Education Thoughts -- Mostly banal

Re-thinking...

Education is the business of learning to copy someone else's ACTIONS.

• Learning to read = learning to translate squiggles to sounds the same way other folks do.
• Learning to play soccer = learning to do the same thing with a soccer ball and your feet that other folks do.

Certifications are an institution's promise that a person is able to DO something.

• Driver's License = state cert that person can be competent on the road.
• Math Degree = college promise that this person can do symbolic, quantitative proofs + calculus.
• Physics Degree = college promise that person can predict how the physical, non-organic world behaves at a particles + forces level.
• Engineering Degree = college promise that a person can build/calculate.
• Software Degree = promise that a person can write/design code.
• High School Diploma ?= promise that a person can do basic 'Readin 'Ritin + 'Reckonin
• Philosophy Degree = promise that a person can evaluate arguments + recite (some important) historical philosophers' arguments
• Art Degree = promise that a person can create art in at least one medium
• Most Sciences = promise that a person can USE historical results from the science appropriately.

And the controversial one

• Liberal Arts Degree = promise that the person qualifies for admission in polite, liberal society. Finishing school for liberals.

Assuming your conclusions

I read the Economist Blog Democracy in America mostly because that's the only place I seem to be able to get my regular dose of Will Wilkinson...it's where he blogs most of the time now. On the other hand...the other folks writing there are largely infuriating. This most recent post, by one M.S. nominally responding to Will Wilkinson fails on the logic rather spectacularly...mostly by means of the error which is the title of the post. Here's the front part of the final paragraph:

It's one thing to argue that taxes are too high, or are too high for some group of earners or for some type of economic activity. But I feel that a broad libertarian claim that "taxation is coercive" is an attempt to legitimise refusal to play by the rules, and to delegitimise the exercise of state authority. The existence of the state involves a certain level of coercion to enforce the law. But the existence of the state is a good thing, both because it provides the infrastructure of a prosperous, safe and fair society, and because it enforces property claims such as deciding who has stolen whose lawn gnome

Translation:

Because taxation is legitimate, then these libertarians arguing that taxation is coercive are attempting to cheat.

Something fishy there?

Reason catches up to Aretae

Big article talking political positions via Jon Haidt psychology of ethics. HT: Patri

Natural Authority Consequences

So...what does the libertarian (as Matt points out, it's not all libertarians) disbelief in authority amount to?

If Oscar the observer believes that Boss Bob has moral authority over Worker Willy...then Oscar will be relatively accepting of Boss Bob using force (threats, rods no larger than your thumb, guns) in order to compel Willy to do what Bob asks. Ditto Husband Herbert and Wife Wilma, White William and Black Bart, or Parent Pauline and Child Chuckie.

If Oscar does not believe that Boss Bob has moral authority over Worker Willy (nor vice versa), then Oscar will find Bob's unilateral force against Willy to be exactly as repugnant as Willy's unilateral force against Bob.

A father slapping a child is EXACTLY as repugnant as a child slapping the father. White/black the same. Worker/boss the same. Husband/wife the same.

This is the notion of moral authority. If one does not believe in moral authority...then all the exercise of authority is vile and depraved: the practitioners are morally odious.

If one does believe in moral authority...one can still be libertarian by rejecting the notion that the government constitutes a moral authority. A government agent exerting force against a citizen could then be equivalent to a teen attempting to attack his own father...which to the person who buys the moral authority line...is really bad juju.

As far as I can tell we've got 3 choices.

1. It's morally acceptable that the strong enforce their preferences on others with violence.

2. It's morally acceptable that the strong enforce their preferences with violence if I like the preferences.

3. It's not morally acceptable that the strong enforce their preferences with violence.

I count many/most pre-modern societies as holding something awful close to 1.

I count effectively all liberals, conservatives as holding #2.

The formalists seem to be saying "assume that the strong will enforce their preferences on others with violence, and ignore the moral question...now what"

Anarchists, Left-libertarians, and TCS-ers hold to #3.

The standard libertarian holds a position somewhere between #2 and #3. And just to note the other side...it's non-obvious (a priori anyhow -- a posteriori it's a slam dunk) that property rights are more than preferences.

The Habit Theory of Practice

I've been pushing practice as the be-all end-all of learning for quite a while now. I am not sure I've gotten the full explanation well stated.

Learning is the business of moving stuff from undoable to competent excellence. Undoable to automatic, though, is a multi-step process.

1. You learn steps to do in a conscious fashion.
2. You push those now learned steps to unconscious/automatic activity via practice.
3. Now that you're expert and automatic at the process, you BEGIN to use feedback systems to get actually good.

Step one is IQ-sensitive. Step 2 isn't really. Many teachers never get to see step 2...because their courses are not long enough to see the student escape from the conscious activity. And #3...the point at which experitse or mastery happens....that one is the domain of coaches and Lean Production systems.

Effectively...the habit theory of practice (my words) suggests that the steps from 1 to 2 are the essential component of learning. Moving a skill from learned to automatic is the interesting part. Or as last years QOTY says:

Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong. Because if you practice long enough, you'll realize something important about the thing you thought you already understood.

The easiest way to understand this is to recognize that habit is the key factor in learning. What is habitual is the essential part for any real life application outside of school. What you CAN do is not important to a 95% certainty. On the other hand, what you actually do...which is almost certainly what you automatically do is very important.

Great Eastern Insight

The Great Eastern Insight is what I term a common idea for most or all eastern religions.

Basically: The "self" is a self-constructed illusion...and attachment to this illusion is the source of most of your unhappiness. It's important to also keep in mind that they've (without ever saying this) incorporated the habit theory of practice as well.

This is not to say that you should (or can) abandon the habits you've created. Just that the conscious attachment to protecting the self is the problem.

"I'm not the kind of person who" is the sentence that is the cause of all your unhappiness.

Doing X because it's habitual, on the other hand, is a good thing, provided you've got good habits.

Indeed...it's worth thinking about that one might be able to consider a person to be primarily two-faceted. Un/sub-conscious habits of behavior/reaction, and conscious behaviors one takes in order to protect the self. If one can build good habits of mind, then the "self" truly is the enemy.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Arnold Kling is one of my favorite bloggers. He writes in a highly reality-based fashion...with relatively light ideological blinders on. However, in this last article, he's missed the key point by several inches. Arnold writes:

The libertarian perspective is to divide these organizations into those that thrive on the basis of voluntary transactions and those that thrive on threats and intimidation. In general, governments and criminal gangs fall on the "bad" side of the line and corporations fall on the "good" side.

In contrast, I think many people think that certain organizations are inhabited by good spirits and others are inhabited by evil spirits. One particular viewpoint is that good spirits inhabit labor unions, the Democratic Party, crusading lawyers and regulators, etc., while bad spirits inhabit the Republican Party, fundamentalist churches, criminal gangs, and corporations.

This is halfway to correct. But he's forgotten a key point. Politics is NOT about policy. Politics, for 99.9% of the population, and 98% of the punditocracy is effectively a spectator sport. There is MY team, and the other team. Has nothing to do with good spirits...has to do with simple, basic, core human morality. My team is good, and the other team is bad. Leftists think the regulators are good and the corporations are bad. Many conservatives think that the corporations are good, and the regulators are bad. But it's almost all a my-team, your-team thing.

I love most the folks who are not participants in the politics-as-sports game. Folks who disagree with "their side" as much or more than they disagree with "the other side"...folks (like me) who are not normal enough to treat politics, or debate as it's meant to be: like a Jets vs. Steelers game.

Links

• Less Wrong tells reminds us of one of my favorite truths. Statistical prediction by machines average more accurate than that of the best experts. Far more interestingly, they also point to a historical result on statistical prediction of marriage happiness. Sex-fights = happiness. Strikingly accurate.
• IWANL sends us to this article on College being low value. Illka sends us to Sippican Cottage, which comments more intelligently. Summary: If you study alone, study diligently, and study something useful, college is valuable. If you are a normal student who doesn't, it's not. Some people might suggest that this means that practice is the whole deal in learning, even at a college level.
• Borepatch rounds up the I am TJIC support team. Of course, if anyone were even marginally thoughtful, rather than being powerhungry bastards...their reading TJIC's discussion of why it's not time to start shooting:

  So, the proposed question was “answer the damn question, TJIC: do you endorse a revolution right here and now in 2011?”, and my answer is “no, I do not endorse shooting at politicians in 2011″.

  Pretty clear position, pretty obvious on the blog. Not dangerous at all. Of course, his blog is down now, so I can't link it.
• Glenn Greenwald is a very interesting counterpoint to the formalists...a non-institutional leftist who is upset that there isn't any actual leftism on the institutional left outside their rhetoric. Obama has adopted all of Dick Cheney's terrorism policies to a point that Cheney praises Obama on terrorism.
• Hanson: Reality >> Rhetoric. That's not how he says it at all. Talk is cheap...and consequences are the key. Specifically, argument is not real useful...and some kinds (Conceptual analysis) are even less so.
• UPDATE: Assortive mating FTW. Tyler Cowen links to this abstract: " In the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points (r = .381), whereas in the United States, the correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is somewhat smaller (r = .126)."

BBdM and Leopold

One of BBdM's inspirations for his theory is King Leopold II of Belgium and the Congo...

In the case of Belgium, Leopold, constrained by a strong, large selectorate behaved in as enlightened a fashion as one could hope for in a Monarch. Assume a near-infinite list of how cool he was. In the case of the Belgian Congo, Leopold was unconstrained by any real selectorate, and proceeded to rape the country and brutalize the people. From the undisputed parts of Wikipedia:

"His harsh regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of millions of people"

I count this as standard monarch behavior. If constrained by strong oppositional forces that encourage the monarch to benefit the people (large selectorate) then he is likely to be well behaved and effective. If unconstrained, or minimally constrained by a small selectorate, he will be effectively a monster.

Responsible Left

Borepatch asks what an intellectually responsible left would look like. While his answer is good, I'd like to draw your attention again to Scott Sumner from yesterday.

Fact is, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew was a leftist. He began his career as a socialist...but then learned something of economics. Denmark is entirely a social democracy, hardcore democratic, and even harder core leftist...and yet they have free-er market policies almost across the board (except tax rate) than the USA. Ditto New Zealand. If you want a responsible leftist vision...that's what you need. Of course, that only works in small countries where folks are actually pulling for the best interests of the country....not for the best interest of the bankers, as per the standard public choice answer in a non-responsive, hugely populous indirect democracy.

1 answer, and 1 answer only: devolution. If Berkeley seceded from the USA...they would probably manage a social democracy for being smart enough..and not having the ability to cannibalize others. Hell, I'd personally appoint Robert Reich fuhrer....and I bet they'd be good intentioned and intelligent...and get their leftist thing working...after some applied public choice theory.

The libertarian issue

In my discussions on authority, plus a little extra noodling, I think I've found the tipping point that makes folks libertarians.

Folks who are libertarians fundamentally do not believe in natural authority.

If you don't believe in natural authority, then the government CANNOT have any. and therefore, the government is functionally identical to the mafia. Pay up, or else. Full stop.

If you do believe in natural authority, the libertarian position looks insane. Bob, the boss, correctly has authority...and his actions are justified by his natural authority.

Contrarily, if you do not believe in the existence of justified natural authority...then the non-libertarian position looks insane. Some dude Bob has no right tell worker Willy what to do, unless it's a chosen exchange. Doesn't matter if Bob is a conqueror, a technocrat, a capitalist or a union leader. There are exactly two interactions in the world...freely chosen and thug-based. Mafia with guns and trading. Full stop.

I think it explains a lot of the miscommunication between libertarians and others.

Important posts

• Don Boudreaux quotes Wright, criticizing Keynes:

  Characteristically, Keynes deferred a statement of the basic assumptions of of his fundamental model until the eighteenth chapter of his book, where they are often overlooked. Yet everything in his model depends upon these assumptions, and I am sure that if their limited nature were more widely recognized, Keynes’ conclusion would have far less prestige. The crucial passage runs as follows:

  “We take as given the existing skill and quantity of available labour, the existing quality and quantity of available equipment, the existing technique, the degree of competition, the tastes and habits of the consumer . . . the social structure including the forces. . . which determine the distribution of the national income. This does not mean that we assume these factors to be constant; but merely that, in this place and context, we are not considering or taking into account the effects and consequences of changes in them” (italics supplied [by Wright]).

  This passage (some of the more technical sentences are omitted) assumes in effect that (i) there is no technical change or invention, (ii) there is no change in taste, (iii) there is no change in population or resources, and (iv) there are no changes in the preferences of the population between work and goods, on the one hand, and leisure, on the other. These assumptions, it will be seen, in effect “freeze” the system, and practically every dynamic element of capitalist civilization is removed. Of course, as he explains, Keynes did not mean that these forces were always lacking in reality. But what he did mean, and the point cannot be too often stressed, is that in the basic model on which his system rests, virtually all the dynamic social forces are omitted.

• Continuing in this vein, Interfluidity is brilliant, and long. He argues that standard economic models doing constrained optimization (the grad school standard) are no longer the correct model, but we should be doing a lot more in the way of iterated game theory instead:

Let’s play a game. There are two players, a space of hypothetical moves, and a set of constraints that limits acceptable moves in each round. The two players in general have different objectives: high payoff states for Player 1 are sometimes (though not always) low payoff states for Player 2. Player 1 assumes the constraint set is exogenous. Player 1 knows that the constraint set is not fixed — she has observed changes over time — but her working hypothesis is that the constraints form a martingale, which is a fancy way of saying that her best guess with respect to the shape of future constraints are present constraints. Importantly, Player 1 does not believe that future constraints are a function of present moves. Player 2, on the other hand, correctly understands the distribution of future constraints to be a function of present moves, and is also aware that Player 1 erroneously believes constraints to be exogenous. Both players choose strategies to optimize an intertemporal payoff function. How will this game work out? The answer is obvious: Given any initial conditions, Player 2 always performs better than Player 1 would have under the same conditions (in expectation). Further, Player 1 may frequently observe Player 2 acting in ways that seem irrational, sometimes mutually destructive, when Player 2 chooses a strategy that yields jointly low payoffs when strategies with jointly high payoffs are available, holding the constraint set fixed in expectation. Player 1 will compute strategies that yield an acceptable Nash equilibrium, only to watch that equilibrium fail to hold as Player 2 makes choices that are apparently suboptimal given Player 1’s available responses. Meanwhile, Player 2 will not be surprised by Player 1’s choices and will correctly optimize her unilateral welfare in a manner that is potentially costly to Player 1.

This is a huge idea that is poorly, if at all grasped by regulators. Regulation/politics is an iterated game. If you don't understand that there's folks with different positions who are playing the iterated game...you lose. See, for instance, financial markets. Anyone who makes regulations without understanding that there are folks on the other side planning to game the regulations is simply doing it wrong. Anyone who thinks that they can, in 1 move, regulate in a way that beats the iterated approach of highly paid experts is delusional. Long, worth reading.
• Kling following Sumner on Denmark. Denmark works because it's more democratic and civic minded, and decentralized than the US. The US fails because of it's size, undemocratic-ness, and centralization. Read them...especially if you're a critic of democracy.
• I like Robin Hanson's line here a lot. The reason to be an academic is not to find truth, but to defend your team against fancy arguments from the other team.
• Eric Crampton and his 2yo have similar tastes as I do about authority.

Lessons from a -- hating to lose

I saw an old friend this past weekend, that I hadn't seen in a couple years. I've recently been becoming comfortable with the position that some real portions of expertise come from being competitive, and not wanting to lose. In listening to my friend, I've become convinced that I understand the mechanism.

What happens when someone who hates losing loses? They practice. Indeed...they almost universally do EXACTLY the right kind of structured feedback-practice that is needed. When Peyton Manning misses a throw, you know that he's spending a week reading what he did right, what he did wrong, and what he can do better. Ditto Kobe Bryant, if he's shut down by an opposing player's defense. Ditto Magnus Carlsen. Ditto anyone who plays ANY competitive game. And that's what a player who is serious about winning (who dislikes losing enough) does if they lose a game of any type. PUA-style game...same thing. If you fail, you analyze, and practice. However... it's truly only the people who hate to lose who have the motivation necessary to look at their losses and upgrade their moves.

Texas vs. California

I miss Texas.

More on Amy Chua

I am particularly fond of The Last Psychiatrist's response:

I'll explain what's wrong with her thinking by asking you one simple question, and when I ask it you will know the answer immediately. Then, if you are a parent, in the very next instant your mind will rebel against this answer, it will defend itself against it-- "well, no, it's not so simple--" but I want to you to ignore this counterattack and focus on how readily, reflexively, instinctively you knew the answer to my question. Are you ready to test your soul? Here's the question: what is the point of all this? Making the kids play violin, of being an A student, all the discipline, all of this? Why is she working her kids so hard? You know the answer: college.

She is raising future college students.

RTWT.

Wealth > Liberty 2

Earlier I argued that wealth is the meta-metric...and that everything else (really, everything) is purchaseable through wealth...which justified Wealth being a stronger driver than liberty...which is opposite my natural position...and opposite my personal choices. Unfortunately, I forgot to respond to the final sentence of the ?critique? which was important to me. Here's the charge:

The problem with utilitarianism is that it potentially justifies almost any system.

And if you call a tail a leg, you can justify cutting off dogs legs. But that doesn't make cutting off dogs legs ok. And if you convince someone that 1+1=3, then you can pull all sorts of crap.

In real life, wealth is a simple, universal measure of value...convertible to anything else.

And those features that make the average person wealthier are well known. Free markets, free trade, rule of law, stable, enforced property rights, low tax rates, state out of business, creative destruction, low cost of legal access, low violence, government out of economy, educated women (doubles the number of economic participants in a country). Autocracies do less well than democracies, full representative democracies do worse than constrained democracies.

The fact that some folks lionize authoritarianism while not noting that GDP sucks is not relevant. What works is known. It worked in Singapore, and it worked in Ireland, and it is working in Botswana. China started working when China tried it, and failed until then. India still isn't working well.

There is a right answer. The fact that folks can argue about what the right answer is, and still have room to learn some other details doesn't detract from the fact that the right answer exists.

Congratulations, Kevin Carson

Kevin has won the Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing for this piece on pernicious transportation subsidies.
Rod Long adds:

I wonder which response will come first: left-conflationist attacks on Kevin or right-conflationist attacks on FEE

Wealth > Liberty

A good while back, I posted, arguing that Wealth is the hyper-metric, while liberty is merely a good. Foseti accused :-) me of being a utilitarian. The accusation reads something like this:

There's a word for someone who values happiness more than liberty - utilitarian.

Unless I'm reading this post wrong, you seem to becoming out on the utilitarian - not libertarian - side.

It's also not clear that people derive happiness from autonomy. For example, Singaporeans support their government more strongly than any "free" country.

The problem with utilitarianism is that it potentially justifies almost any system.

Several points.

1. I will assume that utilitarian is meant to separate consequentialists from deontologists. My particular brand of consequentialism is a Rand-Schmidtz derived dialect of ethical egoism...but as my other favorite philosopher says...look, in reality we all run 3 parallel ethical systems: De-ontological, Value, and Virtue. I tend to think that I lean towards virtue ethics first, value ethics second, and deontology only occasionally...but I probably misunderstand myself. I certainly argue for virtue ethics first. More here.
2. Autonomy as a factor in happiness and utility is very well established in the literature. If you don't buy it, 3:1 says you haven't looked at the substantial literature. Autonomy is a deep, strong, universal human value. Though some folks have it more than others. Yes, that screws with the formalist position somewhat...but so what...it's true, and well established.
3. Bryan Caplan has discussed Singaporean government support with Singaporeans first hand. His short, informal survey says, (a) Singaporeans vote wealth first. (b) it's more complicated. (c) elsewhere, (can't find it), he suggests that it isn't that democratic, and the preferences of the voters are not AS revealed as we would think.
4. An economics lesson. Money is the resource we use to buy stuff with. Contrary some folks repeated disparagements, new iPhones are not the only thing we do with our money when we're richer. Rather, folks with more money buy more of stuff they care about. Rich folks buy more autonomy, fewer working hours, more leisure, more knowledge, more environmental protection (clean air/water/etc.), lower crime, helping others...etc. Money is the universal currency. I (and Wilkinson) have chosen to spend our wealth in working less, and getting more Autonomy. Portlanders have chosen to pay for environmental pleasantness, and SWPL status. Everyone who goes from $3000/y to $10000/y chooses a lot of cleanliness (clean air/clean water) benefits. With $, nearly everyone buys some amount of autonomy. My preference for liberty over most other values, with a preference for wealth over liberty is not strictly a consequentialist argument. It is an argument acknowledging the true nature of money as the medium we use to buy EVERYTHING...even liberty.

Economist fail

Yesterday, I complained about the idiocy of the economist when talking about health care problems and solutions. Their next post makes the exact same mistake about education.

To recap: What makes a system good?

(a) technology, (b) new entrants (c) real competition, (d) decent incentives (e) new approaches

How does education stack up?

1. Technology for education is mildly improved since 500 BC. Not much
2. Public financing + Teachers Unions mean no real new entrants
3. Competition? Are you joking?
4. Incentives? Is this a comedy routine?
5. New approaches? Given A,B,C,D...not many

QoTD

Broadsnark brings it:

In short, if you want less rape and child molestation, you would be better off banning religion than porn.

More completely:

Great paper on porn from the University of Hawaii. The gist is that as pornography becomes more available sex crimes decrease. Most interesting info:

• rapists were more likely than non-rapists in the prison population to having been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster
• rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males
• sex offenders requesting treatment commonly disclose that pornography helps them contain their abnormal sexuality within imagination as a fantasy instead of their aggressively acting out in real life
• what does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing

Links

• Falkenstein: forecasters who successfully predict big issues predict normal behavior very poorly. I quoted this article yesterday in a different context.
• LessWrong: Rationality basics. I mostly disagree. Rationality is about doing. The other parts are an aside.
• Seth Godin: On the habit of obedience.
• Sonic Charmer: An ideal response to "Palin's not smart."
• Instapundit: Evolution says aliens are probably dangerous. Glad to see folks are catching up to Robin Hanson.
• Powerline points out how dishonest Krugman is (HT: Insty)
• Sumner points out the distinction between utility and happiness. Important.
• Tiger Mother: Katie Granju responds. Charles Murray responds. Insty responds. Foseti responds.

Free Trade

Foseti asked a question about free trade recently: Should you support "Free Trade"?

My response, from the comments:

The left libertarians, anarchists, and most of the extreme folks I know think that your conjecture is true. “Free trade” and free trade are unrelated.

Standard libertarians…and especially my favorite smart academic libertarian leaning GMU and Volokh Conspiracy types all argue that free trade agreements like NAFTA require thousands of pages in order to allow the special interests to maintain their absurd local for a little while, as a political truth. Fact is: All tariffs will decrease by 10% of 2010 values a year until 2020 at which point they will be permanently abolished doesn’t leave room for the special interests to get favors and the sugar lobby to keep the tariff on Brazilian sugar until 2025. Regardless the weakness of the sugar delay, it’s a massive positive elsewhere.

As usual, I oscillate between the moderate academic libertarians and the firebrand anarchists, and my position is in between.

But then I read Don Boudreaux, academic economist with a better explanation. Apparently the academic economist who demonstrated that it was even theoretically possible to make life better for the citizens of one country by less free trade was Paul Krugman...but even he has agreed that even though it is theoretically possible for less free trade to make people better off in some circumstances....In reality, it is effectively impossible.

Glad to know that the folks who study the topic have looked at it.

QoTD

Illka made me laugh:

If a postmodernist became mentally ill, how could you even tell?

EMH: All but proven

Falkenstein discusses the conflict between reality and sales and the futility of forecasting. These lines shine:

When I worked for an economics department, I quickly learned what a lame business we were in. Our stated purpose--to forecast the economy to allow people to make better decisions--was different than our actual purpose--to provide rationales for decisions already made, to serve as an excuse to have a get together.

A problem in this field is that accuracy spells extinction because no one wants to listen to an honest forecaster, they don't purport to know enough. Rather, listen to someone who can make you rich! In selling forecasts to the masses, honesty is a strictly dominated strategy.

Even more interesting to me, though, is Falkenstein's dismissal of the idea that someone can beat the S&P500 by a reasonable amount. His line...as a FAR more in-tune trader than anyone else you are likely reading, is that beating the market notably is a sales technique that has NOTHING to do with reality. Here's him on EMH:

I remember pitching the idea of beating the S&P by a couple percent and having lower volatility by investing in low volatility stocks. The guy in charge said, 'I have people here who can outperform the S&P by 10%!' Now, clearly he didn't, and to this day I don't know if he was so stupid to think he really believed it, but it sure sold better than the truth, and selling funds is more important than returns because due to the magic of survivorship bias the current set of funds will always be better than average

Chinese Mothers & Obedience 3

Isegoria has a fabulous post up, first summarizing the Chinese mothers discussion, then later arguing against my anti-obedience position, with perhaps the most notable add being Shannon Love of ChicagoBoyz who argues against the position as well, in a distinct fashion.

Re-summarizing:

Chua: Here's how Chinese mothers do it. It's better

Aretae: She's forcing practice and teaching the habit of obedience.

Caplan: She forgot the genes, which are most of the story...and her anecdote loses to evidence.

Love: Teamwork matters hugely to success, and Chua's kids don't get any.

Health Care Primer

M.S. at Democracy in America manages to annoy me substantially with this article responding to Will's brilliant earlier post.

Here's a primer for M.S. :

Almost everything in the world is getting better and less expensive. Why? Better technology, new entrants, real competition, proper incentives, new approaches

A few things in the world (Education, Health Care) are NOT getting both better and less expensive. Why? Lack of (a) technology, (b) new entrants (c) real competition, (d) decent incentives (e) new approaches. Indeed, one can make an argument for rate of progress in a field being based entirely on those 5 factors.

How does Health Care stack up in the USA?

A. New tech? We have some, but FAR FAR FAR less than we would in a lower-regulation environment.

B. New entrants? The AMA is as close to a midieval guild, built to prohibit new entrants, as exists in the USA...and they control the supply of new doctors.

C. Real competition? Not even. Regulatory scheme is absurd for doctors...as is the licensing requirement.

D. Decent incentives? Private first-dollar "health insurance" along with pay for procedure is among the worst incentive structures for a health system imaginable. I suppose a case where there were large side payments to doctors if you died would suck worse...but I'm not sure what else would.

E. New approaches? AMA + licensing prohibits those.

What works better? ANYTHING ELSE.

Note the price path of cosmetic surgery, lasik, and related non-insurance covered tech vs. the price path of insurance-covered system

Best system in the world?

Singapore: 4% of GDP, catastrophic insurance with the rest out of pocket from a required HSA mops the floor with everything else...and by a large margin. Consumer incentives line up right.

Next?

Kaiser Permanente/Germany: 8% of GDP...single-company hospital+insurance company. Incentives for insurance company are to provide care cheaply and effectively. No $ value to be extracted from customer, by doing extra work, or not enough work to solve problem.

Much worse?

European style single payer with rationing, government deciding who gets what work, but with the rich able to escape to free systems, and pay for the procedures they want.

Super-crappy?

Employers pay Insurance companies pay Doctors, with price signals nowhere in the picture, and no rationing either. Entrants massively restricted, both in technology, methodology, and practitioners. USA system. Inevitably broken.

Yes, I did quit a health-insurance company 3 months ago. Reason #15 on my list was that I couldn't stand being so obviously part of the problem.

/RANT

Malthus wins

If I were smart, I'd have noticed that over the last 3 years, I've learned the same lesson 3 distinct times. Isegoria (via Clark), Robin Hanson, and Arnold Kling have all taught it. Then I encapsulated into a law:

Rates Not States.

And I still don't have a solid handle on it; it still surprises me whenever I rediscover it.

Wealth (an awful good proxy for happiness) is a simple equation: Stuff/People.

However, since rates>states, that breaks down to Productivity/Population growth.

As per Romer's new growth theory, Productivity~=Tech growth, so...

The equation roughly works out to Tech growth/Population growth.

Our entire world is built on the never-before seen case of Tech growth outstripping Population growth. Our descendents' happiness will almost entirely be built on how long that can be maintained.

Robin points out that if we get uploads, that CAN'T last very long. Other folks have pointed out that in the absence of tech growth, eventually the breeders will evolutionarily outbreed the nonbreeders, so population control is no choice. Our ONLY path to happiness in the mid-range is through tech/productivity growth. And the choices we face are between a return towards poverty or more tech growth. And that's the fundamental long term question in our society. Tech growth, or poverty. Of course it's a dial...and it can be turned anywhere along the range.

(Written in response to comments chez Foseti.)

Book Review: The Predictioneer's Game

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita lays out his theory in this book. Among the best books I've read. I'm inclined to say that folks who haven't absorbed BBdM's insights simply don't understand politics yet.

Here's the theory:

Game theory + Public Choice + simulations = Win.

All group activity, politics interestingly but not specially, is a struggle between groups for outcomes. All participants have (a) preferences, (b)strengths of desire for their answer, (c) strength of desire for some solution, and (d) influence in the process.

If you understand game theory, put in correct inputs and run the math through a good simulator...you'll get the outcome that will happen a reasonable proportion of the time.

The question is: what persons or groups make what decisions. The results of the negotiation are largely set by the goals of the negotiators. However, varying some goals can have intriguing results.

Nominal forms of government are a joke. The question of what happens has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with nominal forms of government. The question is what do different power blocks want.

Government is the business of splitting the spoils. How the country gets run is a very stable game theory problem. If the government requires the consent of LOTS of the people in order to run the government, then the government does stuff that makes lots of people happy. If the government only needs the consent of a few people/groups in order to run the government, then the government builds a minimal coalition (50%+1 of the power block) who get all the spoils while they screw everyone else with a hot poker. Easy, game theory solution. Turns out it works that way in the real world too.

Interesting parts of the book: He runs through several historical game theory analyses he's personally done...from probability of companies with legal malfeasance (predicted Enron, Worldcom stuff year or two early), succession planning in a company (just simple, fun game theory with hacks), legal negotiation between a company and federal prosecutors (beautiful hack of the game theory here), much international affairs...and 4 historical cases, wherein he argues what needed to happen to prevent WWI, WWII, and a few other historical badnesses.

My line...if you don't understand BBdM...your politics are not coherent. It's that important.

QoTD

From Balko:

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

– John Green, father of nine-year-old Christina Green, who was killed in Saturday’s Tucson shootings.

linkfarm

Hanson: Inequality = savings?

Illka gives us 2 links: Income=Numeracy & Creativity vs. Social Engineering

Arnold Kling: The Attitude

Radley Balko links to: 4th amendment on chest=arrest

TJIC: Mortgage deduction=insane
Cafe Hayek: economics!=predictive, progressive vs. progress
Will Wilkinson: beautifully nuanced critique of Ezra Klein on health care. This is a case study on how to think well.

Sebastian Marshall: Effort != value

Obedience, the sin.

Bryan Caplan responds to the Amy Chua article. However, he doesn't address the obedience issue substantially. It's a good counterpart to mine. In my comments, there's a lot more discussion of obedience that I'd like to call out.

My line is that Obedience is a habit. Either you have it, or you don't. If you have it, you are inclined to do as you are told...though with some ability to resist. If you don't have it...you are disinclined to do as you are told...though with some ability to comply if necessary.

Either you have it in you to think of some folks as "right and proper" to follow directions...you have a category of "people to take orders from" or you don't. Either people are equals, and all interactions are transactional (I do X in exchange for your doing Y) or not.

Category A: Authority is all right

Category B: Authority is BAD.

Autobiographical:

I fall entirely in category B. I grew up calling my parents by their first names. I got in trouble in Kindergarten for calling the teachers by their first names. Eventually I learned that in some circumstances, people got annoyed by my calling them by first name...and stopped calling them first names to their faces when it would cause them to lose status. I am often reminded by my mother that Do X, or even Do X under threat of punishment were simply not functional. Do X because it's a good idea because of Y,Z, W, and Q might work...if it convinced me.

I never believed that the teachers before High School knew more than I did about topics I was interested in. I got in fights with my 8th grade science teacher, in particular, because I actually did know more about some areas of physics. My parents required that I go to high school, rather than skipping it for college under the idea that I needed to learn social activity. On the other hand, they flat out admitted they didn't expect me to learn anything important...and that was probably the nail in the coffin for the idea that teachers held some kind of appropriate authority. They were there for one purpose, I was there for another...and their suggestions were always transactional (in my mind): If you don't do A, B happens. College didn't fare any better in my estimation of whether the teachers (a) had authority, or (b) had substantial expertise in what it would require for ME to learn something...I th0ught (mostly correctly) that I knew more about how I learned.

I'm near 40...and have been working for about 20 years. In those years...I've had roughly 5 years when I wasn't self employed, and of those years, all 5 of those were highly left-alone. Get results X, and we'll ignore you. That's the end of the discussion. Usually even less. And when they wanted something I didn't want to give...I've offered other choices and I've offered to be fired.

The only "authority" that I submit to is armed authority, where they can kill me if I resist. And there, I'm generally seething from injustice. If some armed thug tells me what to do...I am likely to comply...because they are an armed thug...and all armed thugs telling me what to do qualify as armed thugs...regardless who they work for.

/Autobiography

Either you believe that authority is sometimes legitimate, or you don't. I don't. Not master over slave, lord over peasant, rich over poor, husband over wife, politician over citizen, god over human, or parent over child. Natural authority is crap.

Indeed, I hold to the position that acceptance of authority is a sin. The kind of thing that makes a person suspicious ethically and cognitively.

My wife suggests that it's more than a habit of mind ... that it's a personality trait instead...and holds up her personal example of having tried for 20 years to be obedient, and failing. Not to teacher, boss, husband, God, not to anyone. Simply a personality trait...unable to obey.

I believe in compliance if threatened or convinced. I NEVER believe in obedience based on the source. It is a sin to be obedient, but it is a mortal sin to advocate or enforce obedience.

Headline oTD

Slashdot:

US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks, Is Leaked

Does anyone not believe that the wikileaks type has won, and the secrets people have lost? Brin called it. Prepare for the transparent society. And get a Looxcie.

God Bless Texas

Tyler Cowen links to this, showing just how deep the culture gap is. The texas legislature has a metal detector, with a fast-lane for folks with concealed carry licenses. Further info:

Can a concealed weapons license holder who's waved past security actually be carrying a gun into the Capitol?

Answer: Yes.

"God bless Texas," Cox said.

I miss Texas, and it's capitol, Austin. Best quote from the article:

In Texas, the martial arts of choice is the handgun," he said. "If we were in the Philippines, I'd be teaching you a stick.

Great Anti-Ivy article

Insty links to a fabulous article on the costs of attending an elite college. It starts off seeming weak, but gets better through the middle. Maybe my favorite line:

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.

Incidentally, this matches, awful nicely, my discussion earlier of Amy Chua's approach. They're learning obedience...not questioning. More quotes:

An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.

and

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Of course, the most amusign thing about the essay is the extent to which the author is self-limited by his upbringing. He could have just said it in Borepatch vernacular: There's smart and there's "smart", and they aren't the same.

Group Success

Isegoria cites an article on "Group IQ" that explains how MIT Sloan has confirmed some stuff that the field of Organizational Behavior/Organizational Development has known for a long time.

Individual ability and group success are not very well correlated. Group success tends to rely on being able to work together, leaders who do less directing and more listening, and emotion-reading. Group success does NOT depend much upon individual ability. Group success is a science, and the common sense we all developed from the artificial environment of school or IT shops does not at all teach us what works in getting group success.

RTWT...even with registration required

Inequality

Don Boudreaux points at several articles discussing income inequality:

Tyler Cowen.

Max Borders.

I think there's a lot missing from those articles that is very well summarized by other bloggers I like.

Will Wilkinson, a year ago, had a great piece @ CATO unbound reminding us all that consumption inequality matters more than income inequality in 99% of the cases. And consumption inequality is FAR lower than income inequality.

Tino Sanandaji has had a running series (which he summarized and linked here) on how the most recent book on income inequality is massively intellectually dishonest.

If you have any interest in inequality, what it means and what it doesn't...I'd read Cowen, Wilkinson, and Sanandaji. Borders is ok as well.

Learning metaphor

Sebastian Marshall quotes Casanova's Memoirs on morals. The Aretaevian position is that schooling (ALL of schooling) should be understood to be this kind of thing:

Casanova likens learning morals before getting real world experience to reading the index of a book before the book itself. You get an idea of what’s going to be in the book, but you don’t really “get it.”

Learning comes from experience. What you have before experience is a guess of what to expect, and a system that will make some (probably small) part of your incoming experience make sense.

Is this a pattern

Krugman pontificates smugly about something or other...this time Texas. While there were some tolerable responses, and responses to responses...Tino comes along with a big honkin' datastick, and thrashes the position to within an inch of its life. My favorite line:

Paul Krugman is now claiming Texas doesn’t have a well managed economy or something. To be frank, I didn’t read his column, because I have grown tired of the man and his dogmatic and predictable views. He has been caught cheating so many times that I now trust Krugman's figures as much as I trust Glen Beck's.

RTWT.

Chinese Mothers vs. Teacher of the Year

Everyone seems to be commenting presently on the Amy Chua and Chinese Mothers. Here's her piece from the WSJ. It encapsulates a 1-sided extension of the Aretaevian education position that the ONLY thing that matters is practice. As such, I've been wrestling with this as an approach for the 20 years I've been looking at education. Teach that success comes through perseverance. Success is good...therefore hard work is good. It's a compelling story.

However, there's also a counterpoint. My all-time favorite education piece is by John Taylor Gatto. His claim is that the material taught in school is only a miniscule portion of what is learned...and that what is learned are habits of character and habits of interaction. Along with the perseverance that Amy describes comes the other lessons Gatto explains...most notably obedience.

On top of this obedience/peseverance agument sits the Bryan Caplan/Judith Rich Harris/historical position that much/most of a person's adult self is 90% independent of their childhood is mostly true. IQ and Big 5 personality traits are mostly NOT things that change based on childhood. Nutrition matters (enough), no horrible diseases matters. and non-abuse matters. But apart from that, you're going to be who your genetic personality suggests. Adult personality is inherited biologically, not transmitted through family.

But then there's the cultural norms thing. Mormons live ~6 years longer than the average american...and I think that's race-adjusted. You don't inherit religion genetically, you inherit it culturally. Habits are learned. My wife, as always the most emotionally aware person I know, suggests (my words) that emotional habits are also learned.

And so we have a conflict. As a parent, you have only a little bit of control. You can build habits, both emotional and procedural. You can help teach foundational skills (some folks grow up knowing how to fix cars, and others don't). You can't impact IQ. You can't impact Personality. So what do you do?

I personally am unwilling to teach obedience as a character trait, even if it buys the habit of persistence that will buy, more than anything else, success throughout life. I think persistence is an important trait, perhaps the most important trait, but obedience is a mortal sin. Agreeing with Robin Hanson...I think persistence is the trait that wins over time...it is for sure the stable-state winner.

On the other hand, I can imagine that a lot of folks do want to teach persistence, even at the cost of teaching obedience as well.

Feature, not bug

Patri sends me to read Brad Taylor at LaTNB. Brad mostly quotes Conor Friedersdorf's lovely article on how truly bad regulations are for improving quality of life. While Brad and Conor are right that this massively decreases welfare...they are mistaken to think that it is a bug in the system.

Technology is fundamentally a disruptive force. At a fundamental level, changing technology means shaking those with power out of their perches. If some actor has power, and wishes to keep it (and given the Hanson/Falkenstein status/envy hypothesis, that's everyone who has power), then regulation is a benefit, not a cost. Yes, it screws everyone substantially, except the persons with current market power. Which makes it a net good according to government, and something guaranteed to happen.

It's a feature not a bug. It's just that the system isn't designed to do what some of us wish it would.

QoTD

Clayton Cramer:

“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln

HT: Insty

Links

• Foseti finds 2 largely realist articles on gender differences in major magazines. Incidentally, the Atlantic seems like it is moving to occupy the place the Economist inhabited when I started reading it 30 years ago: Best smart person magazine.
• McArdle comments on a BMJ article claiming that the big british pro-autism-link study was not just mistaken but fraudulent.
• CoyoteBlog illustrates "The Inherent Political Failure of Technocracy". Note...his line isn't about democracy...it's about technocracy: Rule by Experts.
• Borepatch snarks intelligently that Global Warming causes Totalitarianism...with examples.
• Insty sends me to Reason where it is argued: "The truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets." The other quote in there is from Milton Friedman: "The case for free enterprise, for competition, is that it’s the only system that will keep the capitalists from having too much power."
• Austin, where I spent 6 years, is still culturally the best place in the Country/World for me. San Francisco-style "Purple-hair, so what?" Texas style "my property, my gun." Tolerable living costs, especially outside the city. Geek culture. University town. Fitness-positive. Darn fine food. By observation...much stronger music culture than a cultural backwater like Chicago. Overall...probably my favorite spot in the USA, if a little warm for me. Free range chickens and long range rifles. Free love, free pot, profit motives, and employment at will. Willie Nelson, cultural icon of the city, is among the most libertarian public figures in the media today. Insty's link to an article on Austin makes me nostalgic.
• Tyler links to his article on the recession and employment. Think: recalculation story.
• Robin, 3 levels of meta- in, is discouraged that Kant understood betting.
• Sheldon Richman reminds us that the foundation of economics is that different people value things differently. When I am fair, and give each of my kids a scoop of Neapolitan ice cream, my little girl ends up with a lot of chocolate...and my little boy ends up with more ice cream, but no chocolate. Both kids are happier. We call it the double inequality of value, and it's hard to understand economics at all without it.

Mild shift in education fundamentals

Regular readers of this blog will know that I count education as MY field. Nonetheless, over time my position goes through minor variations. Newest variation: a shift in theory of motivation.

In education, the factors are practice, interest, and ability.

I think it's obvious that for complex tasks (tasks that someone cannot be expert at in 24 hours of devoted work)...the issues are:

1. Practice.
2. Ability
3. Motivation.

I break down Practice into 3 further items:

1. Quantity
2. Targetedness
3. Feedback

Regardless that...my interest today is in Motivation. What types of motivation are most effective.

What kinds of Motivational options do we have?

1. Intrinsic (Math is fun)
2. Peers (friends are doing it.)
3. Authority respect (Parent/teacher/leader likes me better if)
4. Negative Consequences (If I don't...life sucks)
5. Positive Consequences (If I do...life is good)
6. Want to win (special case of v.)

My historical position has been that i and ii are the killer motivators...but recently...I've been developing a greater and greater respect for simple desire to win.

Indeed...I think that in competitive activities...Desire to win is the determinant of who wins. The hungriest competitor gets the trophy. And in reality (as opposed to in that pleasant fiction that we all like to hide in)...damn near everything is competitive.

Links

• LessWrong has one of it's (IMO) better articles up now: The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship. Killer quote

  This is why, in more than 1000 posts on my own blog, I've said almost nothing that is original. Most of my posts instead summarize what other experts have said, in an effort to bring myself and my readers up to the level of the current debate on a subject before we try to make new contributions to it.

  I agree. I've made very few even marginally novel arguments on this blog. I think the newest thing that I've said here is that quality of practice is the best education lever you've got. My position that the feedback system defines the system itself is also moderately novel. And I haven't seen anywhere else a thorough epistemological take on AGW like mine. The rest...not so much.
• Isegoria finds Surov on "The last Month of Peace". When Russia is done with thos approach...China won't be.
• TJIC gets 2. P's & I's. Eternal cry.
• Kevin Carson does a decent introduction to regulatory capture: It's the system, stupid. I think the Mancur Olson model of this being inherent in government and all centralized authority systems is also important here. Finally...it's worth noting that BBdM has suggested, both with deductive game theory and with supporting data...that the relevant measure for how much regulatory capture happens is how few people the government must keep happy in order to maintain power.
• Sebastian Marshall suggests that entrepreneurhip is a 2-factor deal:

  As for entrepreneurship – really, people make a big deal of it, but it’s not so hard. You need to (1) add value to things you touch, and (2) get some share of the value you created.

QoTD

I have slowly shifted from mild support to mild opposition to the Iraq War over the past 8 years. I'd like to say it's because of changing levels of maturity...but I've always considered the WMD bit a flashy corner-issue (used for US Sales purposes) in the Iraq war decision...but at least the WMD issue is finally resolved:

In July 2008, in an operation kept secret at the time, 37 military air cargo flights shipped more than 500 metric tons of yellowcake — found in Iraq — out of the country for further transport and remediation to Canada.

Of course, it was all a cover for general anti-Bush-ness, rather than a principled position...so I don't expect any of the "Bush lied, people died" to recant...they'll find some other reason why it was all Bush's fault.

The health of a society

I've suggested this before, and I continue to insist on its truth.

The health of an economy can be measured by a comparison of the expected rate of return between

(a) $1M spent building better products

(b) $1M spent convincing the government to make rules that favor your company.

This puts me in an unusual disagreement with left-libertarian snark-master IOZ. IOZ argues that David Brooks column which suggests that geniuses are going into finance is false. Fact is, the margin is the right place to measure...and on the margin, the fact that finance produces insane returns for smart folks who are willing to work huge hours shifts effort from other areas into finance. Indeed, the EV in finance is simply better than anything else you can find....which means the more money minded of the 3+ Sigma set move more into finance, and less into other stuff.

Autonomy

Foseti sends us to the thinking housewife who argues for the delight in hierarchy.

So hierarchy, by its nature, is fundamentally good. And Lewis follows the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition by going further, by believing that the goodness of hierarchically ordered relationships extends all through the world that God has made.

I agree. Fundamentally, hierarchy is a religious precept, and one more reason I'm not religious. I can't stand people telling other people what to do. I keep coming back to the more-and-more uncontroversial vision of years ago.

10,000 years ago, command DID NOT EXIST. There were alliances, teams, and low-intensity violence, but the idea that anyone ought to obey anyone else was inconceivable. Everyone was pseudo-equal, and IQ was used (primarily?) to cheat on equality-norms, and gain mild, but statistically significant advantages by rule-bending and convincing others. When agriculture happened, populations became sufficiently immobile that up-and-leave ceased to be an option...which allowed some thugs to impose command on others without their consent.

Only in the last few decades has wealth increased in the West (Japan/Europe/America) enough that the agricultural immobility of the last 10,000 years is becoming seriously threatened, and with it, the predators ability to prey upon the rest of us. As ability to exit increases (directly with wealth, and alternate options), the notion of command will continue to erode. Yes, it's the forager/farmer hypothesis.

Jon Haidt, pre-eminent researcher in moral foundations has found 6 (no longer 5) moral foundations advising most people's thinking. Standard, apparently built-in faculties, that societies of various sorts edit somewhat.

The 6 foundations are:

Fairness/Reciprocity

Harm/Care

Ingroup/Loyalty

Authority/Respect

Purity/Sanctity

Liberty/Constraint

Liberals (and many women) have strong moral impulses in the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity axes.

Conservatives (and religious folks and older people) have smaller reactions to the first two moral foundations than liberals, but much larger moral impulses on the next the next 3 (Authority/Respect, Ingroup/Loyalty, and Purity/Sanctity) FWIW, there are folks, including myself, who dispute the extent of the liberal deficit in Ingroup and Purity...but suggest instead that the Ingroup and Purity are displaced from the conservative, but no smaller.

Libertarians (and many young men) have substantially higher moral impulses on the Liberty/Constraint moral axis, while often having little-to-none on the Purity or Authority axes.

If we don't recognize that there is at root (as Moldbug says) a MORAL disagreement...we're not likely to get anywhere. The Church of Harvard is the liberal branch of the clergy...and in opposition to the Conservative Clergy who like Monarchs.

The core disagreement is moral. Occasionally, someone will get to some position that violates their base ethics...on rationalist ground. but mostly the argument on the ground is an ethical one.

My core, natural, moral position is that Autonomy is teh shiznit. Everything else ought to be subservient.

My modified position after 20 years of study is that Wealth is more important than autonomy. Health too. But Wealth drives Health, and Wealth drives (positive) Autonomy.

OTOH, fundamentally, economic disorderliness (fewer rules) on a larger scale drives new ideas, which drives wealth. While micro-level and meta-level order is nice, the macro picture that wins is Chaos. All hail Arioch.

Foseti responds

Here.

First, my favorite line:

I therefore believe that any system that appears to have a huge selectorate must in fact be governed by a smaller subset of its citizens.

For the USA, I think this is correct. And I think it's among the more interesting conclusions that fall out of BBdM's work. Because one can correlate pretty strongly the size of the selectorate with the level of inequality in a system...one has to look at the USA and say, "well, I guess the selectorate isn't as large as it seems to be." Let us at least agree that in the USA, the selectorate isn't all that large. Even the voters are composed primarily of older richer white folks.

On the other hand, it may be that in an country of 300M people across 10 Million Square kilometers, there is simply nothing that can be done to make for good governance. The best-governed places in the world seem to be those places with good institutions, and 5-10 M people. Denmark, Switzerland and Singapore are all (reportedly) wonderful places to live. Denmark does it by heavy-duty equality-promoting social democracy...that has been evolving to a market-friendliness that kick's the USA's asses on all topics but income tax. Singapore does it via a lucky choice of leader and a British/Asian civil service for its first 50 years. Switzerland does it via massively decreased central power, and direct democracy.

3 paths, all currently quite successful. All small.

On to points of potential disagreement.

I said:

A libertarian might suggest that economics and firms work as they do primarily because of freedom of entry (to a market), and freedom of exit (from a provider, or even from a market), and semi-graceful failure (companies usually go broke/out of business without killing many people)

Foseti said:

All true. Now let’s apply these principles to the organization of a state. What I want is a state motivated by profit (interestingly we currently have states that are motivated by losses – i.e. the more services they provide without paying for, the more stable the state).

It is my contention that a state motivated by profit will do very little to hinder entry and exit. Oppressed citizens don’t make good workers – so prohibiting exit would be folly. Entry may be limited to productive people, but I consider this a feature, not a bug.

Finally, it is my contention that a state motivated by profit will create a very graceful mechanism for failure – with failure defined as replacing the governing regime. The CEOs of joint-stock companies change hands all the time.

But companies go all the way out of business...and new companies come into business...and this competition between old companies and new companies the very real chance of the company dying are a major (inextricable) part of what makes the system work. No corporate bankruptcy/dissolution/asset sales = no functioning market.

I think the big disagreement comes down to this:

The best way to make states compete for citizens is to make states directly have an interest in having citizens. I think the profit motive is the best way to achieve this goal.

I hold with BBdM and the public choice theorists that the current situation for almost all rulers IS a profit motive. Further, the simple game theory (and what will end up happening) is that concentrated power (strong states) with relatively few folks they have to keep happy (small groups of interested shareholders) will NECESSARILY make the decisions to benefit the few instead of the many. If, for instance, the CEO of Texas could guarantee his job by just keeping his 2 major stockholders (the CEO of ExxonMobile and the CEO of Dell) happy, we are effectively guaranteed over time to see activities that benefit Dell and ExxonMobile and hurt the rest of the country. We've seen this in every form of government for the last 500 years.

If you are run a country, and are accountable to 3 people...your best path for your lifetime is to pillage the country, share the loot generously with 2 of those people, and rule until you die. If you are accountable to 5 Million people, the strategic calculus for staying in power is to build better institutions. Math, not pleasant-sounding theory here...and the data agrees.

Foseti's misleading question

Foseti asks

Why do libertarians oppose the free market solution to governance?

and then suggests that the current government-supported system of lack-of-accountability built into current joint-stock corporations is the correct solution.

I think the question is akin to asking God why he didn't design the fern like a Tiger. Clearly, a Tiger, 500 pounds of muscle and fangs, solves the problems associated with Tigerhood well, so shouldn't a fern be designed with claws and fur?

A libertarian might suggest that economics and firms work as they do primarily because of freedom of entry (to a market), and freedom of exit (from a provider, or even from a market), and semi-graceful failure (companies usually go broke/out of business without killing many people).

The joint stock corporation works because it is clearly better for rich people to not be accountable for what their companies do than for them to be accountable...and said rich people purchased a government system that allowed this.

Furthermore, the libertarian might suggest that there are very few advantages large companies have over small companies, except in extracting government favors, complying with government regulation, and getting governments to limit innovation ( and thus growth ). Hence the incredible correlation between socialism and stability of large companies.

Why don't formalists take serious conservative political scientists who have data to suggest that the size of the selectorate is a/the primary factor determining how the pie is divided in any given political system. If 3 people control 52% of the political decision process, then those 3 people somehow also get ALL of the above-subsistence surplus and the rest of the country gets none.

Only way economics gives us to get good economic results from politics is to make it easy to switch jurisdictions, and to make exit easy. Make the polities compete for citizens, and the quality of the polity improves.

Scarcity defines power. Ricardo demonstrated that in the 1820s, and it's been true ever since. Politics follows the power. If you want benefit to citizens, shift the balance of power from the state towards the citizen by making states compete for citizens. I think that

(A) repeal of the 16th amendment, and

(B) enforcement of the 9th/10th/originalist commerce clause would do FAR better than a joint-stock corporation form of organization.

But so long as you have countries of 300 million or 1.5 billion people, with no intra-state legal competition, and no exit, they're all screwed by simple economic logic...and there's simply no way out.

Additional factors in Learning

Perfidy asks about how to go about learning stuff, in a practical fashion. Details.

I spent a lot of the morning tossing it around in my head. Here's the line:

1. Motivation wins. You will learn something best if you obsess on it because attention is the key factor. I personally work best when I obsess, because then my brain is on the problem all the darn time. When I'm not practicing in RL, I'm practicing in my head. Turns out, for instance, that in sports activities, virtual practice is ALMOST as good as real practice.
2. I think skill loss is underappreciated as a general idea. if you work on something for an hour a week, and it's hard...roughly 55 minutes of the hour is going to be catching up to where you were last week. OTOH, if you work on it 3 times a week for an hour, you'll probably spend 30 minutes of each hour getting up to speed....but you'll also get 1.5 hours instead of 5 minutes to move forward. 3x time devoted...18x benefit.
3. I don't have a great answer for 3 hours once a week vs. one hour 3x a week. Longer durations mean more skill loss...but getting into the groove takes a while as well. I think I'm inclined to prefer a 3 hour stretch to 3 1 hour stretches. Because of the focus costs (it takes easily 30 minutes to get into the zone on something hard).
4. My incessant education mantra: The key is doing. Do, do, do. ITunesU, Khan Academy, Discover Channel are probably net negative value for learning. They make you think you've learned something by listening, where in reality, you don't know squat about anything until you DO it. I think MIT Open Courseware comes with problem sets, so it might be useful.
5. More on doing...Perfidy's question was how to learn, potentially in physics. Apologies up front for picking on perfidy, but that's the wrong question. What do you want to be able to do? Solve problems in Quantum Electrodynamics? Write a program the shows a star's displacement under General Relativity? See if you can predict something new using Garrett Lisi's E8 ToE? Perfect-score the GRE Physics exam? Publish a paper in a physics journal? Pick an action, not a nebulous learning.