Author Archives: Arnold Kling

The psychology of resentment

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Nando Pelusi wrote,

Inequities are bound to occur; it is how we react to the perceived injustice that is key. “Natural” emotions such as the anger engendered by cheaters evolved for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t perfect and they don’t necessarily improve our lives. So resist the all-too-natural tendency to nurse a grudge.

A reader forwarded me the essay, which is difficult to excerpt. The author writes of “injustice collecting” as a natural psychological program built to protect us from being cheated repeatedly but which becomes dysfunctional in many modern contexts. Some of my thoughts.

1. As a friend of mine once pointed out, at work, we naturally resent the people who get paid more and work less than we do. We almost never notice the people who are paid less and work more than we do.

2. Sometimes it seems that a person would rather collect injustices than do something about them. That can be really harmful.

3. It seems to me that in the political realm, sometimes groups would rather collect injustices than find a way to move past them.

Kling and Gurri on social movements in Digital City

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Martin Gurri and Arnold Kling have a dialog. I say,

It seems to me that the decentralized nature of these protests is a weakness. By 20th-century standards, a movement needs to mature into having an institutional structure.

He says,

I’m going to make an act of faith and say that new institutions will arise that account for the digital environment and the web culture. With luck, they will embody our ideals of democracy and equality—maybe even nudge closer to these ideals. But it’s early days.

Intentions vs. consequences

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Luke Smillie and others write,

intellectually curious people–those who are motivated to explore and reflect upon abstract ideas–are more inclined to judge the morality of behaviors according to the consequences they produce. . .

individuals who are more curious, respectful, and adherent to salient social norms, tend to judge the morality of an action not by its consequences, but rather by its alignment with particular moral rules, duties, or rights.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I attach a lot of importance to the distinction between intentions and consequences, and my natural inclination is to focus on the latter. Some more comments:

1. Focus on intentions, and you blame the baker for “greed.” Focus on consequences, as Adam Smith does, and you enjoy your bread.

2. Good intentions motivate the rabbi and most congregants at our synagogue to support Black Lives Matter. For now, let us assume that everyone involved in BLM has good intentions (although obviously that is never completely true of any movement). But I cannot stop there. As I see it, the consequences of BLM thus far are bad, and they will be worse. I don’t think this is fixable within BLM. The assumption that racism is the most important factor (indeed, the only factor) in police killings of young black men is false.

I disapprove of racism. I disapprove of police killing young black men. But I also disapprove of overstating the link between the two.

3. In How Humans Judge Machines, Cesar Hidalgo finds that humans judge machines more by their consequences and humans more by their intentions.

In a complex society, I think we are better often better off looking at outcomes as if they came from a disinterested machine rather than as coming from an intentional human.

For example, I believe that social media has harmful consequences. However, these consequences were not the intentions of the people involved in creating smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design

From the comments on statistical malpractice

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1.

Frankly there are just too many PhDs. The talent pool is too diluted.

Imagine if the NBA had 1,000 teams instead of 30. Those extra 10,000+ players will be playing basketball by its official rules but it will mostly be of very poor quality compared to what we see from LeBron James. There’s nothing you can do about that if you’ve committed to having 1,000 teams. There simply aren’t 15,000 basketball players who are as talented as an average NBAer.

2.

Basically, every clever idea that requires human beings to do their duty without reliable detection and penalty for violation, has already been thought of, implemented, and failed entirely. Not just failed entirely, which is bad enough, but made it around two orders of magnitude more burdensome to get papers done. Not good papers, just any paper, which are still mostly bad papers. “Huge additional costs, zero apparent benefit” is the worst of all possible worlds, and such a bad world, that one just needs to move to a totally different planet.

So, the only solution is a completely different mechanism and institution of accountability.

I agree with both of these points.

Virus update

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1. Kling was wrong. Regarding the drop in” deaths from the virus relative to cases, Tom Chivers writes,

it’s almost certainly not because the virus has mutated or anything. “There are some things we know are definitely not true,” says Beale. “We’re convinced that the virus itself isn’t substantially different, that there’s no ‘milder form’ of the virus.” The little package of RNA in its protein-and-lipid wrapper is essentially the same now as it was at the beginning of the outbreak.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

2. Maybe the high death rate in the U.S. is not something that would have been prevented by a different President (on this issue, my view is being reinforced). Andrew Biggs writes,

U.S. policymakers also suffered under the handicap that Americans entered the Covid pandemic in much poorer health than citizens of other developed countries. For instance, over 27,000 U.S Covid deaths list diabetes as a comorbidity, accounting for 16% of total Covid-related fatalities. But what if instead of having the highest diabetes rate among rich countries the U.S. had the same rate as Australia, with less than half the U.S. level? The same holds for obesity, listed as a comorbidity in 4% of Covid cases. Forty percent of Americans are obese, the highest in the developed world and over twice the OECD average. U.S. death rates from heart disease are also higher than most European and Asian countries. Hypertension is listed as a comorbidity in 22% of Covid deaths. If Americans simply had the same health status as other high-income countries, it is likely that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.

Pointer from Bryan Caplan.

3. Timothy Taylor has links to more economics papers on the virus than anyone has time to read.

4. What if the virus had made its appearance in 1990?

–I don’t think people would have self-quarantined. We didn’t have the infrastructure for low-cost direct-to-home delivery. We didn’t have the technology to allow people to work from home.

–I don’t think we would have had lockdowns. We didn’t have a generation of people raised to believe that it was unsafe for children to play without adult supervision. Shelter-in-place orders from the government would have been too unpopular for elected leaders to contemplate.

–We would not have been promised a vaccine. No one could have announced “We already sequenced the virus genome!” as if that meant a vaccine was coming any day now.

–We would not have had all of the treatment options available today.

–Our population would have had a lower proportion of high-risk individuals–fewer elderly, obese, and diabetic individuals.

–We would not have had social media to fill our heads with statistics and model forecasts and expert pronouncements to keep the virus foremost in our minds.

In short, I suspect we would have come out about the same in terms of population death rate, maybe a little more or maybe a little less. The economic consequences would have been much less. And it would not have blown up into a national trauma. For the trauma, we can thank the fact that we now live in the Digital City.

UPDATE: after writing the foregoing, but before posting, I came across Vaclav Smil comparing the current pandemic to those in 1957 and 1968,

Why were things so different back then? Was it because we had no ­fear-reinforcing 24/7 cable news, no Twitter, and no incessant and instant case-and-death tickers on all our electronic screens? Or is it we ourselves who have changed, by valuing recurrent but infrequent risks differently?

Digital culture

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L. M. Sacasas writes,

Certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now reemerging in the Digital City. Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs. In the Digital City, we are newly aware of operating within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control. Though these forces may be benevolent, they are just as often malevolent, undermining our efforts and derailing our projects. We often experience digital technologies as determining our weal and woe, acting upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised.

I describe the essay as a collection of loose threads. Many are interesting, but none are sufficiently well developed for my taste. Still, I think that the basic theme strikes me as increasingly important: our media environment is novel, and this has a significant impact on individual psychology and the culture at large.

Sacasas writes of our “re-enchantment” in this media environment, as we feel ourselves captive of invisible forces. He refers to algorithms as these hidden forces. But I think that the belief in systemic racism is another example of re-enchantment.

His thoughts on the anachronistic nature of fact-checking struck me as spot-on.

Looking at the American Economics Association

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Two from EconJournalWatch. First, Mitchell Langbert writes,

This paper shows that the AEA is nearly devoid of Republicans, though many Republicans are found among its membership, which remains open to all who pay the membership dues. I find that the political skew increases up the AEA hierarchy. I use voter registration and political contribution data to examine what I call ‘players’—AEA officers, editors, authors, and acknowledgees (that is, those thanked in published acknowledgments). For AEA players, the Democratic:Republican ratio is 13:1 in voter registrations and 81:1 in political contributors.

Second, Jeremy Horpedahl and Arnold Kling quantify the increased focus on issues of gender, race, and inequality in the AEA’s flagship publications.

The 21st century has provided the economics profession with many new topics to consider. These include: outsourcing; supply chain complexity; the issues that the financial crisis of 2008 raised with respect to bank regulation, housing finance, and ‘shadow banking;’ the structure, conduct, and performance of Internet businesses and the policy issues that have arisen; the role of China in the world economy; the rise of artificial intelligence; the opportunities and challenges posed by ‘big data;’ the rise of intangible capital and the increased importance of intellectual property; and changes in U.S. economic geography, with some major cities generating an increased share of income.

With all of these new topics, as well as continued interest in perennial topics in monetary policy, fiscal policy, public finance, economic history, econometric methods, productivity and growth, economic development, and so on, for any topic to have gained market share, as gender, race, and inequality have, is striking.

Jeremy did the research and the overwhelming share of the writing of the paper, and it was generous of him to include me as an author. The above two paragraphs are just about my only contribution to the text. But (a) the idea for the paper was inspired by one of my blog posts and (b) I was involved enough to share the blame for any errors or problems that remain in the paper.

[UPDATE: 3. How to teach differently to minorities is the latest announcement about an AEA workshop. Speaking of the road to sociology. . .]

Blocking out the truth

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One of the points made in the Stanovich piece I referred to yesterday is

Identity politics advocates have succeeded in making certain research conclusions within the university verboten. They have made it very hard for any university professor (particularly the junior and untenured ones) to publish and publicly promote any conclusions that these advocates dislike.

As an example, consider another article on Quillette, by Zachary Robert Caverly.

Back in March 2020, a University of Pittsburgh physician by the name of Norman C. Wang published an article in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) about the use of race and ethnicity considerations when recruiting for the US cardiology workforce. Wang argued that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity offices are ultimately unhelpful in promoting minorities in cardiology practice. He also pointed out that these offices may be unconstitutional and that they often make claims that may be unsupported by the relevant empirical evidence. Towards the end, he advocated race-neutral admissions and hiring practices as an alternative to the current model. . . .

After other professionals joined the outcry on social media, the American Heart Association (AHA) announced on its Twitter feed that Wang’s paper did not represent the organization’s values and assured its followers that, “We’ll investigate. We’ll do better. We’re invested in helping to build a diverse healthcare and research community.” A subsequent statement released on August 6th stated that the article would be retracted, and claimed that it “contains many misconceptions and misquotes and that together those inaccuracies, misstatements, and selective misreading of source materials strip the paper of its scientific validity.” Wang did not agree to the retraction and the AHA announced that it would be publishing a rebuttal.

Myside Bias

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Keith E. Stanovich writes,

one particular bias—myside bias—sets a trap for the cognitively sophisticated. Regarding most biases, they are used to thinking—rightly—that they are less biased. However, myside thinking about your political beliefs represents an outlier bias where this is not true. This may lead to a particularly intense bias blind spot among certain cognitive elites. If you are a person of high intelligence, if you are highly educated, and if you are strongly committed to an ideological viewpoint, you will be highly likely to think you have thought your way to your viewpoint. And you will be even less likely than the average person to realize that you have derived your beliefs from the social groups you belong to and because they fit with your temperament and your innate psychological propensities.

Interesting essay throughout. It was difficult to excerpt.