I learned a new word

In Coming Apart: the State of White America 1950-2010, Charles Murray describes a form of economic-sexual selection:

Homogamy refers to the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics.

Educational homogamy occurs when individuals with similar educations have children.

Cognitive homogamy occurs when individuals with similar cognitive ability have children.

They, of course, have smarter children. The smarter children go on to have success. Maybe homogamy continues. And this one way that economic and social classes arise and reproduce themselves.

Don’t judge ideas by the characteristics of their proponents

A friend of mine lamented that he despises “Zeitgeist”, a terrible, hackneyed, and deeply flawed conspiracy theory documentary about the origin of Christianity and its implications for contemporary global politics and international banking (yeah) , on the grounds that it gives the detractors of religion a bad name. Indeed, a reasonable atheist will likely agree that in some aspects the movie is correct in its general spirit, namely, that it's fine to think critically about Christianity. But the makers of Zeitgeist, and more importantly, its majority viewership are uneducated quacks who have no devotion whatsoever to the concepts of reason, logic, and education. As an atheist and a disciple of reason and scientific inquiry, one must loath the company of such people. As an atheist myself I would prefer the company of intelligent Christians to the slow swimmers in the atheist gene pool.

I feel this way about libertarianism too. There are lots of really stupid libertarians. Many of them are members of the Tea Party. Others, militias with anti-government sentiment; furthermore, you can find many weird pseudo-libertarian ideas among the ranks of the conspiracy blogosphere. I’ve long been sceptical of arguments for the abolition of the U.S. federal reserve (a position that is actually well articulated by some economists and libertarian thinkers) almost entirely because I’m so turned off by Fed conspiracy theories. They have, in a sense, poisoned the well. Indeed, I cringe every time I hear “libertarianism” and “Michelle Bachmann” mentioned in the same sentence. As I have written before, even the wacky Ron Paul is far from a shining beacon of libertarian intellect. Certainly no match for his liberal equivalents, like Bill Clinton, or even lesser Conservatives like Newt Gingrich.

It is deeply unfortunate that ideas are often judged by the characteristics of their followers. The two should not be conflated. While it is tempting to blame crazy animal rights lunatics who go after grad students doing science experiments (etc) for discrediting the very sensible ideas of animal rights, to use another common example, this is not sufficient. If you consider yourself to be a reasonable, open minded person, I thus make the following suggestion. If you come across a new idea or a new argument, even if the person making the argument is a little nuts, try and judge the idea as if it were coming from someone who you respected. To conflate idea and messenger is to commit an error of logical reasoning: argumentum ad hominem, or an attack on the man, not the point.

Self governance

In the Ottawa Citizen, David Warren writes:

The issue is the "HHS Mandate" - a decision by the Obama administration to use the most controversial powers of the new ObamaCare bureaucracy, to force private Catholic schools, hospitals, and other charitable institutions to cover such things as contraception, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization procedures in employee health-care plans, or face astronomical fines.

By forcing this issue - through an edict that compels people to buy something not only against their will, but in direct defiance of their conscience - Obama and company have squared their assault on the U.S. Constitution. ObamaCare itself is already being challenged successfully in court on point one: forcing citizens to buy any commercial product. By adding point two, they greatly enlarge the grounds for that challenge to religious freedom.

AM: I actually think Warren has a point here. People should, to the degree possible, be free to govern themselves irrespective of central government writ. Even though I am an atheist and think that the Christian stance on contraception and abortion is pretty dumb, I have to point out that people should still be free to govern themselves, even if they make choices I don't like.

Iraq, the Surge, Regression to the Mean?

My int’l security class is discussing the causes of civil war this week, and one of the main case studies we’re looking at is Iraq. It’s well known that violence in Iraq has ebbed quite substantially since about 2007. If you ask most people why, the answer you’ll get is simple: the surge. George Bush’s strategy in 2007 worked. The strategy was basically to hire Robert Gates and David Petraus, and increase the troop levels in Baghdad and Anbar province by 20,000. Directly following the war there was a massive decline in violence which has continued in the post surge years. Not surprisingly, neoconservatives and Iraqi war supporters take this as proof that the surge worked, and that the U.S. has had great success in Iraq.

But can we necessarily infer cause and effect from this? I’ve long been convinced by Peter Galbraith’s claim that violence declined in Iraq for reasons that had really nothing to do with the surge: (a) Iraq’s Sunni/Shia ghettos which were the scene of so much violence had become ‘unmixed’ (b) Moqtad’ Al Sadr disarmed his forces for purely strategic reasons; the Sunni Ba’athists turned against their former Al Qaeda allies, who had grown to strong, and this led to a decrease in sectarian violence. In short, violence declined for other more particular and local reasons that had nothing to do with the surge.

In short, civil war ebbs and flows with a particular logic. We would not expect high levels of violence to be sustained for long periods of time, but a lull and violence is not an end of the war either. Having read Thinking: Fast, Slow by Daniel Kahneman it seems to me that this surge argument might fall victim to the regression fallacy.

Let me explain:

Regression to the mean is a statistical error caused by the reliance only of extreme observations. For example, consider the effect of acupuncture on migraine headaches. We’d like to know if it has an effect, and we’d like to know about the average. But many people, especially if they are self-reporting, misjudge cause and effect because of selection bias. For instance, migraine headache sufferers are most likely to seek out alternative medicine when pain is at its worst. The pain ebbs and flows: in other words, there is a random statistical distribution and there is a statistical “average level”. Overtime, we would expect extremes to return to the average. The unfortunate migraine suffer observes relief following treatment, but this is only because of selection bias, which they take as evidence of the effectiveness of the intervention. As interventions tend to occur when the patient is most desperate for relief, the mistake is compounded. As Kahneman says, as humans we like to tell stories, and we’re bad at statistics. Statistical reasoning would tell us this is just simple regression, but the causal story telling part of our brain, which usually dominates, likes to think that the intervention worked.

The variable “level of violence” also has a statistical distribution and an average. The intervention, namely the surge, occurred (not by accident) at the extreme point. There was a subsequent return to the mean, but this does not necessarily mean cause and effect. Thinking about causality in this instance is important, because the experience of the surge is likely to shape future nation-building efforts, affect thousands of lives, and eat up tons and tons of resources.

Wage stagnation?

Wow. GMU economist Don Boudreaux destroys the wage stagnation theory



I mentioned a couple of points on my posts on inequality here, and here, but Boudreaux does a much better job of outlining the issues and their implications.