Vidcasts of two books I have read recently

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1. Jonah Goldberg talks about his Suicide of the West with Ben Shapiro. I recommend both the book and the vidcast. It reminded me that my essay on “micro-morality and macro-morality” owes a debt to Hayek that I failed to articulate.

2. John Carryrou talks about his Bad Blood with Nick Gillespie. I recommend the book a bit more than the vidcast, although the latter does make a nice effort to get into a couple of the questions that I posed in my endorsement of the book.

And while we are on Theranos, I liked this sentence from a commenter.

After reading Carreyrou’s book, I am inclined to view Theranos more as an extreme point on a smooth distribution than as an one-of-a-kind outlier, otherwise the displayed level of credulity is difficult to explain even given a lot of people’s fervent wish for a female Steve Jobs.

Boston’s strange housing market

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From Mark Pothier in the Boston Globe.

In Plymouth, the median sale price of a single-family home at the end of 2017 was about 4 percent below its pre-recession peak in 2005. Towns such as Hyannis and Southbridge sat deeper in the hole  —  still more than 15 percent down. Compare that with Cambridge, where the median sale price rose by 96 percent between 2005 and 2017. In parts of Boston, prices have outright doubled since 2005. Never has home-value disparity in Eastern Massachusetts been so extreme.

I have a hypothesis about the cause of house price divergence in the area. Boston has peculiarly bad transportation woes. The “subway” runs above ground on some routes, which makes it quite slow. Parking regulations and parking shortages in Cambridge and Brookline make car transportation difficult, especially for commuters. The road system is terrible. Construction on major streets creates major bottlenecks. A major economic activity is remodeling old houses, and the streets are choked with contractors’ trucks.

These transportation problems make commuting a nightmare in Boston. That in turn puts a premium on close-in housing and lowers the value of housing in suburbs that are nearby in terms of mileage but remote for commuting purposes. I think once the Baby Boomers hit their 80s and no longer have the ability/desire to take advantage of urban amenities, there may be enough of an exodus from the expensive suburbs to stop the price spiral there.

The parasitism metaphor

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Why are affluence and “state capacity” positively correlated? Bryan Caplan writes,

Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.

Possibly related: Handle comments,

One thing we can observe is that, at least for a time, liberalism was more or less culturally self-sustaining, even during those periods of adversity you mentioned. It would take a while to explain why, but my position is that the self-sustaining social mechanism has run out of juice in the process of being replaced by a rival ideology, and so, despite our technologically-enabled economic prosperity, liberalism really is in more danger than in those dangerous times, and there is no longer any ‘soft’ (or coherent) way to implement ‘more liberalism’ solutions.

He might say that left-wing ideology is a parasite that is in the process of killing the host. It will suffice here to define left-wing ideology as the view that capitalism is inherently bad. By that definition, the parasite has already infected an awful lot of educated young people.

Thoughts on Theranos

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From a commenter.

narcissists use anger to cow and intimidate

…the silicon valley culture of “promise x now, figure out how to do it later,” doesn’t really work in other industries. If you combine that with criminal narcissism, you get Theranos; if you just add regular narcissism, you just get Tesla.

What’s weird about venture capitalists is that they seek out these narcissists. I remember reading about a venture capitalist who said that he looked for an entrepreneur who could. . .I forget the metaphor, but it was something equivalent to short-circuiting the rational part of your brain.

My guess is that there are too many people trying to imitate Steve Jobs and not enough people trying to imitate Patrick Collison.

Eric Weinstein on the IDW

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He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts.

1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.

2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.

3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.

4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.

I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.

How to not write a book

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Tyler Cowen writes,

One good reason to write a book is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your system. In that sense, you can think of the lust to write books as a kind of disability.

Read the whole post, which is filled with cynical comments directed at anyone who wishes to write a book. I will add these:

1. Assume that one year from publication the book will not be read by anyone unless one of your grandchildren picks it up.

2. If you don’t get advice about writing a marketable book, you may have to self-publish and your book will sell fewer than 1000 copies. If you do get advice, you will sell fewer than 1000 copies and you won’t like your book as much.

3. Writing a negative review of someone’s book is like telling a mother that her newborn baby looks ugly. Yet many of us cannot resist writing negative reviews.

Morality and the Dunbar Number

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From my latest essay.

When people confuse micro-morality and macro-morality, they make mistakes. Treating a micro-moral problem as a macro-moral problem is one mistake. Treating a macro-moral problem as a micro-moral problem is another mistake.

I think that a lot of the criticism of capitalism reflects an inappropriate application of micro-morality in a context where macro-morality is what matters.

Recycling wastes resources

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From an editorial in Investors Business Daily.

plenty of “recyclables” end up in landfills, in part because of “single stream” recycling. That’s where residents can put everything in the same bin — a switch designed to encourage more recycling. But it results in more stuff that can’t be recycled because it’s “contaminated.” One study found that about 30% of plastic collected in these “single stream” bins can’t be recycled.

Read the whole thing. In Specialization and Trade, I make the point that if recycling truly saved resources, then the market would pay you to recycle. Instead, the editorial notes that “the market for recyclable materials has collapsed as supply increases and demand subsides.”

Applying the null hypothesis

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Kevin Drum writes,

But it’s Los Angeles that’s shown the biggest progress across the board. White kids have improved by 21 points in math and 10 in reading. Black kids have improved by 20 points in math and 16 in reading. That’s the best progress among black kids among all five cities, and close to the best progress for white kids too.

I’m showing you progress from 2003 to 2017.

Thanks to a commenter for the pointer. Drum takes it as given that the improvement in test scores reflects some improvement in quality of teaching. But this runs counter to the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions do not matter.

Applying the null hypothesis, I would bet that the difference in test scores between 2003 and 2017 is due to a quirk of some sort. Were “white” and “black” always defined the same way? Did the rules of who was “eligible” to take the tests change? Etc.

Sorry to be so cynical, but I would want to see more data before I would treat the improvement as real.

Reading about the brain

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The book, Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy Wilson, has been around a while (2002). Some of the studies and methods pre-date the awareness of replication issues. But I still find it very stimulating. Note that Hanson and Simler refer to Wilson’s work and to the book.

There are all of these views about a divided brain. Daniel Kahneman talks about system 1 and system 2. Ian McGilchrist (recent econtalk with Russ Roberts) talks about the left brain as a set of maps and the right brain as having a sense of the territory. Wilson talks about the adaptive unconscious and the conscious brain.

Wilson’s point is that what we mean by our “self” is the conscious brain. But a lot of information is processed and decisions are made by the unconscious brain. The conscious brain is not the executive making all the decisions, nor is it a spectator/commentator without influence. It is somewhere in between.

I am interested in the overall question of moral behavior. My current thoughts are these:

1. The simplest moral heuristic is simply “Do what you observe other people doing.” If other people are driving between 65 and 70, then do that. If the sign says that the speed limit is 55, then that introduces some dissonance, but you still are probably better off doing what other people do.

2. If you don’t do what other people do, then you are defecting. If everyone defected a lot, then we probably could not have a workable society. But if nobody ever defected, then there would never be any improvement at all.

3. Moral life consists of choosing between obeying the simplest heuristic or defecting. I would say that to the extent that you are unable to make those decisions consciously, you lack moral capacity.

4. But our conscious brains can rationalize all sorts of behavior. Our instinct is to disguise or deny behavior that might make us look bad. We go so far as to disguise it or deny it to ourselves.

5. Be careful what you believe about yourself. Going back to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, she seemed to believe that she was another Steve Jobs. This gave her a license to fire anyone who told her something she did not want to hear. It’s now obvious that she treated constructive critics as if they were hopeless malcontents, but ex ante that was harder to see. Making the opposite mistake–treating a hopeless malcontent like a constructive critic–can also be costly.