Why I’m Skeptical About Online Education

David Brooks has sort of jumped on the online education bandwagon.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company,Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”

He details some exciting things happening with the MITx project. I am also excited at these prospects, but think there’s a lot of exaggerating going on about their benefits. The main problem with higher education right now is not access; it’s productivity and low graduation rates. It’s unclear how these online projects would address either of these problems. Certainly, it’s going to be nice for institutions to have these resources available, and there are going to be a particular group of students that are going to be able to use things like MITx, the Khan Academy, etc. for their benefit. But, in my view, these resources will be more like public libraries than higher education institutions.

 

As Will Hunting said, “You dropped a 150 grand on an education that you could have gotten with a$1.50 worth of late charges at the public library.” That’s true, but only if you’re fucking Will Hunting. Today’s marginal student needs somebody holding their hand, giving them advice, helping them navigate higher ed institutions and make good decisions. They need paternalism, and I don’t at this point see how online education is going to help them with that. I could be wrong, but I’m skeptical.

 

That said, just as I think public libraries have been a great resource through the 20th century, I am sure the resources being developed will contribute to the public good as well. And it’s great that they are, for the most part, being privately financed. Yay rich people!

Filed under: Uncategorized

The US is Not Like Greece

Greece is a country of 11 million people. Geographically, it’s about the size of Louisiana. It doesn’t control its own currency, and its government spent years lying about its fiscal condition. After it joined the euro area in 2001, Greece went from paying about 7 percent interest on a 10-year bond to a bit more than 3 percent because investors assumed that its debt was backed by Germany and the European Central Bank…

The United States, by contrast, is a country of 313 million. It controls its own currency, which is also the global reserve currency. The U.S. Treasury bond is the safest of safe assets. Even after a lengthy financial crisis, the World Economic Forum ranks the United States as the fifth most competitive economy in the world, and it’s bigger than the first four combined. Whatever the United States is, it’s not Greece.

That’s from Ezra Klein, debunking one of the most common myths propagated by the right, often used to justify the argument we should rein in deficits now. 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Good Sentences on Evolution of the GOP

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

 

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

That’s from that radical socialist Paul Krugman. 

Filed under: Uncategorized

In the Long Run, We Are All Glowworms.

I’m reading Krugman’s new book, End This Depression Now. So far, there aren’t really any new ideas, but the book provides a good summary of lots of ideas and provides a framework for how they all fit together. One of these is the rejection of the view that we should only care about the long run — so it’s fruitless to enact any measures that would curb short-run suffering. Yglesias has some good sentences on this today: 

“I think that what draws people into Rajan’s trap is an excessive tendency to associate “focus on long-term sustainable growth” with the ideas that they happen to favor. This models political disagreement as one in which there’s an unquivocal “long-term sustainable growth” agenda that some politicians are failing to implement out of either cowardice or else a belief that some priority other than “long-term sustainable growth” is more important at the moment. Under the circumstances, raising the status of “long-term sustainable growth” as a priority relative to fixing mass unemployment starts to look like a clever rhetorical strategy. The cure is to remind yourself that there’s profound and perfectly sincere disagreement about what a long-term sustainable growth agenda looks like. In particular, if you’re a University of Chicago economist you should remind yourself that a great many intelligent people believe a long-term sustainable growth agenda consist of large-scale public expenditures on clean electricity generation, high-speed rail, and universial preschool, a much greater government role in the health care sector, and increased subsidization of public colleges, all financed in large part by sharply higher marginal tax rates on high-income individuals.”

That gets the sociology basically right. But the bigger point is that, to some extent, long-run growth depends of the sort of things we’re doing right now. Krugman makes this point in several ways. First, when you’ve got potentially productive workers that long-term unemployed, they lose skills or drop out of the workforce altogether, so the economy’s productive capacity drops. The same sort of thing happens to college grads who are underemployed: their productive potential goes from high skill to low skill. Second, business investment drops when demand is low, so businesses aren’t increasing their productive capacity. Third, cutting public services, like education and infrastructure spending negatively affects long-run growth. 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Simplicity = Happiness

I’m a big fan of this website in terms of increasing my life satisfaction or self improvement. Chrissy and I are moving soon, so I recently started to get rid of a lot of our belongings that we don’t need or use. Basically, the strategy is to divide things into metaphorical buckets: Keep, Sell, Donate, Throw out, Unsure. I’ve moved about 25 times in my life (too many to be sure that’s the right number) and I hate it every time. But the worst part about moving is spending time transferring things you don’t use that you’ve kept in storage all year to a new place to store them. Having only the essential things that you really take advantage of and make your life better really takes a lot of weight off your shoulders.

One example is books. We’re selling basically all of our books. Chrissy has an iPad and I have a Kindle, so we really don’t need to store hundreds of pounds of books in our apartment, and move them once every year or two. One of the best uses of space is emptiness.

Among other things, we’ve sold our desktop computer, printer, surround sound system, iPod docks, bike pump (of which we had two, and my car, which I replaced with a Capital Bikeshare and Zipcar memberships. What a relief! There’s something about the freedom of not having a car in an urban area. It forces you to walk, bike, or take public transportation. You spend less time sitting and more time reading. You spend less time each day stressed out from being in traffic. I liked driving in the midwest to some extent; there is plenty of joy in riding around, looking at scenery, listening to your favorite songs play loudly through the stereo system. But the costs involved in driving are enormous, for me anyway.

Filed under: Life, Uncategorized

Tim Lee on Zombie Ideas About Inflation

Is there some major advantage to having an inflation rate of 0% as opposed to 2% or 4%? Tim Lee says no:

Economists like to say that money serves two primary purposes: it serves as a medium of exchange and a store of value (many also describe it as a unit of account, but this is largely a consequence of the other two functions). Inflation—even in the single digits—prevents money from working effectively as a long-term store of value. If you were born in 1920 and your retirement plan was to put $100 bills under your mattress, the inflation of the 1970s would have destroyed the majority of the value of your savings.

The problem with this line of argument is that even stable money is a bad long-term store of value. That’s because modern capital markets offer you the opportunity to not just preserve the value of your money but dramatically increase it by investing in productive assets. You can buy stocks, bonds, or real estate, all of which generate a stream of income that increases the value of your investment.

Basically, a low amount of inflation encourages you to invest your money in the real economy instead of hoarding dollars, a significant positive effect with really no significant negative effect. If people are really concerned about inflation, they can purchase real assets or trade dollars for other currencies if they like. 

Filed under: Economics, Monetary Policy

Government Regulation

Markets have been great tools for advancing the welfare of Americans over the course of its history. But, markets function best in a mixed economy where the government defines the boundaries between what aspects of life should be part of markets and which should not. Governments can also use regulations to mitigate risk, promote efficiency by correcting market failures, and enforce property rights ex ante.

First, when there are moral objections to market outcomes, government can and should define the boundary of where markets enter our lives. Allowing Americans to sell their votes, for example, would undermine democratic values that make American society function properly. Similarly, government rightly regulates against the ability to keep persons as property and prohibits the sale of children by their parents. In addition, government restricts the exploitation of children through child labor laws because children cannot legally consent to contracts. While these regulations are relatively uncontroversial, at times, it is difficult to decide where to draw the line. Many economists, for example, have supported the creation of organ markets. These decisions are best made democratically.

Second, government can promote efficiency by regulating monopolies, encourage competition by discouraging anticompetitive practices, and prevent bank runs by insuring commercial banks. Vigorous competition is what makes markets run well, but left unchecked, firms will engage in anticompetitive practices such as forming trusts. Additionally, as we saw with the financial crisis, excessive risk taking can lead to economic collapse that affects us all. Regulations can effectively discourage moral hazard and break up the too interdependent too fail financial system that nearly brought down the global economy.

Third, regulations are a way to effectively enforce property rights ex ante. Market interactions result in legal claims of harm and fraud resulting in damages that must be paid. These conflicts can be remedied through the court system, but may be more effectively dealt with through regulation. In today’s society, many of the harms inflicted result from behavior that carries a certain amount of risk. Regulations are, in essence, a method of mitigating future harm by protecting property rights before the fact. Pollution, for example, harms public health and destroys property value, but there may not be an effective legal remedy for combating the harm.

How much risk we are comfortable with and the cost of the regulation is a tradeoff we must weigh democratically. We may not want our citizens to play Russian Roulette, though we may be comfortable with them skydiving or bull fighting. The world is much safer today than it was 100 years ago, mostly because we are richer now, but also because we are comfortable imposing regulations that promote safety.

Filed under: Regulation

Progressive Consumption Tax

Conservatives have two central tenets in their tax reform agenda. The first is to simplify the tax code by eliminating tax expenditures – government spending through the tax code – that come in the form of deductions and exemptions. The second is to move from a progressive income tax to a flat income or consumption tax. But conservative politicians often conflate these goals, suggesting that “simple” and “flat” are one in the same. Tax expenditures are what complicates the tax code, not progressive rates. While we should aim to eliminate expenditures, especially those that benefit those who are relatively well off, progressive tax rates are justified economically and morally for these reasons:

Efficiency. What is the optimal amount of public goods and services the government should provide? If the government creates a rule that says everyone must pay an equal share of their income, revenue will be restricted to the rate that the lowest earning workers can afford to pay.

Consider the case of a married couple with drastically different earnings. One spouse earns $40,000 per year, while the other earns $400,000 a year. If the couple goes Dutch, they will restrict their shared consumption. However, if the couple adopts a rule that the higher earning spouse pays more, then they can enjoy a higher level of shared consumption. This means they will consume a better house, better car, and better lifestyle.

Happiness. Advocates of progressive taxation often say “Rich people can afford to pay more.” What they really mean is that $100 means more to a person making $5,000 a year than it does to a person making $500,000 a year. This means that allowing poor people to keep a larger share of their income will result in a happier society than making everyone pay the same rate.

Justice. If people deserved most of their income, there would be a good case that they should be able to keep it. However, people don’t morally deserve their income because almost everyone’s income results largely from factors beyond their control. For example, the poorest Americans are richer in absolute terms than the richest Indians. This isn’t because Americans are that much more hardworking than Indians, but because Americans have access to a superb set of institutions and a grand scale of specialization and trade within our borders.

The knowledge and technology we have that allows us to be rich is the result of a multi-millennia human project and social cooperation. Other factors — such as our genes, parents’ income, our order of birth, year of birth, and even month of birth — have enormous impact on our future earnings.

Because people don’t morally deserve their income, it means that society can fairly ask the wealthy to pay more. Doing so allows us to produce more public goods and services that benefit everyone, while creating a more happy and just society than if we asked everyone to pay the same. But, we still need to be concerned about incentives. We don’t want to make rates so progressive or so high that they make it unattractive for people to be productive. Fortunately, this is an empirical question, and all the evidence suggests that the wealthiest among us are doing quite well, and their lot is improving.

Filed under: Taxes

Progressive Tax Rates

Conservatives have two central tenets in their tax reform agenda. The first is to simplify the tax code by eliminating tax expenditures – government spending through the tax code – that come in the form of deductions and exemptions. The second is to move from a progressive income tax to a flat income or consumption tax. But conservative politicians often conflate these goals, suggesting that “simple” and “flat” are one in the same. Tax expenditures are what complicates the tax code, not progressive rates. While we should aim to eliminate expenditures, especially those that benefit those who are relatively well off, progressive tax rates are justified economically and morally for these reasons:

Efficiency. What is the optimal amount of public goods and services the government should provide? If the government creates a rule that says everyone must pay an equal share of their income, revenue will be restricted to the rate that the lowest earning workers can afford to pay.

Consider the case of a married couple with drastically different earnings. One spouse earns $40,000 per year, while the other earns $400,000 a year. If the couple goes Dutch, they will restrict their shared consumption. However, if the couple adopts a rule that the higher earning spouse pays more, then they can enjoy a higher level of shared consumption. This means they will consume a better house, better car, and better lifestyle.

Happiness. Advocates of progressive taxation often say “Rich people can afford to pay more.” What they really mean is that $100 means more to a person making $5,000 a year than it does to a person making $500,000 a year. This means that allowing poor people to keep a larger share of their income will result in a happier society than making everyone pay the same rate.

Justice. If people deserved most of their income, there would be a good case that they should be able to keep it. However, people don’t morally deserve their income because almost everyone’s income results largely from factors beyond their control. For example, the poorest Americans are richer in absolute terms than the richest Indians. This isn’t because Americans are that much more hardworking than Indians, but because Americans have access to a superb set of institutions and a grand scale of specialization and trade within our borders.

The knowledge and technology we have that allows us to be rich is the result of a multi-millennia human project and social cooperation. Other factors — such as our genes, parents’ income, our order of birth, year of birth, and even month of birth — have enormous impact on our future earnings.

Because people don’t morally deserve their income, it means that society can fairly ask the wealthy to pay more. Doing so allows us to produce more public goods and services that benefit everyone, while creating a more happy and just society than if we asked everyone to pay the same. But, we still need to be concerned about incentives. We don’t want to make rates so progressive or so high that they make it unattractive for people to be productive. Fortunately, this is an empirical question, and all the evidence suggests that the wealthiest among us are doing quite well, and their lot is improving.

Filed under: Taxes

On Parents

Cross-posted @ PolicyMic.

Nearly all of the policy proposals coming out of the reform movements on both sides of the political spectrum focus on schools, whether it is school choice, merit pay, early childhood education, or accountability measures. However, there is a giant elephant in the room that everyone who has worked in public education knows about: parents. What, if any, relationship should there be between public policy and parental responsibility for educational outcomes?

For perspective, consider the relative amounts of time teachers and parents spend with children. Most teachers spend 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week, 43 weeks a year with their students, and often have 100 students or more.

Parents, by comparison, spend much more time with their children, can give them individualized attention, and are able to hold them accountable in ways that teachers cannot. Few can deny an enormous cultural shift in responsibility from previous generations to today. In the past, students were expected to know the content of a course regardless of whether they liked their teacher, or whether their teacher’s teaching style matched their learning style. Today, if students fail, it is viewed as a failure of the teacher, the school, or the system. 

Yet, schools have not been afforded any additional rights that correspond to their newfound responsibilities — quite the opposite has occurred. This is not to say that blaming parents alone does any good. Economic changes have resulted in households with both parents working, many single parent households, and low-income parents who often do not have the tools necessary to help their children succeed. However, we should recognize the limits of additional pressures on teachers and schools for improving outcomes without providing them with additional resources.

When I look at the achievement gap between students who come from high-income and low-income households, I see enormous potential to develop human capital that would benefit us all, but I also see profound injustice in the lack of fairness for children who come from disadvantaged households. Children do not choose their parents or their schools, yet these two variables heavily influence their life prospects.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to shift cultural norms through public policy.

The best method, it appears, is to allow schools a greater degree of authority and influence in the socialization of children. This is exactly how successful schools, such as KIPP and the SEED boarding school, ultimately work, by removing students from poverty-stricken environments, placing them in environments that foster high expectations, and requiring an increased time commitment for learning. These schools also require parents to sign an agreement that provides the school more rights and authority in disciplining students. 

However, scaling up this model does not come at a small cost. Per pupil funding at the SEED school, for example, is $33,000 — three times the national average. The best route to ending poverty for future generations is through education, but we must be committed to making this investment. We could afford it by moving away from a government that subsidizes senior citizens — a relatively affluent group — and global military hegemony to one focused on developing human capital and alleviating poverty. Until then, I fear that the reform movements will largely be concentrated on marginal improvements to a grossly unjust system.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Testing my Morals

I took this morality test to see how I fare against the average liberal or conservative. The green bar is me; the blue bar represents the average liberal; the red bar represents the average conservative.

I’m with conservatives on harm and loyalty. I’m with liberals on fairness, authority, and purity.

Test your morals here.

Filed under: Ethics, Politics

Why Progressives Should Support School Choice

[Cross-posted here at PolicyMic]

The American debate over school choice dates back at least as far back as the 1970s, a decade after Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, in which he argued for the establishment of school vouchers that families could use to send their children to a public or private school of their choosing. Friedman’s argument gained influence in libertarian circles because of its resemblance to market systems that included competition. Social conservatives liked the idea of using tax revenues toward tuition at parochial schools.

Progressives have mostly rejected the school choice movement because of its potential to undermine public schools as well as exacerbate inequalities and segregation. But progressives have failed to appreciate just how bad the current system has been at achieving the goals they so vehemently defend. Instead of rejecting school choice altogether, they should embrace the beneficial aspects of a choice system alongside a specific set of revisions that address their concerns.

In the U.S., most funding for public schools comes from local property taxes. This system is both uniquely American and uniquely terrible. It has led to greater inequality and segregation and less social mobility than in other industrialized countries. Poor communities have less property tax revenue than affluent communities and, as a result, less funding for schools. Affluent communities can invest in buildings, facilities, and advanced technology that poor communities cannot afford. More importantly, affluent school districts are able to attract better teaching talent by offering higher salaries and less stressful working conditions. As a result, the U.S. education system exacerbates the inequalities that disadvantaged children enter primary school with. Middle- and upper-class families have a way to get their children out of bad schools: They can pick up and move to the suburbs. Since poorer families are less mobile and often cannot afford to move to suburbia, their choices are limited.

Progressives should be up in arms over these injustices. Most have a “system justification” bias — an inclination to defend the status quo as fair and just. They believe in public schools and they feel the need to defend them against conservative attacks. Consider the conservative critique that public schools are “inefficient.” Progressives typically, and erroneously, respond that efficiency is not important. If a system is inefficient, that means there is a free lunch on the table waiting to be eaten.

However, some progressive criticisms of a “free-market” voucher system are strong. Affluent parents could supplement their voucher with extra income to send their children to better schools, worsening inequalities. The system could become more segregated by race, class, and religion. Teaching creationism in the classroom could undermine scientific education. In general, students’ exposure to varying ideas and cultures could narrow.

Progressives can maintain these concerns without rejecting school choice altogether. Vouchers could be means-tested, or affluent parents could be restricted from using their own incomes alongside vouchers to pay for tuition. A school that accepts vouchers could be required to accept regulations on its curriculum, such as the teaching of creationism in biology. Most importantly, the government could offer additional financial incentives to schools that achieve a desired level of integration.

I share progressives’ concerns about the risks of a free market in education. But a free market is not a necessary feature of a choice system. We can embrace choice while maintaining our commitment to equal opportunity and integration, secularism, and social justice.

Filed under: Education, Public Policy, Uncategorized

The Strange World of Internet Arguments

Update: Eric wrote a response on his blog here. For the record, I have never blocked anyone from posting on this blog except the spambots that get blocked by the filter. I’m not sure why Eric wasn’t able to post on here, but it wasn’t my doing.

Yesterday, on Twitter…

Me: @ericddixon RT @ModeledBehavior Arnold Kling: a conservative economist against teacher merit pay [http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/10/06/economic-weakness-merit-pay-teachers]

Eric: @arhanson Kling doesn’t oppose merit pay at all; he thinks test scores are a lousy measure. And whaddaya know, I’ve always thought that too

Me: @ericddixon seems to oppose merit-pay systems based on test scores, e.g., NY and DC. Do you oppose them as well?

….

Eric: @arhanson seems to think it’s OK to put words in others’ mouths in a public forum w/ faint qualification, pretending it’s all friendly convo

Arnold Kling on EconLog:

Against Merit Pay for Teachers (title)

That would be my position.

I guess me retweeting Modeled Behavior representing Kling as “a conservative economist against merit pay” whose self-titled blogpost is Against Merit Pay and says that’s his position counts as “putting words in others’ mouths”.

At least in the strange world of Internet arguments.

Filed under: Logic, internet

The Death Penalty and the Criminal Justice System

[Cross-posted here at PolicyMic.]

In 1991, Troy Davis was convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer and sentenced to death by the state of Georgia. In the years following, many of the witnesses whose testimony led to the conviction of Mr. Davis recanted their version of events. Davis’ case moved through the appellate court system throughout the past 20 years until he was executed by the state of Georgia Wednesday evening.

A public outcry, based on the recantations, arose over the execution of Davis by those who seek to abolish the death penalty. PolicyMic pundit Evan Mascagni recently highlighted a few of their arguments, including: (1) capital punishment costs more than life imprisonment; (2) our enemies use capital punishment, while our allies have abolished it; (3) capital punishment disproportionately affects black convicts. Other abolitionists argue that many innocent people have been killed as a result of it. Mascagni concludes: “I have a hard time understanding why the majority of Americans still support the death penalty. Maybe they are simply uneducated about the real effects of this cruel and barbaric form of punishment (or maybe they have a fetish for vengeance).”

I don’t think Mascagni is doing its proponents’ arguments justice, nor do I find his arguments against the death penalty convincing. To see why, consider this: on the same day, white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed by Texas. Brewer was convicted in the infamous dragging case, in which James Byrd, a black man from East Texas, was tied to the bumper of a truck by Brewer and two friends, and dragged for 3 miles. At the end, what was left of Byrd’s shredded remains was dumped between a black church and a nearby cemetery. As far as I know, there was no public outcry by death penalty abolitionists over Brewer’s execution. That may be because many of the criticisms that abolitionists levy against the death penalty are not about the death penalty itself, but the moral difficulties involved in punishment and the justice system in general.

But let us consider Mascagni’s arguments anyway. First, the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment without parole, not because of the cost of lethal injection, but because their appeals are prioritized in the appellate system. In my view, this counts in favor of capital punishment — the justice system works harder in capital punishment cases than elsewhere. But even if it did not, we should not decide what constitutes a just punishment based on how expensive the punishment is alone.

Second, while many other nations have banned capital punishment, it does not mean we should do the same. Morality is about more than going along with the crowd.

Third, it is true that death row inmates are disproportionately black and that many convicts, in the past, have been proven innocent. But is this a problem with the form of punishment, or the justice system’s effectiveness at convicting guilty parties? Black Americans are not just overrepresented as death row inmates. They are overrepresented in the entire criminal justice system. Is not it also grossly unjust for innocent convicts to be sentenced to be confined to a cell for life and, in many cases, beaten and raped on a regular basis? Is this not just as cruel and unusual as a lethal injection?

The imperfections in the criminal justice system raise serious questions about the permissibility of punishment, but most abolitionists are not arguing for eliminating the justice system altogether. Instead, we should take these criticisms seriously and work to improve the system as best we can. When new evidence arises, we should reexamine it along with the other facts of the case and avoid making hasty decisions. Other reforms should be on the table as well. However, we should recognize that the likelihood that the justice system will be perfect is quite small. This means that the injustice of an innocent person being convicted won’t go away any time soon.

At least until Minority Report becomes reality.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Conservative Media Bias?

On 9/11, Paul Krugman wrote this on his blog in a post titled “Years of Shame”:

“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”

He got a lot of flak for it, mainly for calling Republicans “fake heroes”. Donald Rumsfeld even canceled his subscription to the New York Times…wait. What? Don Rumsfeld had a subscription to the New York Times?!? I thought conservatives got all their information from Fox News.

Anyway, on the same day, George Mason economist Robin Hanson wrote this in a post titled “Forget 9/11″:

“In the decade since 9/11 over half a billion people have died worldwide. A great many choices could have delayed such deaths, including personal choices to smoke less or exercise more, and collective choices like allowing more immigration. And cryonics might have saved most of them.

Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles. And now we’ll waste a day remembering them, instead of thinking seriously about how to save billions of others. I would rather we just forgot 9/11.

Do I sound insensitive? If so, good — 9/11 deaths were less than one part in a hundred thousand of deaths since then, and don’t deserve to be sensed much more than that fraction. If your feelings say otherwise, that just shows how full fricking far your mind has gone.”

Any flak? None that I know of, only admiration among conservative/libertarian minded people who agree that 9/11 led to policies that they don’t approve of: unjust wars, removal of rights, lots of wasteful spending.

What’s interesting to note is that the main difference is that while Krugman blames the administration for these policies, Hanson appears to be blaming…the victims (said in high-pitched cracking voice)?

Strange, I know. Yes, the victims’ deaths are relatively few compared with other causes of death, but it seems odd that we’re willing to look the other way when someone blames the victims, but when someone blames the administration that enacted the bad policies, we’re outraged. After all, it’s not as if the administration had to invade Iraq, adopt the Patriot Act, and torture detainees. They used 9/11 as an excuse to grab power and push their ideological agenda. [Remember the "pre-9/11 mindset"?] Ceremonies and aid to the victims’ families and first respondents hasn’t been the major cost over the last 10 years.

It’s true that Hanson isn’t as high profile as Krugman and that Krugman is generally more demonized among right-wingers, but I’ve seen others, like the Freakonomics authors Levitt and Dubner, make similar arguments, though certainly not as bluntly as Hanson. I sympathize with their arguments, but disagree with how they’re assigning blame. Why are they so reluctant to demonize Republicans, but so unashamed to demonize victims?

Filed under: Government Spending, Law, Media, Politics, Public Policy

Economists v. Physicists: Who to Trust?

Sean Carroll and Robin Hanson are arguing about the methodological differences between physics and economics and whether the public has good reasons for trusting the expertise of physicists and not economists. They raise several important points:

• There is more consensus in physics than economics.
• Bias is more abundant in economics compared to physics.
• Physicists are given more leeway to use technical jargon in public, making them seem more expert.
• The public has a bias on issues related to economics. They have relatively less bias on issues related to physics.
• Social science is much harder than physical science, so the answers we come up with are less reliable.

Carroll also presents an important question: “[W]hen should we trust an expert simply because they are an expert?” His answer is “never”, though he recognizes that people have limited time and therefore a degree of trust is necessary. A better answer to his question would be: “Always, unless you have a good reason not to.” Economists are often hired by special interest groups to analyze a particular issue in the group’s favor. This would certainly be a good reason to be skeptical of the economist’s claims. But, in general, as lay persons, we should trust the scientific consensus.

Though they present some important differences, I think they miss out on some really crucial ones. First, physicists have an enormous advantage in their ability to assess causality: They can run experiments. Running experiments and isolating variables is simply the best scientific method we have for gaining knowledge. The fact that experimentation is difficult in economics means that we have to rely on less reliable methods for determining truth or causality.

Another enormously important factor is that, though economists give us insight into the economic consequences of various policies, we may have other more important reasons for rejecting those policies. Economics presupposes a moral criterion of efficiency as the best policy goal, but non-consequentialists may reject this goal because of other ethical concerns. It’s not that the public doesn’t trust the expertise of economists, but that they think other criteria are more morally significant than the economist does. Consider the case of eminent domain laws. An economic case can be made that these laws lead to greater efficiency, but a libertarian may reject the laws on the grounds that they violate property rights.

There are many more interesting methodological differences between physics and economics such as unification, prediction, and logical coherence. But all signs certainly point to more faith and trust in physics than economics. I say this as a believer in economics as the best method for understanding social science phenomena. But come on, let’s be real here.

Filed under: Economic Methodology, Economics, Methodology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Physics

The Rise of Moral Individualism

Update: Read David C. Miller’s unique, insightful response to Brooks here.

David Brooks’ op-ed in the Times details the rise of different forms of moral subjectivism such as nihilism, relativism, and emotivism:

“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.”

Brooks’ analysis seems spot on, but it’s interesting to think about it in the context of other sociocultural trends that are happening. Consider, for example, the diminishing influence of organized religion in child rearing. Many have good criticisms of religion, specifically regarding the evidence for the truth of its many claims. However, it seems self-evident that religion has instrumental value for developing the moral compass of children. While the answers it provides for moral questions aren’t satisfying for many adults, they are certainly capable of providing satisfactory answers for children. It seems as though institutions haven’t really risen to the challenge of replacing the instrumental value of organized religion in developing moral cognition. This is why “character education” in pre-K and primary schooling is of increasing importance.

Globalization and increased culture sharing, though unintentional, also likely encourages moral subjectivism by encouraging tolerance. A greater level of tolerance is typically a good thing; we don’t want to reject others’ beliefs or moral judgments out of hand. Nevertheless, tolerance and knowledge of difference often does lead one down the subjectivist path to the intuition that no moral judgments are better or worse than any others.

A final factor is the decreasing level of social capital. Neighborhoods and communities are not as tight-knit as they once were. The rise of social individualism and anti-social outlets, (e.g., video gaming, web browsing, etc.), hinder our ability to develop moral cognition and empathy. It’s much easier to accept starving children in Africa because we don’t have to see them every day. As we isolate ourselves more and more from the outside world, it becomes much easier to ignore its problems.

All things considered, however, other factors such as technological progress and the spread of democracy are still making the world a better place, morally speaking. While we should be aware of the rise of moral subjectivism and try to fight it, it’s important to look at these things in context.

Filed under: Ethics, Philosophy, Religion

Why Not Grow the Pie?

Robert Frank also has some unique insights about why there’s such pushback against adopting efficient policies, e.g., free trade agreements. He appeals to the notion of potential Pareto improvements. The reason that we haven’t adopted more efficient policies is that there’s such a taboo on redistribution in the U.S. The idea of a potential Pareto improvement is that if you allow for the losers of the efficient policy to be compensated, everyone can be made better off. Growing the pie actually helps everyone. But if the losers, e.g., the manufacturing industry employees, know they’re not going to be compensated, then they’re going to push against the efficient policy in the political system.

If you allowed for more redistribution in the form of education or job training programs, you’d probably see a lot less political pushback, and we’d be able to grow the pie a lot more effectively.

Filed under: Economics, Government Spending, Politics, Taxes

My Ideal Tax System

Robert Frank is a Cornell economist. He wrote the microeconomics textbook I used as an undergraduate student. I’ve listened to a few EconTalks (here and here) he’s done with Russ Roberts and found them pretty insightful. He also did an event with Justin Wolfers comparing absolute and relative income and the implications for the general welfare.

Frank’s conclusion leads him to support a progressive consumption tax. This is my preferred system of taxation. His idea takes insights from many that what matters isn’t inequality of income or wealth, but inequality of consumption. The mechanisms he has in place are pretty simple and build off the system that is already in place. You just take someone’s income and subtract their savings/investments to get their taxable consumption. Then you give large deduction, e.g., $30,000 a year for a family of four, or whatever you think is an adequate amount of consumption for the basic goods. Then the tax rates become steeply progressive. Maybe they start at 10% and escalate as high as you like.

The best thing about this system is that you don’t get any distortionary effects. You can have a 100% tax rate on consumption over $10 million a year and it won’t discourage work, investment or wealth accumulation. In fact, it would probably do the opposite. If the price of a Sweet Sixteen party or a corporate jet suddenly doubles, you’d probably just decide to save, invest, or donate that money, rather than use it for conspicuous consumption.

Frank wrote an NYTimes op-ed on the subject a few years back.

Filed under: Economics, Taxation

Limits of Property Rights

I often talk about how influential utilitarianism and Rawlsian liberalism have been. My take is that utilitarianism is the most influential moral philosophy among philosophers, but also via its contribution to economics, among academics in general. Rawlsian liberalism is the most influential theory of justice among political philosophers. But, libertarianism is the most influential political theory among the general population in the English speaking world, though considerably less popular among philosophers. Nevertheless, because of its influence, we need to respond to its objections to liberal and utilitarian prescriptions.

Some libertarians have a particularly confused view of property rights, where they draw a very bright line between owning something and not owning it. If you own it, you can do what you want with it. If you don’t own it, you can’t. That’s obviously mistaken based on how property rights are actually established. Owning a house doesn’t mean you can keep alligators and elephants in your backyard. Zoning laws, though objectionable, also restrict your ability to use the things you own in whatever way you like.

Filed under: Libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Property Rights