Connectivity, transparency, agency, choices, accountability, responsibility.

From a review of Niall Ferguson's The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, a book which I happen to have by my bedside, waiting to be read.

Niall Ferguson belongs to a whole class of author's who puzzle me. Or rather, my approach to them puzzles me. Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, Jan Morris, John McPhee, Garrison Keillor, John Keegan are all authors whose topics and writing fascinate me. I buy their books. And then I don't read them. Well. I have read at least one or more by each of them. But all the others, I usually read a few pages, park it for a while to come back to. And then never do. Or at least not yet. Between those six authors, I have 35 books of theirs, just over half a dozen have I read, and all the rest are waiting. But thats by the by.

In the review:

What the financial crisis shows is that, though the market can go through decades of growth, the world financial system is, indeed, fragile in ways not observed by market players. As a champion of markets and their ability to self-correct, I don’t make such a concession lightly. What became clear during the crisis is that large, interconnected financial institutions were holding securities based on underlying assets whose value was not transparent. When prices and quantities are not transparent, markets do not work. And in finance, where so many of the assets consist of promises for future payment, this can create havoc in very short order.

No regulation or set of regulations or lack of regulations can bear the primary blame for that inherent fragility. Ferguson is right that the complex modern economy is best governed by simple rules—rather than by the hubris of government officials who think they can match that complexity with a correspondingly complex set of rules. But two questions remain: what rules, and who is to oversee it all? This book shows why the simple blame-deregulation story is not convincing, but there are so many rules and actors involved in this saga that the case Ferguson wants to make that over-regulation was the primary cause of the crisis falls short. There were just too many moving pieces to account for in such a small amount of space.

Connectivity, transparency, agency, choices, accountability, responsibility. They keep coming back to bite us. We know they are important but we keep not understanding how important and in what ways.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

I am often in disagreement with those that seek to impose predetermined identities on others based on race, gender, orientation, religion, etc. and then try and prescribe books based on those imposed identities. The point I always attempt to make is 1) we are a portfolio of identities and 2) our identities are subject to context, and 3) our identities evolve over time. For these reasons, I think the blind prescription is ignorant, disrespectful and counterproductive.

As often happens, eventually you find someone who has addressed this much better, much earlier. William James in his The Principles of Psychology (1890).

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these images is to wound him. But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.

Both divorce and death consistently influence children in a negative way, although the overall effect size in each case is quite small.

Interesting. From Divorce Is Hardest on Already Disadvantaged Children by Harry Benson.

The main finding from the study is that both divorce and death consistently influence children in a negative way, although the overall effect size in each case is quite small. Specifically, following parental divorce, children tend to become worse at reading, at math, in their approach to learning, in their interpersonal skills, in their self-control, and in the way they internalize and externalize problems. Following parental death, only math and internalizing tend to deteriorate. The evidence for a causal effect—in both cases—is strong.

Across all of these findings, children’s most common response to the divorce itself was to show no change. The reason why the overall effect is negative is that the proportion of children who did worse after divorce was slightly higher than the proportion of children who did better. For example, internalized problems increased for 24 percent of children and reduced for 10 percent; 22 percent of children got worse at math whereas 16 percent got better.

Interestingly, it’s not just divorce and death that have this effect. There are similar negative effects found in other studies where a parent leaves the household for other reasons—such as incarceration, migrating overseas for work, or being deployed overseas in the military.

It might be tempting to see all this as no big deal. Most kids cope. Some do better even if more do worse. Whether parental conflict was high or low before the divorce undoubtedly plays a role in this.

But there’s one further important variation. And this is new. Across all of these findings—math, reading, internalizing or externalizing problems—divorce had an especially marked negative effect when the parents were more at risk of divorce in the first place, whether due to their education level, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. The children who do worst after divorce have parents who are least able to buffer its effects.

This might help explain why politicians and policy-makers tend to hold a relaxed view of family breakdown. Maybe they look at their own experience and their network of friends and can’t see the problem. But in families with fewer resources, when parents are less well-equipped to buffer its effects, divorce remains devastating for children.

I touched on the issue of how the least financial secure suffer excessive exposure to negative consequences in this post from last year, The brittleness of tactical decision-making.

The last paragraph also echoes Not quite as cynical as it seemed in which I discuss the fact that perception of a problem can be substantially shaped by the randomness of local direct experience rather than a measured understanding of means, modes, and median across this diverse country.

The research highlights just how complex and nuanced sociological/political issues can be.

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs

From Discrimination and the Effects of Drug Testing on Black Employment by Abigail K. Wozniak.

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs. A common assumption is that the rise of drug testing must have had negative consequences for black employment. However, the rise of employer drug testing may have benefited African-Americans by enabling non-using blacks to prove their status to employers. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to identify the impacts of testing on black hiring. Black employment in the testing sector is suppressed in the absence of testing, a finding which is consistent with ex ante discrimination on the basis of drug use perceptions. Adoption of pro-testing legislation increases black employment in the testing sector by 7-30% and relative wages by 1.4-13.0%, with the largest shifts among low skilled black men. Results further suggest that employers substitute white women for blacks in the absence of testing.

I posted on this issue sometime in the past couple of years but can't lay my hands on the item. The point I was making in the older post is bolstered here - What makes sense (try to reduce the disparate impact of drug tests by race by outlawing such tests) from a logical and academic perspective can have dramatically counter-productive unintended outcomes in the real world. What this tentative evidence suggests is that drug tests are a way to increase opportunity, not suppress it.

Mixing smart cities and smart states

A very interesting point illustrating both the importance of definitions and the importance of comparing apples-to-apples.

When government agencies or private research groups release state-by-state information, they often include the District of Columbia. That makes sense. Citizens of the district are part of this country (albeit without the same democratic rights as other citizens).

But even if Washington deserves a place on national lists alongside the 50 states, it isn’t very similar to any of them. It’s a city. And cities are, by and large, richer, gayer, more educated, more expensive and more economically optimistic. Take education. The typical ranking of states makes Washington look to be by far the most educated place in the country. About 50 percent of its residents have at least a bachelor’s degree. No state exceeds 40 percent. But a ranking of cities looks different: Washington still does very well, but is in third place, not first. Seattle (56 percent) and San Francisco (51 percent) are both more educated.

Ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value.

Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway?

Media brands values are in such decline

From Jobless contend with weight gain as they search for work by Michael S. Rosenwald,

An interestingly constructed and quite confused article. It is not really reporting news. It seems to want to make a case that 1) Unemployment causes obesity, 2) Obesity reduces employment opportunities, and 3)Something ought to be done about it by the government.

Federal law does not protect overweight people from discrimination in the workplace, and studies involving workers in human resources show that it’s a daily reality. A 2012 study in the journal BMC Public Health “found a pronounced stigmatization of obese individuals, especially of women, by HR professionals.”

The two predicate statements undoubtedly have some validity. But like many social issues, it appears immensely complex and ambiguous. From the evidence in the article, one could as easily make the case that obesity causes unemployment as the other way around.

While the article sporadically has references to studies to bolster particular points, it relys overall primarily on anecdotes and human interest stories.

Like a lot of conversations and reporting these days, there is feel good talk, there is logical but not empirically documented suppositions, there are claims of this being a problem without support, there are calls for people to be educated and government policies to be improved. And at the end you are left with the feeling: Is that all there is?

Is this really a problem? Probably but its hard to tell. They are using a particular county in Maryland to illustrate their case.

The report found that 72 percent of county residents were overweight or obese, compared with a national average of 63 percent. Its top recommendation: fight obesity.

But if the baseline is 63% of the population is already obese, it is unlikely that an obesity rate of 72% is going to make all that much more of a difference. Perhaps, but it isn't immediately obvious.

They want people to be better informed about food and eating choices but it seems from the quoted individuals that they are already aware that they ought to be eating better. It doesn't seem to be an issue of access or knowledge or awareness. Personal decision-making seems at the core of the issue.

“When you’re defeated, you get depressed,” he said. “When you get depressed, most people have a vice. They either smoke or they eat, whatever.” He ate.

“Anything,” he said. “Junk food. It didn’t matter.”

There was a gym in the community where he lives, but Farrell didn’t use it.

“You can go to the gym, but you just don’t feel like it,” he said. “You don’t feel like doing anything.”

[snip]

She said that she had gained way too much weight after losing her warehouse job.

She copes this way: “I just want to eat and eat all day. It makes you feel better.”

The reporter raises but does not address a couple of challenging trade-offs that are on the face of it reasonable but also consequential in a negative fashion.

Job training groups push trucking, a booming industry always hiring drivers, as a career option for blue-collar workers displaced by automation or jobs moving overseas.

But there are federal health requirements that the obese can’t meet.

It is not unreasonable for the government to have these regulations (as long there is some reasonable empirical relationship between the health requirements and desired policy outcomes such as reduced accident rates or something like that.)

Likewise businesses have to take in to account anticipated impacts on their customer and financial goals (just as the federal government does with public safety) and those decisions can also be negatively consequential.

By the end we can, from the article, only conclude that obesity might be an issue with regard to employment opportunities and that it would be nice if it weren't.

Stepping away from the article and providing context (of which the reporter ought to have been aware: 1) We do not understand the root causes of the obesity epidemic, 2) we don't know for certain that it is a material health issue, 3) we don't understand the linkages between nutrition and weight gain, 4) we don't understand the linkages between individual decision-making and obesity, 5) we have no existing programs that are demonstrably successful helping people to lose and sustain weight loss, 6) we don't understand whether there is a connection between obesity and worker productivity, 7) we don't understand the magnitude of the impact, if any, between business goals of employing low cost high productivity workers and an obese workforce, 8) we don't understand the magnitude of the trade-off decisions between health, safety, and productivity particularly when it comes to an obese workforce, 9) despite initial claims to the contrary, recent research has indicated that food access and exercise acces are not inhibiting factors affecting obesity and 10) there is a well documented inverse relationship between working/income and obesity, i.e. those that work the most hours and earn the most are also the least likely to be obese contra the implication of the reporters argument.

With all these reasonably well established caveats, what is Rosenwald reporting? Doesn't appear that there is a news event. It is clear that there is a lot of terra incognita surrounding obesity. What this reads like is a dressed up PR on the part of some advocacy group to which, consequently, the Washington Post is lending its name and brand. Given that that happens so much these days, it is understandable why Media brands values are in such decline.

The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly . . .

From A Girl in a Library in The Seven-League Crutches by Randall Jarrell

A Girl in a Library
by Randall Jarrell

. . . The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time.
It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly. . .
Yet it is hard. One sees in your blurred eyes
The "uneasy half-soul" Kipling saw in dogs'.
One sees it, in the glass, in one's own eyes.
In rooms alone, in galleries, in libraries,
In tears, in searchings of the heart, in staggering joys
We memorize once more our old creation,
Humanity: with what yawns the unwilling
Flesh puts on its spirit, O my sister!

. . .

Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and bias were uncorrelated

From What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations by Katherine L. Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh. Abstract.

Little is known about how bias against women and minorities varies within and between organizations or how it manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. We hypothesized that discrimination would appear at the informal “pathway” preceding entry to academia and would vary by discipline and university as a function of faculty representation and pay. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program. Names of students were randomly assigned to signal gender and race (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese), but messages were otherwise identical. We found that faculty ignored requests from women and minorities at a higher rate than requests from White males, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and bias were uncorrelated, suggesting that greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce bias. This research highlights the importance of studying what happens before formal entry points into organizations and reveals that discrimination is not evenly distributed within and between organizations.

The study seems in most ways to be much more robust than many I see. My primary concern is that the study does not include raw numbers. They indicate that 67% of professors responded in some fashion but other than that, nothing. All the other measures are relative or percentages which can sometimes mask issues. Other than that, this seems reasonably solid.

This is the second study in a couple of weeks that I have seen indicating that the bias is institutional rather than individual, in other words, that African-American professors discriminate to the same degree as White professors against minority applicants ("Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and bias were uncorrelated, suggesting that greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce bias.")

I have long assumed that there was a lot of discrimination going on against all parties, and not necessarily from a group perspective (race, gender, class, religion, orientation, etc.) but from an operational/institutional perspective. Doesn't make it less bad, but sometimes it makes it more understandable and therefore more amenable to targeted solutions. I have always suspected that the victim categories (race, gender, etc.) are something of a red herring obscuring a much more complex reality.

What are the factors that might be causing professors to be less responsive to minorities and women (independent of their own race and gender)? Being an economist, I of course instantly fall back on trying to understand incentives. What are the risks and rewards to which professors are responding?

And why are there differences based on gender and race? Chinese Females appear to be the most discriminated against followed by Indian Males, then Chinese Males, then Indian Females, then African-American Females.

Why are the STEM fields most receptive to unsolicited contacts from prospective PhD students as opposed to the nominally more people oriented fields of Business, Education, Human Services and Health Sciences?

We already know some of the issue related to gender. Women depart from full time employment at higher rates and for longer durations than do men. If you are a professor, how might that influence your inclination to respond to a female expressing interest in the field? To what degree are response rates shaped by professor's anticipated network ROI calculations? In other words, given limited time and competing demands, there is a limit to the amount of time that can be spent on career coaching and mentoring. There is a real return on creating dense homophilic affiliation networks in most fields, presumably including academia. The implication though is that you probably want to invest your limited time in responding to, coaching and mentoring candidates who are most likely to 1) be around, 2) be continually productive, and 3) have some probability of elite accomplishment. Does that informal heuristic calculation lead professors to consciously or unconsciously favor male candidates? I don't know but it is a logical inference.

But what about minorities? And in particular, why such a strong negative showing for what are otherwise characterized as "model minorities" (i.e. Asian and Indian)? I can only speculate. I am guessing that there might possibly be three things going on.

Most insidious would be if there is indeed, as is widely speculated, an informal cap on Asian/Indian applicants to the most prestigious programs. If that really exists, then it would serve as a disincentive to spend time on such interested candidates. I kind of doubt that this is the case 1) because I hope it is not true and 2) even if it is, my impression is that all the speculation is centered on undergraduates, not graduate and PhD programs.

Beyond that obvious one, the only strong explanatory candidate I have is the possibility that such professors may see a large volume of international Asian and Indian candidates who present complications towards their acceptance in a program. If you are interested in maximizing the ROI on your affiliative homophilic network, you are likely to discount time invested in candidates where there might be language, culture, financing, foreign credential validity issues and green card issues. This hypothesis could have been tested if there had been in a sampling of the letters an explicit disclaimer of citizenship/residency issues. According to this hypothesis, those already demonstrating residency/citizenship should have had higher response rates. I am guessing residency status concern might be a significant factor in the differential response rates.

Why else might minority professors along with their majority colleagues respond differentially to minority candidates? Is there a markedly different attrition rate between minorities and majority? That would certainly be a reason. Are there issues in the grant application process that makes it harder to fund work by minority (non-citizen) candidates? Is there something about the unsolicited contact process that holds some bias? I am running on fumes here. I am certain someone in academia might highlight additional operational reasons that might be relevant.

All in all a very interesting study that formalizes, structures and documents that there is a real pattern of disparate response. But whether the disparate response is warranted for non-obvious operational issues remains unclear. What does seem clear is that disparate impact is based more on operational issues than on majority bias. If all professorial respondents (minority and majority) are equally disparate in their response, then that suggests there is either shared discriminatory biases, which seems unlikely, or that they are responding to some set of shared experiences/knowledge that we are not taking into account.

One other factor suggests to me that this is more operational than discriminatory bias. It is well documented that universities are sharply skewed in political orientation compared to the general populace. Very roughly the general population runs self-identified conservative 40%, moderate 40% and liberal 20% whereas most humanities fields run self-identified conservative 10%, moderate 10% and liberal 80%. From an ideological perspective the stereotype is of liberals being the most unaccepting of discrimination. Now there is no reason that prevents them from holding the view that discrimination is completely wrong and yet being severely discriminatory. Everyone is self-deceptive of the gap between belief and practice. However, these gaps are pretty large.

AN interesting study that provides a platform for much deeper investigation. My suspicion is that the root causes are going to be found to be operational rather than personal bias, but that remains to be determined.

Only 5% of the population are concerned about inequality and 93% have little or no confidence in the government being able to do something constructive about it

An interesting set of data identifying the concerns of the public, and ipso facto contrasting those with politicians and partisans. The People's Agenda: America's Priorities and Outlook for 2014 by AP-NORC.

Economic concerns (unemployment, health of the economy and government debt, are three of the top five concerns. They are preceded by concerns about healthcare which is certainly topical and followed by concerns about immigration. Education, of as about great concern as immigration, tops out the list of six issues, about which at least 20% of the citizens are concerned.

Regarding the "defining challenge of our time" as identified by President Obama, i.e. income inequality, only 5% of the population are concerned about it and 93% have little or no confidence in the government being able to do something constructive about it. So, not a big deal and you can't fix it anyway.

Lack of confidence of the citizenry in the capacity of elected officials to constructively address an issue is not limited to income inequality. For the eleven items about which citizens are actually concerned, 60% or more of citizens lack confidence in the government's capacity to effectively address the particular concern.

Key findings from the report.

The public’s preferred agenda for the government in 2014 includes a diverse set of policy issues that range from economic problems to social policies to foreign affairs. Health care reform is at the top of the public’s list of priorities.

Americans want the government to put significant effort into addressing their priority problems. On the most commonly mentioned issues, large majorities of Americans, two-thirds or more, would like the federal government to devote a lot or a great deal of effort toward solving those problems. And although the public is split on how active a role government ought to take generally, nearly six in 10 see government as a necessary intermediary in dealing with the complex modern economy.

When asked how confident they are that the federal government can make real progress in solving each of the
problems they identified, Americans report very low levels of confidence, with large majorities saying they are only
slightly or not at all confident that the government can make real progress on the most commonly mentioned issues.

Americans express relatively little faith in the current political system, giving the government low marks on its performance upholding this country’s fundamental principles. For example, more people believe the government is doing a poor job than a good job of promoting the well-being of all Americans—not just special interests (55 percent vs. 9 percent)—and of representing the views of most Americans (55 percent vs. 9 percent).

Americans have important personal goals for 2014—such as issues with personal finances and health—but also report
facing significant challenges in meeting those goals.

Looking back, Americans most often cite technology as the biggest change to American life, and they tend to think the
quality of life in America has declined in the last four decades and will continue to do so over the next 40 years.