Asymptosis

My friend Steve wonders at all the college students who study Lithuanian folk dancing and the like, and wonders whether they shouldn’t study something useful instead, and pursue less remunerative interests when they’re past their prime earning years.

This makes some sense to me, theoretically. But here’s what’s weird, something I’ve been wondering at myself for quite a while:

American is the only country in the world where “liberal arts education” is widespread, actually pretty much ubiquitous in higher ed. Every other country has a much more voc-tech model: even at Cambridge and Oxford (and certainly in France or China), when you get to college you declare your major immediately, pursue that major, then get a job in that major.

America also has, far and away (by everyone’s measure, here and abroad), the most, best universities in the world — maybe even equivalent to its military dominance. America is the number-one magnet location for students from across the globe. And countries across the globe are soliciting American universities to set up satellite shops — with their liberal arts models — in their countries.

How to explain this? The standard, loosy-goosey nostrums about developing critical thinking skills, flexibility of mind, adaptability in a fast-changing work world, etc. seem so vague and wooly up against hard-eyed, nuts-and-bolts preparation for the world of work. But on a national and global level they seem to be born out, in spades.

It’s worth noting that those university rankings give a lot of weight to the strength of graduate schools — which are, essentially, voc-techs at a high level. But (almost) all the people in those graduate schools came up through the liberal arts undergraduate system.

It’s possible, of course, that we have the best universities in spite of the liberal arts model, not because of it. Perhaps if we were more utilitarian we’d be even more profoundly dominant in higher education. But I’m thinking that that imagined counterfactual conjecture has the burden of proof on it, up against the existing evidence.

This reminds me of the comment I read a while back from history professor. His students would ask him what they could do with a history degree. He said (paraphrasing from memory here), “Unless you’re going to teach, nothing. But that’s the wrong question. The right question is ‘What do people with history degrees do?’ The answer is — everything.”

Me, I got my B.A. in Literature, Theory and Criticism, and went on to be an equity partner and/or principal in a whole string of startups, with combined values totaling tens of millions of dollars. Did that degree help me do that? I have absolutely no idea. I do know that it’s what I wanted to do at that time — what I’d work at day and night because I was fascinated by the subject. (Even though I had absolutely no intention, at any time in my life, of becoming a teacher or a professor.)

And that interest has continued, greatly enriching my life ever since. Viz. (Competing for the most-life-enriching prize is what I call my pre-graduate degree, which I took in downhill skiing — paid for by loading chairlifts in Very Cold Weather for two winters at low wages, and by the opportunity cost of not doing something more remunerative and/or career-enhancing.)

I don’t call myself representative — I’m somewhat smarter than the average bear, and I had a lot of other advantages of birth. Certainly some people will enhance their lives far more by studying something more practical.

But on a national level, I like to think about one of my kids’ friends, who is currently at the Annapolis Naval Academy, majoring in … literature.

Wacky? Maybe so. But when I look at the world around me, the balance of the evidence tells me that our country and our world are better off because he has the freedom and opportunity to do that. It’s another aspect of the freedom that our country provides — cultural, institutional, intellectual, psychological — which is among the main reasons — maybe the main reason — that we’re such a remarkably successful country.

Asymptosis Economics, Education, Foreign policy

Michael Bloomberg:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

I would add:

1. The moderate muslim community, which uniformly disowns and decries terrorism in the name of Islam as despicable and contrary to their religion, is the most powerful voice there is against those terrorists. There are few more effective things we can do that empower, embrace, and encourage that voice.

2. The voices against the mosque are raised not in prospect of any future good, but in angry reaction to past evils. Vengeance, revenge, should never serve as the spur to our actions, because the urge for vengeance — no matter how innate and irresistible it is to the human character — is always about looking backward, never forward.

Retribution — rooted in cold, clear, calculated reasoning and intended to prevent future evils — is often essential and inescapable. But vengeance-driven actions are almost inevitably counterproductive.

That’s what I think, anyway.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Free Speech, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized, constitution

I’ve long lauded Jim Manzi for his cogent and convincing arguments against carbon taxes. He’s the antithesis of the “1998 was really hot! Look: it’s cooler now!” school of head-in-in-the-sand self-delusionists. Rather, he takes the 2007 IPCC report as the best available consensus scientific knowledge we have, and uses it to think through a clear-eyed, long-term cost-benefit analysis of carbon taxes/cap-and-trade. Anyone interested in this subject should read this article (and note that it’s published in the regular “In-House Critics” column of the  decidedly lefty New Republic, which speaks volumes about which side of this debate is willing to tolerate and consider — and yes, publish — strongly argued dissenting views).

When I consider arguments in favor of climate legislation, Manzi’s thinking is what I measure those arguments against. Here’s his argument in small (my emphasis for easy skimming):

• “the cost of policies designed to limit the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million (ppm) average a little over 6 percent of global GDP by 2100 (with a very wide range of estimates). That is, we would start paying a cost today that would rise to about 6 percent of world output by 2100 in order to only partially avoid a problem that would have expected costs of about 3 percent of world output sometime later than 2100.”

• “hedging your bets and keeping your options open is almost always the right strategy. Money and technology are our raw materials for options. … the loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate all theorized climate change risk (or all risk from genetic technologies or, for that matter, all risk from killer asteroids) would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk.”

Yes, he addresses the uncertainty/risk/probability issues of global warming — notably those from Harvard’s Martin Weitzman.

It’s a compelling argument: given the risk scenario painted by the IPCC in 2007 — and its uncertainty — our best response is to promote economic and technological growth and development, so we have the resources to address problems in the future, when we have a clearer picture of what the problems are.

But the counterarguments are also very strong. If Manzi incorporated them into his thinking, I think he would come to very different conclusions. Respondents at The New Republic have offered several of them; I will steal from them unabashedly, and add a few of my own.

• The 2007 IPCC report is getting long in the tooth — it’s based on the best research from four to six years ago. Recent research is (almost uniformly) far more alarming. Two examples: 1. “The area of summer sea ice remaining during 2007-2009 was about 40% less than the average projection from the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.” 2. One report posits a circa 5% chance that large portions of the planet will be rendered uninhabitable — including the eastern U.S..

• The 2007 report specifically did not make projections for sea-level rise. The modeling of ice-sheet behavior was considered too difficult at the time. The economic costs from rising seas could dwarf all others combined. A cost-benefit analysis that doesn’t include those costs doesn’t tell us much.

A 6%-of-GDP insurance policy against those eventualities starts to sound more reasonable. But even the 6% estimate has serious problems.

• Manzi assumes that carbon taxes will add to, not replace, other taxes. Economists agree that consumption taxes and “Pigovian” taxes — taxing negative externalities — are more economically efficient (they result in greater economic growth and prosperity) than many of our current taxes, like those on income, corporate profits, etc. A carbon tax is a Pigovian consumption tax. If our tax base shifts in that direction, the result is more economic efficiency, yielding the very result — faster growth and development — that Manzi champions.

• He assumes the need for a global taxing regime, ignoring the benefits to the U.S. of a unilaterally imposed carbon tax. The long-term savings in national defense and security from reduced fossil-fuel consumption are darned hard to predict, but even most righties will acknowledge that we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq if there was no oil over there. That war will cost us trillions, all told — somewhere north of 25% of U.S. GDP for a year. And that’s before even considering the fuel that it poured on the fire of global jihad. That was one damned expensive insurance policy to ensure future oil supplies.

• He ignores the threat that global warming poses to U.S. national security, as detailed by those left-wing nut jobs at the Pentagon in their Quadrennial Defense Review for 2010 (PDF): ”climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

• He ignores the truly horrific, potentially even apocalyptic human impact of global warming, and a “mere” 3% decline in GDP, especially outside the developed world. (Quite resoundingly demonstrating Jonathan Haidt’s findings about libertarians’ lack of compassion.) As Nate Silver has pointed out (H/T Bradford Plumer) we could eliminate 43% of the world’s people and only reduce world GDP by 5%.

As I said, I greatly admire Jim Manzi’s thinking. But I have to say that his failure to include these points in that thinking gives the strong impression of confirmation bias.

Asymptosis Economics, Energy Independence, Foreign policy, Global Warming, Politics, Uncategorized

If you’re like me, you hear your friends say this a lot about America: “we need to start making things again.” It seem intuitively correct, but there’s a pretty standard economic response: if we’re getting all the profits based on our knowledge and innovation, even though we’re not doing all the work, what’s the problem? Sounds kinda great, actually. Apple pulls a 60% margin on the IPhone 4, spending only $6.54 on assembly costs in China for a $600 item. (!)

It’ll all trickle down, right?

I’ve struggled with my thinking on this a lot; there are obviously lots of problems with the trickle-down idea (some of which I’ve discussed many times), but it’s hard to argue with the phenomenal prosperity (or at least profits) that the Apple model delivers.

Andy Grove’s new Bloomberg article does a lot to help me sort out that thinking, and adds another nail to the coffin to which “trickle down” is increasingly (finally!) being relegated.

His central point, cutting the Gordian knot: as the manufacturing ecosystem disappears in America — along with the jobs — we lose the ability to innovate. I think of the decades-long culture in my home town, Seattle, which has its roots in generations of Boeing machinists and engineers bringing up machinists and engineers. It’s a self-perpetuating culture from which innovation springs.

Grove’s article is brief and concise (and well worth reading in full), so rather than summarizing it I’ll just pull some choice morsels for you. All emphasis is mine.

… our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. …

Startups … cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. …

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs. …

American companies discovered they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done cheaper overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering. …

what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work — and masses of unemployed? …

Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. …

…the cost of creating U.S. jobs grew from a few thousand dollars per position in the early years to $100,000 today. …

Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed … U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up. …

a general undervaluing of manufacturing — the idea that as long as “knowledge work” stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs. …

we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. …

Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best economic system …  we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.

Such evidence stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries … These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. …

these economies turned in precedent-shattering economic performances over the 1970s and 1980s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries. …

Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory — and job-centric political leadership — to guide our plans and actions….

… our pursuit of our individual businesses … has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. …

Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate. …

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. … Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. … Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations.

I fled Hungary as a young man in 1956 to come to the U.S. … I witnessed first-hand the perils of both government overreach … there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. …

If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.

Grove understands what the rabid Norquistista free-marketers seem incapable of comprehending or acknowledging:  there is an invisible hand, but there is also a tragedy of the commons.

He only makes one real policy proposal: taxing offshore work and using the money to encourage onshore employment. There are many others (Robert Frank had some great suggestions in last Sunday’s Times), all rooted in central economic planning by the federal government. I’ll just mention my favorite once again, without further discussion: greatly expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and increasing its “salience” by delivering it on weekly paychecks.

And then there’s infrastructure, of course. I just rode the TGV from Paris to Avignon and back — at 200 mph. A great experience, and the prosperity it’s delivered to southern France is incalculable.

China is currently building 42 high-speed rail lines. We have one that we’re sort of, kind of, working on.

I’m sure this is because China is foolishly engaged in centralized economic planning.

And we — obviously far more clever than they — are not.

Asymptosis Economics, Foreign policy, Politics

My friend Steve likes to proclaim the value of casual intuition — based on one’s day-to-day observations over the course of life — and downplay the value of expertise, analysis, and data in making good judgments. Among other things, he defends Sarah Palin and other less-thinkerly politicians on these grounds.

He also points to Robert McNamara — the king of data analysis — as having failed utterly in his judgments on Vietnam. This putting aside the facts that 1. Steve’s casual intuition would have led him to exactly the same policies (if not worse), and 2. McNamara’s data was not the driving force behind the big decisions and judgments on Vietnam. They were at best excuses, rationalizations, or simple thumb-twiddling.

Also: systematic, in-depth knowledge — rooted in research, analysis, and frequently, data — is obviously not sufficient to guarantee good judgment. But it is arguably necessary. Or at least, it (greatly?) improves the odds of making good judgments. If the Bush administration, for instance, had had some basic knowledge of the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni…

One of the key books on this field is Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment. He argues — based on analysis of 82,000 predictions by 284 experts — that political experts perform only slightly better than random dart throws. It’s a pretty damning condemnation of experts.

But as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, there are two fatal flaws in Tetlock’s argument:

1. He only examines questions that are highly controversial among experts. (If 50% believe each way, 50% will inevitably be wrong.) Tetlock explicitly ignores the “dumb” questions that seem to the experts to have obvious answers.

2. He doesn’t compare the the experts to the average person on the street. The only such comparison in the book is between experts and Berkeley undergrads — who are darned high on the elite/expert spectrum, in absolute terms. And even in that comparison, the experts win in a landslide. The undergrads aren’t even as good as chimps or dartboards.

This suggests that if you looked at those “obvious” questions — which are often not at all obvious to non-experts — and compared casual to expert opinion, you’d see experts being right far more of the time. As they say in the biz, “more research needed.”

Tetlock does reveal another fact, however, that serves to seriously undermine one’s confidence in the intuitionally inspired beliefs of Sarah and similar: among the experts, “foxes” — those who in Nicholas Kristof’s words are “are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance” — resoundingly beat out the “hedgehogs” — those who “have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions.”

Is this also true of everyday folks? Based on my many years of decidedly non-systematic observation, I would suggest that it is.

Update: Chris’ comment,

This worked well enough back when virtually all information of note was controlled by experts.  Now they’re forced to compete with everyone, which has the nasty side effect of forcing people to become steadily more extreme and loud just to be heard.

Reminds me of another takeaway from Tetlock’s research. Again quoting Kristoff because he summarizes it well:

the only consistent predictor [of accuracy] was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites.

In other words, the loudest, most simplistic, and most dogmatic “experts” 1. are the least accurate, and 2. get the biggest megaphone.

Asymptosis Economics, Foreign policy, Politics, Rhetoric

Ever since Bryan offered this bet on future unemployment rates in the U.S. and Europe, I’ve been wondering: how do incarceration rates affect those numbers?

Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population List [PDF], compiled since 1992 by Roy Walmsley of the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College, London.)

Only Russia comes even close, at .63%. (Canada: .12%. Australia: .13%. China .18%. Germany .09%.) Our rate is four to eight times that of most other countries.

Prisoners aren’t part of the unemployment calculation. They’re not counted as part of the work force, and they’re not counted as unemployed. There are various arguments about whether that makes sense (feel free to comment), but if we include them in the calculations, what do unemployment rates look like? In particular, Bryan’s bet makes me curious: How does U.S. unemployment compare to the EU15?*

Here are the numbers for 2008. Calculations based on labor force and unemployment figures from Eurostat.

Percent of (total work force + incarcerated population)

In 2008, all of the difference between EU15 and U.S. unemployment rates is accounted for by the prison population. The cynical view would say that we just imprison our unemployed, which doesn’t strike me as the most economically efficient arrangement. (Here putting aside any foolish notions of Christian charity or the like.)

I would have liked to do a fever graph comparing unemployment rate, incarceration rate, and combined rate over the years, but the data’s only available in fairly intractable country-by-country form, and I didn’t have time or energy for all the cutting and pasting. (I wrote to Mr. Walmsley and he was nice enough to reply, but he was unable to provide the data in a more usable form.)

Note: Eyeballing the data, I do not think incarceration accounts for the (significantly larger) differences in previous years. (I would suggest that the additional difference is mostly the result of labor-market and other market rigidities imposed by unions and government regulation — not the result of redistribution. But that’s another post.)

Perhaps one of my gentle readers might have the time and inclination to compile those years? Or, write to Roy Walmsley and ask him to provide a simple table of the data that only he has: prison population by country and year. All the other data, at least for OECD countries, is easily available.

* Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.

Asymptosis Economics, Foreign policy, Politics

In my earlier post I didn’t give Jim Manzi sufficient credit.

He argues that a systematic government policy of torture (as distinguished from the torturous acts that Americans have engaged in over the centuries) is 1. a radical break with American tradition, and 2. because of 1, is quite possibly (I would say definitely) damaging to American strategic interests.

Here’s the money quote, which I endorse wholeheartedly:

I am looking to tradition, settled practice and the wisdom of our forebears for guidance in a difficult situation. Among other things, this strikes me as the obviously conservative approach.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Rhetoric, constitution, iraq

“The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

—Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.)

Read the Report.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Politics, constitution, iraq

Jim Manzi discusses torture here. I find the discussion uncomfortably cold-blooded, but it has the accompanying virtue of clear-headedness and cutting to the crux (unlike those from his compatriot Johah Goldberg at The Corner). The important (extra-moral) question is not torture’s tactical value, but whether it achieves America’s strategic goals.

That’s a damned good question–it’s actually the question that BushCo didn’t get, and it’s the question that Obama has put front and center in his rethinking of America’s foreign policy (diplomacy, military, trade, the whole ball of wax).

What Manzi doesn’t consider in this piece is the crucial question that accompanies his: what are America’s strategic goals, and how are they effected by the Bush torture regime? In particular, how are those goals affected over the decades as our children come of age and take their places in the world?

Here are some possible strategic goals (again reluctantly putting aside for the moment the fundamental moral repugnancy of torture):

• To prevent foreign terrorist acts against Americans–on American soil and/or abroad.
• To protect the American homeland from military invasion.
• To reduce armed conflict worldwide.
• To increase American power and influence over other countries–the ability to convince our friends and coerce our enemies (and vice versa).
• To increase access to American trading parters abroad.
• To make it safe for Americans to travel the world or live abroad.

On the last item, the BushCo crowd and their most vocal love-it-don’t-ever-leave-it supporters don’t really like the idea of travelling abroad. (Do you think Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and company are planning any world tours?)  They don’t seem to understand why anyone would want to.

Personally, I put that item quite high on the list–not only for its inherent goodness (I want my girls to have that international mobility in their lives–to be welcomed far and wide [think: Jackie Kennedy]), but because it’s a bellwether for all the other goals.

So, judging by that single goal for a moment: If torture results in killing or capturing a few dozen terrorists, how does that weigh against millions or hundreds of millions who come to hate us (or like us a hell of a lot less) as a result?

That question is aptly applied to the other strategic goals as well. I’m encouraged to see that the Obama administration seems to be doing exactly that, and that pundits who have previously ignored or dismissed the issue (i.e. “soft power” pooh-poohing) are now actually considering it.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Politics

You can see the polling data here, here, and here.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Politics