silent, but not only paying lip service, and maintaining some real influence, but not getting cancelled or becoming a suspected heretic ripe for persecution,” is a tough game: walking the high wire without a safety net.
However. Even being totally accurate and fair on those matters, I think it is still possible to come to a tragic conclusion about “uselessness”. Sometimes there is nothing left to optimize.
Imagine a chess game in which a player is making “perfect” moves, but began at such a disadvantage that the walls are closing in. At some point in the end game before # ‘checkmate’, it is still only “X more moves” until one can be forced. Assuming your opponent doesn’t make any mistakes, the game is already over and lost, it’s just a matter of going through the remaining motions until the pieces are in the right position according to the technical rules. You’ll see grand-masters concede a few steps before the true end. They see it coming, and there’s no sense delaying the inevitable.
I think Cowen is nearing this endgame, and there are some indications it’s already here. Look at how he has been forced to spend multiple posts dancing around the obvious, which is that parts of the USG bureaucracy are deliberately slow-rolling cv19 vaccine and treatment trials, as they are not even really trying to explain their internationally aberrant obstruction and risk-aversion in any rigorous and principled manner subject to statistical scrutiny or cost-benefit critique.
Once intellectual life has collapsed past a certain point of degeneracy such that the main question is no longer “Is this correct?” but instead “Who does this help?”, then the room for maneuver for strategies like Cowen’s to do any good shrinks quickly to zero.
Cowen is just another lockdown libertarian.
He had no definitive data to support the lockdowns and never even tried to reconcile his position with other ethical concerns.
All of your talk of his optimization, hedging and what not (blah blah blah), will never be able to overcome the more basic points above.
The people who trash the Great Barrington declaration only seem to focus on COVID-19 deaths. They don’t take seriously the negative effects of the lockdowns.
I lost my dad last June. He was incredibly lonely at the end because the nursing home did not allow visitors. I think he would have preferred to have visitors even if it caused him to die a few weeks sooner.
This is the strongest argument against the lockdown. That it doesn’t even help the at risk population on net.
I don’t mean that we can’t have a higher degree of precaution in nursing homes (which as far as I can tell is enough to reduce COVID mortality by 80%).
But I just don’t understand why people think its healthy for old people to sit alone all day watching TV. This isn’t hard. COVID symptoms show up within a few days of getting COVID. Just quarantine for the week before you visit grandma. If you’re feeling sick, don’t go.
Cowen’s just being Straussian with the GBD. Sometimes when the intellectual environment gets particularly bad and needs a double dose of this stuff he has to bring ‘Tyrone’ out of retirement, and he recently did that too.
The point is for him to signal affiliation with high status opinion (which is very anti-anti-lockdown), while articulating the case for such opinion in a way such that its major defects are plain and obvious.
Every time you see Cowen make a sudden and disjoint drop in his level of rigor on an issue, and his usual like-minded friends feel it necessary to say, “Huh?” – it’s his way of signalling what is really going on, and of calling the obvious critiques and objections into existence and “signal boosting” them, without having to say them himself.
For instance, after his GBD article, David Henderson was provoked (as calculated) to spend two separate posts playing the role of this foil and taking it apart, point by point. Cowen has been saying for months that it’s important for people to “show their work”, but when he criticizes the GBD, no work. At best, in terms of inappropriately putting the brakes on the vaccine trial, he quotes a commenter who showed some ‘work’, i.e., common sense statistical facts that fly in the face of the idea that the bureaucratic decision can be justified on the basis of the evidence. (Ikiru is not even in Kurosawa’s top five and has a fairly typical handling of ‘bureaucracy’ – “Jupiter Ascending” had a clumsy homage to the same common portrayal – but promoting the film subtly addresses the need to pile on and lower the status of some institutions when they are being intransigently incompetent and biased.)
David Friedman felt compelled to actually do some of this work and demonstrate some back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit calculations demonstrating GBD plausibility.
The same thing happened when Robin Hanson was proposing variolation. It doesn’t make sense for Cowen to favor “human challenge trials” in general, but not for that, unless the explanation is that elite opinion definitively turned against the idea early on. Hanson crunched some numbers and made an actual cost-benefit case, and Cowen had little choice but to retreat into touchy-feely gobbledygook (which to be fair is probably all he can do when ‘arguing’ with Caplan about education, or Hanson about literally anything.)
“If you want to understand the artist, look at his work.”
– John Douglas
Cowen’s work has been mediocre and timid for quite some time. All of your apologetics don’t change this.
It is very possible that Handle is correct, but is it really fair of TC to make his readers work so hard just so he can signal affiliation with elite opinion?
Perhaps Homer is simply nodding?
Oh gosh, this new one is bad…
“It’s pointless to argue over the relative value of young lives versus old.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/how-much-does-it-matter-who-dies-from-covid-19.html
I made clear what I mean by useless in the comments I made to Tyler’s post very early today; read
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/from-the-astrazeneca-comments.html
Since Tyler has access to enough resources to do serious analysis of a few relevant issues, I have been pushing him to do that. The problem is that he prefers to entertain his readers, to allow them to fill the blanks on specific ideas without a context or a model on which readers can rely to make reasonable inferences (rather than to throw all sorts of unfounded ideas). You can argue that I should stop reading MR but there are very few people with such a large amount of resources to understand what is going on and analyze proposals.
Since 1962, I have earned my life “optimizing subject to constraints”. I have always paid attention to all relevant restrictions to decision-making and the dynamics of adapting beliefs to new information about opportunities and restrictions. I have gone to other fields to understand both points. Even today I feel that the game is far from over.
I don’t know if Tyler thinks it’s over, or close enough to spend his time entertaining readers. Yes, there are restrictions, but rather than becoming bored where the light is, I prefer to move into the darkness.
Here is a Cowen post on the only thing that matters.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/04/should_you_have.html
“I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing. One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts.”
My understanding is he has zero biological children. I know that there are cases in which this isn’t possible, and if that’s the case what I’m saying is cruel, but I judge people in large part on the number of children then have. Whenever its less then two, its almost always a bugman.
I can provide anecdotal evidence that the mental health of university students (both undergrad and grad students) has declined markedly over the past 25 years.
What this tells me is that a lot more young people are getting their mental health evaluated now than did so when we were that age.
Having a mental determination is a badge of honor and creates a group identity for today’s youth.
There might be something to this.
I suspect that the trend toward smaller and less stable families is the main factor in mental health deterioration.
Exactly right. And this is happening just at the time when it has become more complex and is taking longer to establish one’s place in society.
Think about how your life would have been different if you had been born into and grown up with today’s technology. I know that I am thankful that I did not do so (I am 54). I think that if I had, I would have amounted to almost nothing more than what I am today- a nearly obsessive user of the internet- but in that hypothetical, a very, very poor one struggling to find the money to pay the rent.
I don’t remember where I read it, but it rings true to me- farmers weren’t neurotic- they didn’t have the time to become so because they worked hard all day and then went to sleep.
“I don’t remember where I read it, but it rings true to me- farmers weren’t neurotic- they didn’t have the time to become so because they worked hard all day and then went to sleep.”
+1
Nothing worse to spur neuroticism than not having a purpose and something to get you out of your own mind.
What if it’s “good parenting” that increases neuroticism? Or at least “good” as defined by helicopter/snowplow parents?
This young woman’s journey might be enlightening. Evaluated through her youth, she found a cause as a college activist for autism. You get more of what you incentivize.
The young woman seems to have inadvertently exposed why words are now “violence”.
“Besides, how could I have forgotten the sanctity of my lived experience, my vow never to surrender to reason? Thus, I insulated myself from even the slightest traces of disagreement. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words could force me to challenge my most dearly held beliefs and cope with the fact that I might be wrong—and that would be too much to bear.”
In the end, I believe she’s “grown up” a bit more and faster than her contemporaries.
https://quillette.com/2020/10/14/my-brief-spell-as-an-activist/
Confounders: muscle mass and sex partner count
I have to wonder if this is just really a reflection of the decline in religion and rise in secularism over the past few decades. Use to be that many mental health problems were dealt with through the church. But now the problems are dealt with through psychology.
Maybe all we are seeing is psychiatrist just displacing the preacher. The numbers could just support this thesis just as well — Right?
The answer is that the facts about which things tend to make most people happy, comfortable, and calm instead of blue, awkward, and anxious are politically incorrect.
Tolstoy’s, “All happy families are alike,” is, when you stop and think about it, a very politically incorrect statement in this day and age.
Yes, bad luck with brain chemistry has a lot to do with a lot of cases. But correcting for that, the gaps are still too huge to explain in terms of biochemistry.