Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions
nber.org
nber.org
These are both really tricky questions, because the questions described are derivatives of derivatives! The deficit is the time derivative of the debt; so it's possible that someone is hearing "did the debt rise during clinton" (which would be true). Likewise, inflation is the derivative of the value of money. So someone might be hearing "did things get more expensive over reagan" (which would also be true). The deficit/debt one is really tricky since they both start with the letter D and even though I know the difference occasionally in conversation I switch the two.
That leads to a contradiction -- we expect our elected politicians to do whatever the public wants, but we also want our politicians to be wise, forward thinking, selfless, and moral leaders. Those two desires can only be fully reconciled if the public itself has those qualities, but the public doesn't have much direct, quick feedback as to whether it's making good choices.
We also don't want to pay our politicians very much (politicians make orders of magnitude less than, say, business leaders) and still expect them to be fully independent, unbribeable, and only beholden to the public. You get what you pay for.
Now in the US, I can't seem to find anyone who think this. My biggest issue is that I can't even find anyone who thinks that the government is the people. Everyone seems to think of the government as this black box that has a mind of its own and inflict laws and rules upon us. While I'm much more used to the common thinking that the people rule, and the government simply enact our rule. We elect it, we pay for it, and therefore it simply does what we elected and paid for it to do.
I'm not sure what makes up that difference, but it could be the bi-partisanery. It's a shame too, because it often fails to capture fine grain requirements. Like say I wanted a very liberal economy, while keeping gun rights strong and conservative norms in place? Or the other way around? There's no kind of choice like that. So you lysine end up for choosing based on your top issue only.
East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Maoist Guangzhou and Unregulated Hong Kong. Time and time again it has been shown that a large collectivist state does not deliver on any of its promises, but instead creates poverty and misery.
Now social democratic states can be relatively effective with a smaller population, and when administered by efficient, civic minded and hard-working people. The US Federal Government does not qualify.
It ignores the vast majority of history with no functional government, no taxes, and free markets such as say, 3000BC in Moscow --- take your pick. Was there technological advancements, well maintained cities, and a prosperous middle class of entrepreneurs and innovators in societies free of coercion? Where were the emergent social orders which arose as an inherent stochastic process from individual capital pursuit in say, 600AD in Berlin?
These only started happening after the rise of civic society and only in places with well-organized, democratically run institutions.
These apologists also choose to ignore any counter evidence.
There's over twice as many doctors per 1,000 people in Cuba than the US, however those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about how decrease in things like open sewage, food-borne disease and other civic advancements lead to increase in longevity, those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about how there's more affordability and more equitable medical care under democratically administered health systems, those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about what Nestle has done to privatized water, what the diamond industry has done to Africa, how the market-based oil system has kept the middle east in 21st century monarchies, those facts are dismissed.
Such claims as miraculous progress due to privatization are absurdist fantasies and easily refuted without even having to bring up their abysmal failures such as Puerto Rico, Enron, Pinochet's Chile.
There's over twice as many doctors per 1,000 people in Cuba than the US, however those facts are dismissed.
And how does this effect the quality of life in Cuba? Life expectancy is the same [0]. Are working class Americans creating makeshift boats to sail to Cuba in order to benefit from the superior conditions?
When people talk about how decrease in things like open sewage, food-borne disease and other civic advancements lead to increase in longevity, those facts are dismissed.
Those are good things. Low tax, high income places tend to have these features as well, strangely enough. I recommend visiting Hong Kong or Singapore.
When people talk about how there's more affordability and more equitable medical care under democratically administered health systems, those facts are dismissed.
Those aren't facts. Those are vague hand waves.
When people talk about what Nestle has done to privatized water, what the diamond industry has done to Africa, how the market-based oil system has kept the middle east in 21st century monarchies, those facts are dismissed.
I never claimed markets were always benevolent. Simply that they tend towards more prosperity than collectivism. Also none of what you pointed to is particularly free of state involvement - states are all complicit.
You can "cherry pick" the worst examples of what corporations have done all you like, they pale into comparison to the cherry pickings of the worst thing public institutions like states have done (famines, genocides, world wars).
Such claims as miraculous progress due to privatization are absurdist fantasies and easily refuted.
And yet you have failed to do so.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Part of the problem is that we keep electing people that want to destroy government instead of people that want to make government work better.
> East and West Germany
In your analysis does West Germany qualify as an example of glorious free market or as a social democratic state that is too small to serve as a good example?
What didibus said applies to almost every developed country in the world, there are definitely those ideas towards government in Germany (including West Germany before reunification), Japan, and the UK. In most developed countries, you would be hard-pushed to find any party which followed attitudes you might describe as 'starve the beast', 'the best government is the least government' and so on. Even the most conservative parties in those countries in general do not think like that.
As a counterpoint, US is only #8 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
I could have a broader discussion on taxation if you want, but I find it's important to establish, and agree, upon a number of facts before those can start being productive. It's a long haul conversation.
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&ser...
By the end of that time period the US had become a much more powerful country, but the average person was not significantly more wealthy compared to those in other developed countries than they were at the start. Which would lead me to think the difference is mostly down to other factors - for instance natural resources, mining, timber, agriculture etc and also cheap plentiful land for house-building, the only industrial nation left standing after WWII, etc.
a) Pure Communism. The state builds the roads. The state needs road workers and workers need food so the state grows food. The workers need steamrollers so the state manufactures steamrollers. The workers need asphalt so the state mines gravel. The entire economy is centrally planned and collapses like the USSR.
b) Pure Capitalism. A private company owns the road. You need their permission to leave your house, take deliveries, receive an ambulance, connect to the power grid, etc. They charge what the market will bear. Everyone becomes a serf of the road company.
c) Capitalist Social Democracy. The state collects taxes and takes bids for private contractors to build the roads, which the state then owns and allows all people to use at no charge.
Only one of those actually works.
Tolls have the pricing wrong. There is no unit cost so the problem is apportioning the fixed cost. A platinum mine clearly derives more profit from the road than a potato farmer, so why should we charge per truck (tolls) rather than per dollar of profit (taxes)? All that does is price low-profit (i.e. more efficient) enterprises out of the market, which is exactly what we don't want.
In addition to that we already have a tax collection infrastructure which is not going away, but collecting tolls would require a redundant toll collection infrastructure on top of that.
Congestion tolls are the rich man's way of getting the government to build enough infrastructure for them without having to pay for enough infrastructure for everybody.
If there is congestion it's either because you don't have enough roads or because you don't have good enough mass transit which is dumping the load it should be carrying onto the roads.
Your point about the rich getting infrastructure seems like a non sequitur here. It's voters' job to get their representatives to build enough infrastructure, not just the rich.
I agree that congestion tolls are somewhat regressive, but the solution is to have a progressive tax system, not to avoid efficiency taxes.
You also have the inefficiency of destroying demand outright. Some people will just stay home.
It also seems like the presence of congestion would already be diverting traffic to less busy times, because nobody wants to sit in traffic. So there is not a lot of low-hanging fruit there.
And if you want to shift demand to mass transit through pricing, instead of making the roads more expensive, make mass transit less expensive. Then you don't need a toll collection infrastructure for roads and may even be able to eliminate the fare collection infrastructure for mass transit.
> In a lot of jurisdictions it's essentially impossible to build enough road so there is zero traffic, because buildings can grow upwards but roads cannot.
Sure they can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Bridge
But high density cities are the obvious case for mass transit improvements.
> Your point about the rich getting infrastructure seems like a non sequitur here. It's voters' job to get their representatives to build enough infrastructure, not just the rich.
The point is that congestion pricing benefits the rich over the poor, as compared with alternatives like funding another bus or subway line via taxes, or reducing/eliminating fares. Which voters care about when deciding what to get their representatives to do.
> I agree that congestion tolls are somewhat regressive, but the solution is to have a progressive tax system, not to avoid efficiency taxes.
It's politically a lot easier to not impose regressive fees than to impose them and then try to balance it by transferring more money to low/middle income people who are already paying negative effective tax rates.
All the other arguments apply equally well to other consumables that are normally priced, like food and energy. Consumption taxes are inherently regressive, and poor people consume more of their income than their rich, but the solution is not to simply price consumables at $0.
IMO, the burden should be to show why roads are such a special good that they should always be free, regardless of externalities.
You're right that mass transit should be a part of the equation. Singapore is a city where this works well -- mass transit is (relatively) cheap, universal, and efficient. Car ownership is ridiculously expensive due to taxes, and congestion pricing is high (around $15 at rush hour) [1]. This prices road travel appropriately, as a luxury good in a dense and crowded metropolis, and pushes all normal transportation needs onto mass transit.
They're special because essentially the entire cost is the construction cost. If you want another loaf of bread then the farmer has to grow more wheat. It has a unit cost.
If you want to drive on the road then either the road capacity already exists or it doesn't and your choice of whether to drive doesn't change that. If you decide to stay home it doesn't save the government money. It's having the ability to drive on the road that costs money, not exercising it once the road is already there.
What congestion pricing does is suppress demand, i.e. to remove the (economic) ability of some people to drive, which can reduce the need for transportation capacity. But we don't want to suppress demand. Demand is good. People going out and participating in the community and the local economy is good. It might be better that people use mass transit than drive cars, but the way to achieve that isn't to make driving worse, it's to make mass transit better -- to stimulate demand rather than suppress it.
The apparent appeal of congestion pricing is that it nominally generates revenue, as opposed to improving or subsidizing mass transit which nominally consumes revenue. But in practice the result is the opposite because suppressing rather than stimulating demand for local transportation would mean there is less activity in the local economy.
Congestion also happens because the market is distorted and decisions have not been made to build quality, affordable, housing near the jobs that workers have. (Which reduces the need for commuting at all.)
> Congestion also happens because the market is distorted and decisions have not been made to build quality, affordable, housing near the jobs that workers have. (Which reduces the need for commuting at all.)
You are entirely correct. Building more housing near where the jobs are is an excellent alternative.
"C" is what leads to things like corporate bail outs.
Parenti talked about this with Conrail in the 80s. It was a train system that was put in public trust because it couldn't make money in the 70s. Then after the public made it profitable, under Reagan, it was reprivatized - not because it didn't work, but because it did work.
"C" goes beyond this in corruption. You get "compromises" where you have private health-care paid by public taxes (obamacare) or medicare part D with prescriptions being covered but the government forbidden from negotiating the prices. Or you get private for-profit schools able to use government loans for tuition and getting to the corrupt state of affairs we have now.
No, "C" is a terrible idea because it's a giant funnel into the hand of corrupt bank accounts - it promotes the state to prop up forms of dysfunctional capitalism.
In fact if you look at the total tax burden by country, including state tax and other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates) You see that the US is higher than places like Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands - way above France and the UK. We pay more and get less, and it's all because of "C".
For instance, arguably schools are primarily for education. So increasing the access to and quality of education is probably a decent goal.
For profit systems certainly have increased the access to, but arguably deceased the quality of, and arguably education is only incidental to the true project, which is profit.^1
It's this problem, where we entrust civic needs in private hands and hope the needs are satisfied incidentally.
The problem with communism is that it's somewhat the same thing. Instead of economic capital, they fight for political capital using a similar perversion of incentives.
I don't think there exists a Grand Unified Equation that works for all civic needs and I don't think that the best answers already exist.
Instead, I think it should be openly and honestly researched like all other sciences and leave the sportsmanship and team cheering world it currently occupies.
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[1] For-Profit schools may have their place. I don't know much about auto mechanics or plumbing, but I can imagine a certified for-profit program would be a fine way to do this. I can also imagine them cutting costs, paying off inspections, and passing everyone so nobody stops paying the tuition. The goal is to not make ripping people off and cheating them out of an education such a profitable and incentivized thing to do.
The thing you're really criticizing is government corruption. A corrupt government will screw you no matter its ideology.
It is the exploitation of government that is inherently corrupt and the exploiter who is the corrupter. The commingling of such interest leads to the pursuit of private profit in the name of the public trust.
The calls for less government are constantly in the name of removing the watchdogs and observers, the enforcers and regulators - the only counterbalance to this incestuous relationship.
They call for a removal of oversight to alleviate corruption and a forfeiture of authority and action to increase responsibility.
The only perplexing thing is how so many continue to be startled and bewildered by the direct consequential policies of encouraging such statecraft.
b) dramatized perhaps but ok
c) layers on ridiculous rule after rules, hands out contracts then only to those than can afford to abide all the rules (conveniently they're also related or friends with those people), which is started layering on after its propaganda engine convinced the public it was to prevent government doing a bad job of spending their taxes. Then fast fwd to 2016 and wealth inequality has gotten so bad the whole thing looks rather untenable without a serious rethink
Which one is workable again?
Is it? These things were predicted long as a consequence of state socialism long before the USSR existed, and we still don't learn our lessons (venezuela)
Yet the "greatest reduction in both poverty and mortality" is a relatively recent phenomena happening during the rise of publicly accountable civic institutions. [1]
To then attribute this with something that did not lead to this process in the first 69,800 or so years is, in my opinion, pretty poor logic.
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[1] In fact, in Africa the greatest rise came after the decolonization post-ww2 and the establishment of states and representative governments. To say the predecessor extractive industries under colonialism weren't "capitalist" is also, quite incorrect.
I tend to belive it was more the morals of the age of enlightenment and the progress in modern science, which was probably accentuated by those same morals which caused all that. And today, I see a move away from those morals, which is a little alarming I think. But I'd similarly would need to come up with a pretty good proof for all that, as nothing is obvious when so many variables are at play.
In the case of science, this is the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" that is often talked about today, but really coincided with the enlightenment. Scientific ideas compete in the literature for dominance, and that grow the most acceptance over time eventually dominate. Both Newton's calculus and gravitational theories proved to be subject to quite a bit of criticism (from Gottfried Leibniz and Robert Hooke, respectively), and of course Newton's gravitational theory has become dominant, though I have heard that the calculus we learn today is closer to that of Leibniz than that of Newton. Likewise, Darwin's theory of natural selection was subject to intense a persistent criticism for nearly 100 years -- Darwin's Theory of Natural selection was published in 1856 and the Scopes trial was not decided until 1925, and the Supreme Court only struck down laws outlawing teaching of evolution in 1968. Today, of course, countless scientific theories are competing for dominance in the scientific literature across the world -- a process that has been fundamental to the monumental scientific gains we have made since the time of Newton.
Likewise, secular theories of morality have been almost entirely emergent in nature. Adam Smith first proposed that morality was the consequence of compassion, learned by each of us as we grow up and figure out that making others happy makes us happy, and seeing misery makes us unhappy (he called this "mutual sympathy of sentiments"). He claimed that as we grow, each of us comes up with our own moral code based on what we discover to cause mutual sympathy of sentiments, and that society's moral sense is derived from each of our individual moral codes. In fact, Adam Smith first used the term "the Invisible Hand" in his "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" to describe how societal morality is derived from individual moral codes. An example of this in our lifetime is the growing acceptance of lgbtq people in the west, or in the generations before us, the about face in the moral attitude towards race. Today, that arguments is carried on by the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that our sense of morality is continually moving towards acceptance and away from violence, which he attributes to commerce (which forces people to interact with each other), and centralized government, by forcing people to act as people of a court rather than as warriors -- though I might prefer the term civilized government.
That said, none of these ideas are even slightly novel. Lucretius first expounded on them in his "De Rerum Natura", and obviously the giants of classical liberalism explained them in much greater depth. Charles Darwin was brought up in the tradition of the Scottish enlightenment thinkers, and very much surrounded himself with the ideological successors to classical liberalism and, in particular, David Hume. In the economic sphere, Hayek devoted his entire life to the idea of emergent phenomenon. And lastly, most of the examples here are taken from "The Evolution of Everything" by Matt Ridley.
The thing in the US is that I don't hear anyone talking about what they're even trying to accomplish. Do citizen even agree there? Why isn't there a conversation about that?
If we had a testing function, something we all agree on that this is the outcome we all or at least the majority wants for the society we're in.
Then we'd have a way to judge how a government did, or what worked and what didn't, and we could focus on iterating and improving our output towards what we all want.
Unfortunately, I think some minority groups, often corrupt, often in power or rich, they spend a lot of money and effort to switch up the conversation away from what people want and towards what they want, and then they have massive teams working to realize their vision.
Don't try to give any benefit of the doubt to the people you disagree with on this. Don't try to see things from their perspective, and whatever you do, don't assume they have good intentions - you might just end up understanding someone else a little better and be forced to change your world view.
They receive multi-million dollar contributions from organizations whose riches were made from things like defense contracts, for-profit education and for-profit prisons.
You are advocating to what? Ignore that?
Beyond that their claims are faulty and not reflective of reality.
I used to have a facebook group where I'd take the AEI posts and dissect them. They'd do something like have two circles representing values, but the values are actually the radius of the circles ... so they are off by 3.14*r^2 in representation of the differences.
There were many other things where they would do something like float some chart so the bottom value is only 5% less than the top, and then zoom in so it covers a very small time period, and then purport it as being significant.
Literally every day. It was amazing. I went there right now, second post, comparing planets to GDP (http://9ol.es/planet.png) using inaccurate metrics of planet size and inaccurate calculations with relative mass along with depicting 3d objects as 2d... it's wildly inaccurate.
This 1000x.
This or something like it has been called the "paranoid style in american politics" as early as 50 years ago: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame...
I mean, American immigrants are literally a self-selected population of people who found their home societies chafing and restrictive enough that they were willing to migrate thousands of miles at great risk to build a new life. And this migration was repeated time and again within the US -- as each part of the country was populated, waves of Americans decided to strike out West and get out from underneath the bankers, politicians, and other elites that would take over.
I think paranoia about government will always be the flip side to wanting to be fully free and independent (whether or not that is achievable in reality).
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/welfare-...
...bombs, bailouts, bribes, bureaucratic inefficiency, lining the pockets of lobby groups, incarceration for victimless crimes, keeping cops charged with police brutality on the payroll...
I would encourage you to check the officially published breakdown of how taxes are spent - and then consider what the actual break down might look like.
People have a real cognitive dissonance when it comes to the state. I think it's hard for people to deal with the the fact that money will inevitably be taken from you under threat of force to fund things you hate, that you find wrong, or that ruins peoples lives. It's much easier to just close your eyes and think of roads, schools and libraries.
I.e. state welfare by another name.
Government jobs (and contractor jobs) are stable, pay well even for people who don't have great educational backgrounds, and companies like Lockheed know how to spread around defense dollars so it becomes a jobs program in all 50 states.
In this sense, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/electio...
I'd happily spring for a slightly more up-market model of civilization, too, so I'm one of those pretty-well-off tech guys who advocates for higher taxes on me and people like me.
People bitched, I said "quiet you +$100k yr coworkers who moved here recently after hearing how rad it is! It's rad because of these things!"
I'm happy to piss an the parade of anyone who complains about paying taxes. Especially those that benefit disproportionately, like tech workers (high tech being subsidized by the government since the industrial revolution came along).
I don't want someone else to pay for it but I want them to contribute.
The explanation for this is that people subconsciously keep note of which of their beleifs are Merit Beliefs and which Crony Beliefs.
Reagan was elected during an extreme inflationary period and it had dropped dramatically by the time he left office. Clinton started office with giant deficits and left office running a surplus.
It also dropped every year. Just so happens it dropped by more.
So if you just ask "Did inflation rise under Reagan?" A very literal answer would be "yes, repeatedly, just not overall."
So you'd balk, "That's not the spirit of the question!"
But let's switch to the spirit of the question.
Suppose you know that Volcker's anti-inflation efforts are almost certainly the most decisive factor in the decline in inflation. Suppose you also know he was appointed to control inflation by Carter. And you know that Reagan later fired him for other effects of this work. So if we're going by the spirit of the question, it appears to the individual on the street to read, "Was Reagan the President most responsible for halting the inflation of the late 70s?"
Once we're reading charitably and trying to make the question as sensible as possible, even then the answer is still probably no. The most literal or the most charitable answer is no.
But, sure, asked to put money on it, most people would give the dumb answer too, because they'd assume anyone who asked such a poor question hadn't given the issue too much thought.
Ok, ok. Postscript and time out. This is obstinate sophistry for the fun of obstinate sophistry. I wasn't of voting age in the late 70s and early 80s, and don't have a strong partisan opinion on combatting stagflation. But you could run this same sort of game on almost any one of these questions. It's not a clean world of pure facts that people are mucking up with their perceptions. It's almost all perceptions on top of everything. In fact, there's even a selection bias in the questions they pick, which have muddy expositions like this. No one just asks "Did Nixon visit China?" or "Did Johnson succeed Lincoln?" Uncomplicated facts are uncomplicated. Complicated facts only appear simple when you're giving the standard answer.
> It also dropped every year.
What does this mean? Are you just making a pedantic point that some months had higher inflation rates than others or am I missing something?
I'd argue the comment gets better as you go along, maybe skip to the postscript. But I'm biased, YMMV.
As for the facts, this shows up with clear cut and simple examples. Does economic theory say that raising minimum wages increases unemployment? Was Obama born in the USA? Do Democrats by and large care more about black deaths than white ones? Were weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq?
Large fractions of people will answer these along partisan lines. The actual answers are yes, yes, yes, and no. (The most controversial being the third. See the description of the "kill whitey" experiments at https://www.wired.com/2010/09/kill-whitey-its-the-right-thin... for verification.)
People really filter information through their biases and come up with beliefs that are more based on ideology than reality.
Huh, I don't. If I ask you if you got out of bed yesterday, I don't care whether you are currently in bed or not. I'm asking if you rose at all. On economics, if I ask you if there was mass unemployment during the 30s, I don't mean "only in 1939."
On WMDs, well, here we go again. Sarin tipped missiles were found in Iraq according to intelligence declassified in 2015:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-...
Before that, in a hearing at the HASC in 2006, regarding weapons found in Iraq during the war in various states of functioning, Army Col. John Chu reported, "These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes ... they do constitute weapons of mass destruction."
http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918
More from WIRED:
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...
On the minimum wage, I know what you're getting at, but I'm sure Card and Krueger would quibble with the phrasing of the question, arguing that they also have an economic theory with different results.
I think you're exaggerating what is clear cut and what's not to support your own bias that the world is comprised of simple uncomplicated facts, and people are either wrong or right. The more charitable explanation is that most issues belie significant nuance.
Not every issue, to be sure. Obama was born in the US. Rain is wet. But a lot of these studies cherry pick issues of controversy that are issues of controversy precisely because they hide layers of nuance that some people want to pretend isn't there at all.
The Iraq WMDs though... we just have HASC testimony on the record saying it's true, I don't know where you're coming from on that one. ;)
Whatever it was, it's nice of the administration to dig up some old missiles from the last war for us skeptics. Because when you're getting fucked, it's nice to get a little reach-around.
Of all the math classes I've taken, Dimensional Analysis remains the one I'd most like to see forced on every highschooler. Units matter. Unlike quantities cannot be trivially compared.
You could argue that "the debt is the integral of the deficit" is equivalent to "the deficit is the derivative of the debt" but in that case, I could construct a well-defined quantity which is the definite integral of the debt starting from the year, 1800 and the deficit would then be the fourth derivative of that quantity.
This paper argues that voting for social reasons ("this result will benefit society") is sensible even in large elections. The value depends on the percent turnout, but not on population size.
Interestingly, fontback's hypothesis is exactly how they modeled the choice, with a financial incentive plus some "psychological incentive"
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in voting for the candidate that rationally maximizes the Good, for some subjective measure of the good. These are the 'social preferences' Gellman talks about.
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in the tribe, and they want to vote for the people like them and around them to fit in, especially so they won't be confused with the Enemy.
Pretty much everyone has both tendencies, which are inherently in tension. This is cognitive dissonance. People don't like experiencing this, so they end up choosing to believe both in tribal politics and that their tribe is the rational one, which is the most convenient way to cut that Gordian knot.
Now, we can debate which tribe is more rational. I think currently in the USA the blue tribe has more people motivated by the desire to be seen as rational. Then again, we'd also predict that's what everyone thinks. So probably that debate wouldn't be productive.
This experiment is useful because it tells us that money is a very useful way to cut through the bullshit of tribal beliefs. It also might give us hints as to how to design our electoral system to tend toward more rational options.
And in addition, the more and more fiercely we tribally associate, the less and less we want to do with the other tribes. This has gone to the extent that certain fields of employment, or even fields of science are largely owned on tribal lines.
Conservatives largely outnumber liberals in fields like agriculture, while liberals dominate social sciences. This sounds fine, but peer review demands cultural diversity as well, or our own cognitive bias imparts blind-spots on the work. The only fix for those blind spots is cultural diversity, and the only way people can be happy with that cultural diversity is to re-tie their Gordian knots and learn to accept other people as other people, and not the devil monsters we tend to equate them as today.
The current extreme polarization in the US is new and fairly unusual, in historical terms. It could be an inevitable phase that other counties will reach too, or it could just be a random artifact of the US's history and political system. Very few countries have a voting system that locks in the main two parties as strongly as the US, for example.
The idea that all politics is purely about tribal identity, and that "rationality" is a myth, would seem to suggest that we've never made any real social advances. But I'd count things like the outlawing of slavery as advances.
It reminds me of the extreme view of social structures in science (which Thomas Kuhn subscribed to, if I remember right), that all scientific "advances" and "revolutions" are just changes in fashion as one generation of scientists succeeds another. But each advance does in fact get us closer to the truth, even if we never quite reach it.
Without getting into the whys and wherefores, my main concern is that as we eliminate some forms of tribal clustering (ethnic, gender, class, etc.) we are simply replacing them with other forms, namely political affiliation or wedge issues. Particularly, I'm concerned with tribal clustering on wedge issues that don't affect the quality of work a person might do.
If you truly believe that one candidate is a lizard-person, the rational thing is to vote against them. When everyone you know and trust also believes in lizard-people, and you are unable to test for yourself, the rational person also believes. The answer to the problem is accuracy in facts, a wider dissemination of reality. The rest will follow.
The problem (according to Caplan) is that voters don't learn how society works and how different policies would affect it. So they support policies that sound good to the uninformed.
And here we are :)
It's too simplistic to put the entire blame on voters - I don't think the US has a monopoly on "low information"/uninformed/apathetic voters when compared to other OECD nations.
Surely different social expectations on the issues squeezing the middle class (health/child/education costs), a different (more partisan?) media landscape, geographic size, a polarized judicial system (who weigh in on the "culture wars", campaign financing, war against drugs etc), and deeply entrenched financial interests have some significant influence upon our elected officials.
The cost of becoming an expert in society, economics, etc is vastly bigger than the benefit you can expect to get out of it.
...in national elections. Federal systems are designed with this in mind. In recent decades, more and more issues have become national issues, which erodes the influence of the individual voter. And, on top of that, if the power of the vote is ineffective, you can always move in a federal system. So the erosion of choice is compounded.
Big organizations are the only entities that can compete on a national scale, but your actions absolutely can matter more locally. That's a strong reason to favor more local government, IMO.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-...
Frankly, I doubt most participants understood the payments guidance about what amount correct answers would earn them.
This could imply just putting a paragraph of confusing words with dollar signs mixed in before asking questions might also diminish political partisan bias in responses.
In this particular case the money was a proxy which was more powerful than words meant to say 'your answer is important' or 'your vote counts'. It's actually hard for me to put in words this concept but intuitively it is what seems is happening.
Ok so let's take as an example upvote/downvotes on HN. Many of us give little thought to the impact and do it impulsively at least in some cases. Now let's pretend we know there is an impact, even minor, financially. We will pay more attention and I feel at least be more likely to carefully consider voting in either direction.
Remember with money also people tend to not want to be wasteful it doesn't feel good. Nobody takes even pennies and throws them in the trashcan.
And yet they should. https://what-if.xkcd.com/22/
If you spend more than 3.6 seconds actively thinking about a penny, you value your time at less than $10/h. This comment is unfortunately self-referrential. Oops
Ok here is an example. Let's say that your home that you are paying a mortgage on offers a 5% increase in value per year (totally made that up) vs. putting the money in a money market that pays 6% per year (definitely totally made that up). On the surface the money market is a much better return let's stipulate and observe. After all you have liquidity and I will even further assume that the 6% is guaranteed. But wait a second. If the money is tied up in a house you can't spend it. In the money market you can. So the house is forced savings and in the end you might very well end up with more, all else equal.
I say this as someone who just took cash that I had and bought a sort of expensive car by the way. Realizing that if I had the money in more real estate (which I also own) I most likely wouldn't have bought the car (since I don't like to finance or lease even though in theory it can make more sense financially).
And I don't think it works with pennies. Pennies are heavy and not worth much. You need a 100 of them to get $1. That's a lot of coins. For $100 you'd need 10,000 coins and that's going to start taking significant space.[1]
There's a reason people don't use pennies a lot.
As described in the book, system 1 is effortless and automatic; it produces the first thought to come to mind when attempting to answer a question. It is good at pattern matching and associative memory. However, when faced with a difficult question, often times the best it is capable of is to answer a different, easier question instead.
System 2, on the other hand, is the source of effortful, logical thought. It requires deliberate effort to engage and because of this is often described as "lazy". In everyday experience, we rely on system 1 most of the time, and most of the time that works well and is sufficient. An example is reading: an experienced reader rarely needs to sound out the individual letters of each word, instead perceiving entire words and phrases at once; that's system 1 at work.
Now, if you ask someone to answer an objective question that has a partisan aspect to it, system 1 will immediately provide an answer (without you even asking it to, and regardless of whether system 1 is actually capable of providing an accurate answer). In this case, it's likely that system 1 is actually answering a question which is superficially similar to but not the same as the one that was asked (e.g., "is this my tribe" instead of "did deficits increase or decrease during the Clinton administration").
At this point, unless a person chooses to engage system 2, they are likely to accept the only answer at hand, the one suggested by system 1. The possibility of receiving a payment for an objectively accurate answer provides motivation for engaging system 2.
If they aren't paying me, I'm more likely to say what I really think.
Example: Someone close to me thinks the Detroit Lions are the best football team.
Even for Midwest football: http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/21/qje.q...
It was probably a beneficial trait when the Dunbar number roughly matched the number of people with in a day's communication.
That is: If I ask you what's 3x3, for you to know that the answer that I want is 9, then you must know the truth.
But I suppose there is some room for nuance. Like, take asking this question: "Has a human walked on the surface of the moon?"
Let's suppose that Alfred answers that question with "No."
Then you offer to pay Alfred if he answers the question correctly, and he changes his answer to "Yes."
So, does Alfred actually know that people walked on the moon, and before he was just trolling or trying to get into the in-crowd of moon-landing deniers? Or is it that Alfred actually, sincerely believes that the moon-landing was a fake, but he knows that you likely believe that the moon-landing was real, and wants the payment?
Here's my logic:
I'm talking to Alfred, moon-landing-truther. Alfred, I feel, is open in telling me how it works. He knows that I believe that the moon landing is real. He acknowledges that there is reason for me to believe that it is real -- he understands the conventional narrative. He explicitly argues his own (crazy) counter-narrative that subsumes the conventional narrative, reinterpreting the facts that I use.
I've never heard anyone articulate a conspiracy theory around the example questions this study gave. Nobody has ever said to me -- not even online -- "Sure, it appears that inflation decreased during Reagan, but actually, here's the reason why that's a lie," nor "Sure, it appears that the deficit shrank during Clinton, but that's a lie."
The closest that I've heard is two things:
1. A general belief that the media or the establishment lie or shill for Team X, without specifics.
2. Not on "inflation during Reagan" or "deficit during Clinton," but I do sometimes hear conspiracy theories that inflation is not actually currently low because the way that they calculate it and handle new inventions is a cheat, or that unemployment is not actually currently low because the proper measurement of unemployment is workforce participation.
and
Ecclesiastes 1:2 - All is vanity
"I think want me to say the unemployment rate is X, so I'll select that, but I believe the unemployment rate is actually Y"
When the media is just the media, no longer the mainstream media, but just the media with just another (biased) agenda and world-view that is no better than any others, they end up acting like spoiled children. I hope HNners are smart enough to realize that all medias are biased in some ways (some more than others) and that fake news/post truth are just another political term (unless you are talking about the spam that floated on Facebook with completely fake headlines, not justified by the content).
Claims that the U-1 is falsified/manipulated for political purposes, or that the "real unemployment rate" is actually much higher than even the U-6, are much more clearly false.
It's like a random organization asking you if Climate Change is a hoax, for which you know nothing about their bias.
apparently there are 6 different numbers... http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/07/unemployment-rate-shows-at-5-...
So, when they ask which one are they talking about?
It's a red herring because the question itself was a rate of change over time, for which the answer is given in a 1.0% range. Irregardless of whether you focus on U-5 (the reported statistic) or U-6 (the denier's statistic), it's still only about a -0.2% and +0.1% change, respectively.
Even if you did the math on U-5, you would still get the answer right for every of the 6 numbers.
For instance, there are official measurements of debt, deficit, and inflation. But some might believe that unfunded liabilities are debt, or that inflation is higher than the official number.
Assuming that's true, how could we use that effect for, say, good?
So if you were to ask someone in a survey for their opinion, they might respond according to their preferred level of nuance on the politically charged topic, throwing a monkey wrench if the underlying presumption of the question is overly simplistic. They might provide a contrarian response because they see the question as loaded, as in "Did you stop beating your wife?"
An incentive though turns the game into a Keynesian beauty contest, and makes people fall back on the perceived popular answer, even if they don't think it's right.
* All the examples of this are incredibly fraught and risk sidetracking the entire discussion. Kindly only read these if you can charitably look for the meta-rhetorical point. But imagine:
Did Trump support the war in Iraq? Depends on whether a half-hearted 'yes' on Howard Stern really counts.
Did Bill Clinton lower the deficit? Depends on how much you believe the Republican House forced his hand and was the real actor.
Did Reagan end the cold war? Depends on how much you want to credit internal political factors or the role of Gorbachev.
Were WMDs found in Iraq? Depends on whether you count sarin-tipped warheads found in 2005, seed material found at Tuwaitha, or if you're referring exclusively to the Hans Blix UN investigations or assembled nuclear munitions.
The study designers tried to use careful phrasing to avoid some of these problems. Even so, there are some questionable ones. "Did inflation rise under Reagan?" Of course it did! At least once every year! Just not overall...
a) Most beach house owners are GW deniers. b) Most beach house owners have strong confidence of the future government. c) Most beach house owners are extremely rich so they don't care.
How about those who are GW believers, and seriously think it is critical timing for action rightnow, and have uncertainty about future government, and are not extremely rich. Are they selling houses and moving to inland?
I think it is a pretty good test of how many people seriously believe GW. Do not tell me the incentive of home value is not strong enough.
Why do millions of Americans still smoke cigarettes? Do most smokers have awesome health plans and optimism about medical research so they assume that cancer treatment will be pleasant and affordable in the future? I think it's a pretty good test of how many people seriously believe cigarettes are carcinogenic. Do not tell me the incentive of a miserable premature death is not strong enough.
My question is why don't we see massive sell of beach houses. My question is NOT why there are still people not selling their beach houses.
> 14. How many Supreme Court justices are there?
:(
"This paper reports results from two novel experiments designed to distinguish sincere from expressive partisan differences in responses to factual questions. In both experiments, all subjects were asked factual questions, but some were given financial incentives to answer correctly. ... In our second experiment, we therefore implement a treatment in which subjects were offered incentives both for correct responses and for admitting that they did not know the correct response."
> The amount paid for “don’t know” responses was also assigned randomly, and was a fraction of the amount offered for a correct response: 20% of the payment for a correct response with probability .33, 25% with probability .33, and 33% with probability .33.
Qwrusz's comment may be relevant here.
Different people, different answers. Plenty of people learn what to say at what point pretty darn early.