There are problems that the government can fix, but the problem of people not liking to be in the bottom of the distribution is not among them

From What Does it Mean to Be Poor? by Megan McArdle.

Ever since that report, it's been conservatives on one side, pointing to the consumption data, while liberals retort that there is more to life than flat screen televisions. And I'd say that both sides have a point. When you look at what people are consuming, you don't see the gross material deprivation that really used to characterize being poor, like lack of hot water, regularly having no food in the house, shivering yourself to sleep in the cold, or wearing patched (or worse, unpatched) clothes. Younger poor people quite frequently have things that older non-poor people consider nonessential luxuries, like cable or satellite television, expensive sneakers, and high-end cellular phones. On the other hand, it's still really terrible to be poor, and there are quite clearly rather a lot of people suffering this terribleness.

So how do we reconcile these two observations? There's what I'd call the implicit conservative view, which is that poor people are not so much lacking in money, as lacking in the self-discipline to spend their money wisely. This view is reinforced by the fact that a lot of immigrants do arrive here with even less than the native poor, often don't qualify for supplemental benefits that cushion the deprivation of the native poor, and nonetheless after a generation or two end up quite prosperous. This Bryan Caplan post is a fairly strong version of that argument.

I think it's hard to disagree that the poor could stop being poor--at least as the US currently defines poverty--if they behaved differently; it's basically numerically impossible to fall under the poverty line if you finish high school, wait to have children until you get married, and both work full time. On the other hand, as I wrote a while back, I think this ignores the evidence that when you are poor--"which is to say", noted George Orwell of unemployed coal miners, "when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable"--it is actually much harder to make those choices than Bryan seems to imagine. Which is why the poor of Orwell's England also struggled with things like obesity and dental decay from consuming too much sugar and not enough vegetables; it is hard to get interested in dieting if a sugar high is the nicest thing that ever happens to you.

There's also what I'd call the implicit left view, which is that, as Jesus said, "The poor, you will always have with you." This Noah Smith post on poverty in Japan seems to encapsulate it pretty well. In response to Caplan, Smith argues out that about 16% of the Japanese seem to be poor, even though they are notoriously crime free, averse to single parenthood, and not big drinkers or drug users. These are people who work, but need to scrimp on things like food, and eschew vacations, in order to afford even more necessary items such as medical care and school uniforms. “Poverty in a prosperous society usually does not mean living in rags on a dirt floor,” Tokyo social welfare professor Masami Iwata told the New York Times. “These are people with cellphones and cars, but they are cut off from the rest of society.”

I take the point. The minimum decent living standard--aka the poverty line--does rise along with national wealth. In 1900, many middle class families may have lacked a telephone. But by 1980, not having a telephone indeed meant that you were "cut off from the rest of society". It's hard to even look for a job if you cannot put a phone number on a resume. Similarly, now that we do not have an elaborate infrastructure for feeding and sheltering horses, or a place that they may be easily and safely driven to town, some sort of car is a minimum requirement for living in many places.

And yet, this sort of observation often comes dangerously close to the trivially true point that there is a bottom of the income distribution. If you simply define the bottom 15% or so of society as poor, you will have gained definitional clarity, but at the expense of moral clarity on the required response. There's a bottom 15% of the income distribution at Davos every year, yet I would not contribute to a charity which promised to help those unfortunates. There are problems that the government can fix, but the problem of people not liking to be in the bottom of the distribution is not among them. At least, not short of a sort of radical communism that not even the radical communists managed to actually implement.

They come in, clobber you over the head, and then go away

From Once Upon a Time: The lure of the fairy tale by Joan Acocella, a rambling essay with some interesting publishing history and recounting the changing critical assessment over time of the Grimm's Fairy Tales.

A quite interesting story about academia's fraught relationship with children's literature in general and fairy tales in particular. Acocella does not really address the perennial allure of fairy tales. Her article might be better subtitled: Once Upon a Time: The lure of the fairy tale to the febrile imagination of academics.

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity. However much detail Wilhelm added, the stories are still extremely short. Jack Zipes’s translation of “Rapunzel” is three pages long, “The Twelve Brothers” five, “Little Red Riding Hood” less than four. They come in, clobber you over the head, and then go away. As with sections of the Bible, the conciseness makes them seem more profound.

The stiffer the social or legal punishment, the steeper the burden of proof that accusers must climb

From The Cost of Costly Punishment by Megan McArdle. An excellent article articulating how trade-offs are at the heart of the most interesting and challenging decisions. We don't like the choices and yet a choice has to be made.

Separate from the point of the article is the juxtaposition of two different writers discussing the same topic from entirely different vantages. I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell but as I indicated some time ago, you can't trust his writing. He is compelling and writes about interesting issues in a persuasive fashion. But if you step away from the emotional narrative and look at his arguments from a logical perspective and you examine his evidence with a modicum of skepticism, you discover that his gift for writing well is the key variable in his articles; not his actual arguments.

I would view Gladwell as making arguments by infusing selective data and research into a literary narrative. Gladwell sees a putative pattern in the environment and then communicates it artistically.

McArdle on the other hand, also looks for patterns in the data but rather than using pathos, she uses logos to explore the validity and implications of that pattern. She comes up with equally compelling narrative, but for my money, hers, while perhaps less literary, are the more interesting. Particularly because, following the logos, she often arrives at the unpleasant trade-off decisions we seek to avoid and which often get hidden in the weeds of a literary narrative.

Something that law-and-order hawks frequently underestimate is that when you make punishments harsher, they tend to be applied less frequently. Take probation revocation. In theory, once a pattern of probation violations is established, a judge brings the hammer down and sends the offender to jail. In practice, probation violations only get written up when there's quite a pattern of offending--5, 10, even 20 or more violations. Eventually, the probationer commits one violation too many, and their frustrated probation officer requests a revocation.

The problem is that even if there's a pattern, the actual violation that sends them to court is usually fairly trivial: they missed a probation appointment, tested dirty on a drug test, or perhaps got caught drinking a beer. You're asking a judge to send someone to prison for years over . . . what? Time management problems? A fondness for Coors Light? (Cue obvious jokes about American beer.)

In practice, the judge often declines to do so; they send the probationer back to try again. Eventually, that person is probably going to end up in jail--the failure rate of probation is disappointingly high--but it takes a long time. The result is what Mark Kleiman calls "randomized draconianism". Most of the time, when you violate, nothing happens. Only occasionally do we send you to jail. And that's inherent in the system: who imposes a five year prison term for smoking a single joint?

[snip]

But the very seriousness of the crime, and the harshness of the consequences means that society is also going to want to be very, very sure that the people it punishes have actually molested children. Nor is it clear to me that this is the wrong instinct; it is worth recalling that we systematically and thoroughly ruined the lives of the Amiraults forever, based on clearly confabulated stories from children who were inadvertently coached by irresponsible therapists to accuse the Amiraults of, as the Board of Parole put it in a skeptical review of the case, "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations."

I don't really see any way around this. Some crimes should be viewed as so morally horrific that they cut one off from decent society. But society also needs to be careful about who it cuts off. It is very terrible to let a child molester keep working on new victims. But it is also very terrible to destroy the life of an innocent adult--to brand him with a label that will probably keep him from ever associating with decent people again.

[snip]

In the cases of child molesting and racism, I think we've chosen the right tradeoff. (In the case of probation, I think we haven't, as I'll outline in my book). But we should understand that it's a tradeoff: the stiffer the social or legal punishment, the steeper the burden of proof that accusers must climb.

But the intergenerational transfer of cultural capital doesn’t just happen automatically

From Selfishness as Virtue by Benjamin E. Schwartz

That is a problem, but not one that bothers Klinenberg. In the cacophony of appeals to save the planet, create jobs, reduce the national debt, and end world poverty, it’s rare to hear anyone champion the value of social reproduction. But the intergenerational transfer of cultural capital doesn’t just happen automatically. It requires time, money, space and lots of institutional support. It also requires prioritization and encouragement. While America’s columnists, talking heads and progressive intellectuals are consumed with economic growth, technological development, individual opportunity and social safety nets, few question how well America is developing the character of the next generation.

It’s no accident that so many Americans have embraced expressive individualism or that American commentators avoid discussing how well we are transferring values from one generation to the next. After all, America is the land of the free, and that freedom grew in part out of a protest against that which came before (the medieval Catholic Church, the British Crown, the ways of the “old world”). The very act of journeying from somewhere else to the New World or from established colonies to the American frontier was an act of departure even if that journey allowed for continuity in a different place. A country born of immigrants is cautious in how forcefully it speaks of the present generation’s debt to the past or its responsibility to the future. But the Founders also greatly valued organic community, understanding that the chief distinguishing feature of a free society is that it maintains order through the self-regulation of citizens living together rather than by dint of the authorities of state, the internalization of civic values being the central bulwark against the deformation of liberty into license and chaos.

Nonetheless, American individualism seems to have been fed a rich diet in recent decades. That diet has consisted of both the general infusion of market-fundamentalist metaphors in our social and intellectual life and by a range of technological innovations. Both phenomena threaten to deplete stock of social capital.2 Individualism has come to mean no limits on our freedom of maneuver, no obligations arising from a shared history, community and culture. As a matter of objective and, yes, quantitatively measurable reality, we are indeed “going solo”, and most Americans seem to be fine with that—as the generally positive reception of Klinenberg’s book seems to reflect.

The recognition that we are who we are because of our elders raises uncomfortable questions about our responsibility to future generations. If someone in my past forsook instant gratification to allow me to become who I am, does this obligate me to do the same? Am I responsible for ensuring that certain values outlast and outlive me? America’s strength is a function of many factors, but certainly one of them is that for generations citizens answered these questions affirmatively. The popularity of “going solo”, which Klinenberg’s data strongly affirms, doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans are answering “no” to these questions. It’s worse than that: As more of us spend more of our lives alone, we’re less likely to even confront them. By default, we are now allowed the novel conceit that selfishness is a virtue.

Pescriptive rules are conventions

From False Fronts in the Language Wars by Steven Pinker. A very good discussion on the tendency of people to argue strawmen and false dichotomies, in this instance with respect to language.

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle.

[snip]

The thoughtful, nondichotomous position on language depends on a simple insight: Rules of proper usage are tacit conventions. Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things—not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, the Gregorian calendar, and paper currency are familiar examples.

The conventions of written prose represent a similar kind of standardization. Countless idioms, word senses, and grammatical constructions have been coined and circulated by the universe of English speakers, and linguists capture their regularities in the “descriptive rules”—that is, rules that describe how people speak and understand. A subset of these conventions has become accepted by a virtual community of literate speakers for use in nationwide forums such as government, journalism, literature, business, and academia. These are “prescriptive rules”—rules that prescribe how one ought to speak and write in these forums. Examples include the rules that govern agreement and punctuation as well as fine semantic distinctions between such word pairs as militate and mitigate or credible and credulous. Having such rules is desirable—indeed, indispensable—in many arenas of writing. They lubricate comprehension, reduce misunderstanding, provide a stable platform for the development of style and grace, and credibly signal that a writer has exercised care in crafting a passage.

Once you understand that prescriptive rules are conventions, most of the iptivist controversies evaporate.

Idiotic when viewed from any other perspectives

It is delightful that Megan McArdle is back writing after a fallow period as she transitioned from The Atlantic to Newsweek. I have missed her clear writing, rational thinking, and common sense. She is much like Thomas Sowell in that respect. From Philadelphia Wants its Eyesore Back by Megan McArdle.

It also harkens back to an old policy problem: excessively rule-bound government frequently does stuff that makes perfect sense within the rules, but is also perfectly idiotic when viewed from any other perspectives. The more we expand liability, and the tighter we wind the red tape, the more foolish outcomes like this we will see.

Every system has a tendency to accumulate unproductive elements over time. So long as there is not much external change or any external shocks, things may approach the level of unsustainability but don't usually crash over.

Government systems tend to be especially prone to this simply because it is usually shielded from agency, consequences, and to some degree resource constraints. But it is true in the competitive sector as well. Innumerable times in my consulting career I have asked why something was done a particular way (a way which seemed inefficient or ineffective) and gotten an answer along the lines of - It's always been done that way; Mr. Smith (who retired 25 years ago) set it up that way; It seemed too much trouble to change, etc. We get accustomed to the status quo and set great store on its preservation rather than figuring out how to improve it. Much success depends on fixing something and then leaving well enough alone. Except when the whole system becomes marred by just-good-enough. By the time you notice, it is often nearly too late.

Courage and fresh perspecitves are critical to every system.

The foundation of all civilization is loitering

Jean Renoir (French film director)

the foundation of all civilization is loitering

The shock felt around the world

From The Next Panic: Europe’s crisis will be followed by a more devastating one, likely beginning in Japan by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson. It is all about productivity. Continued growth can only occur, all other things being equal, with increasing productivity. The importance of productivity increases if other factors such as aging of population or actual decline of population are occurring.

Debt is a useful tool for easing transitions and facilitating investments but is only viable if it leads to greater productivity. Debt taken on in order to enable current consumption is a slippery slope towards ruin. And that is what has happened in the modern developing world. Britain, if I recall correctly, pioneered government borrowing in order to fund the Napoleonic wars. Despite horrendous levels of debt incurred defeating Napoleon, the near century of peace following 1815 allowed productivity to boom and for all that debt to be managed down. That debt bought the circumstances that enabled dramatic increases in productivity.

Japan and most of Europe are now well down the financial path of ruin. Aging and soon declining populations with increasing levels of already high indebtedness married to structural deficits to fund various social programs (transfers and consumption) means that, as the article indicates, that there are dark days ahead for our fellow OECD members. China is in much the same situation with their population graying rapidly, though not yet declining.

Despite a few reprehensible outliers (California, Rhode Island, Illinois, etc.) who are in nearly as bad condition as Greece, the US is not quite at the precipice yet. The economic trauma of our allies will hurt the US economy to some degree. Backing away from structurally unsustainable obligations will hurt even more but it is not as if there is a choice. Math is a harsh mistress.

Japan’s demographic decline will be hard to reverse—and even in the best-case scenario, the positive effects of a reversal would not be felt for decades. The economy, roughly speaking, is as healthy as it is likely to become. Yet the government seems incapable of steering away from the cliff, a characteristic that should strike no one as uniquely Japanese—just look at how the Euro­pean leadership has behaved over the past half decade, or how you can polarize American politicians with the phrase debt ceiling.

A crisis in Japan would most likely manifest as a collapse of confidence in the yen: At some point, Japanese citizens will decide that saving in any yen-­denominated asset is not worth the risk. Then interest rates will rise; the capital position of banks, insurance companies, and pension funds will worsen (because they all hold long-maturing bonds, which fall in value when rates rise); and fears of insolvency will surface.

[snip]

The shock felt around the world will result not just from the realization that Japan is unable to meet its pension and other social obligations. Investors will also be horrified to see the disappearance of the private savings previously used to buy government debt, whether through debt defaults and bank failures or through high inflation. For ordinary Japanese, public promises about retirement benefits and price stability will be broken just as their private savings for retirement collapse.

No one can predict the timing, but without radical political change that creates a more responsible fiscal trajectory, this will happen.

The most worrisome implication of Japan’s increasingly precarious position, particularly in the wake of the 2008 crash and Europe’s ongoing crisis, is that our financial systems appear to be returning to their inherently unstable nature, which plagued the 19th and early 20th centuries. Financial institutions back then were not too big to fail—they were too big to save. Their balance sheets dwarfed most governments’ ability and willingness to provide support.

I think Boone and Johnson paint perhaps too dark a picture but there are certainly grounds for concerns about these sort of fundamental questions. You have to produce more than you consume. If you borrow to consume, the bill will come due and you had better have the cultural and governance structures in place to make the hard decisions that come with such market adjustments to economic fundamentals.

Which brings us back to reading, storytelling, and the transference of the values, knowledge and skills that have served us well in the past and which, after a decades-long assault, will see us through to a better more productive future. Reading and books are a critical element in the revitalization, resurrection and transference of that culture. Read a book today.

Stop striving for a goal of universal eradication of the fringe that is frankly impossible

From Separating the Pseudo From Science by Michael D. Gordin. An essay exploring the intersection between argument, scientific method, knowledge, truth and the importance of variety/variation.

I have come to think of pseudoscience as science's shadow. A shadow is cast by something; it has no substance of its own. The same is true for these doctrines on the fringe. If scientists use some criterion such as peer review to demarcate, so will the fringe (creationists have peer-reviewed journals, as did Velikovskians). The brighter the light of science—that is, the greater its cultural prestige and authority—the sharper the shadow, and the more the fringe flourishes.

Fringe theories proliferate because the status of science is high and science is seen as something worth emulating. Since World War II, science has been consistently prestigious, and heterodox doctrines have proliferated, but the pattern holds in the past as well. Late Enlightenment France and Victorian Britain were high points of scientists' status, and clusters of such movements (mesmerism, spiritualism, phrenology) cropped up at these moments as well. Paradoxically, pseudoscience is a sign of health, not disease.

Shadows are also an inevitable consequence of light. Carl Sagan and other anti-Velikovskians believed that greater scientific literacy could "cure" the ill of pseudoscience. Don't get me wrong—scientific literacy is a wonderful thing, and I am committed to expanding it. But it won't eradicate the fringe, and it won't prevent the proliferation of doctrines the scientific community decries as pseudoscience.

Nevertheless, something needs to be done. Demarcation may be an activity without rules, a historically fluctuating marker of the worries of the scientific community, but it is also absolutely vital. Not everything can or should be taught in science courses in school. Not every research proposal can or should receive funds. When individuals spread falsehood and misinformation, they must be exposed.

We can sensibly build science policy only upon the consensus of the scientific community. This is not a bright line, but it is the only line we have. As a result, we need to be careful about demarcation, to notice how we do it and why we do it, and stop striving for a goal of universal eradication of the fringe that is frankly impossible. We need to learn what we are talking about when we talk about pseudoscience.

It's just a measure of the fact that you can find a lot of people who are willing to do that job

From The Merits of Merit Pay by Megan McArdle. She is addressing a common argument that confuses the perceived moral value of a job versus the market value of a job. It is economics 101 but not commonly understood and she puts it well.

We do, in fact, pay teachers pretty well relative to their level of education and hours worked. But that's a side point. The real point I wanted to make is that you hear this sort of thing all the time, and it misses a fundamental point about markets: it treats them as if the demand-side were all that mattered. In this mental model, the supply of workers is fixed, so the only thing that matters is how much we want them; the more we want them, the higher we bid their wages.

But of course, there is another side to the market: supply. And the reason that teachers are not paid as well, as, say, chartered financial analysts is that it is considerably easier to meet the requirements for being a teacher than to pass the CFA exam. It's no accident that the professions which require a lot of math pay more than the professions that are based more around reading and writing. Nor that math and science are the hardest positions to staff at most high schools.

But the majority of positions in high schools, or primary schools, are not staffed by math and science majors. They're staffed by humanities or education majors, who are relatively plentiful, and also, in less demand elsewhere in the market. With a glut of candidates, schools don't have to pay that well, and they don't.

This is not a measure of their value as people, nor of their value to society, nor even of whether society recognizes that value. It's just a measure of the fact that you can find a lot of people who are willing to do that job.