The Ambrosini Critique

Why social democracy? Its a great injustice in the world that smart people aren’t valued by society as much as they think they should be, especially given they know better than anyone else how things should work.

Proof of the injustice comes from the second table from this post at Half Sigma:

(Wordsum is a measure of intelligence.)

Fredrick Hayek wrote this about socialist intellectuals:

Nobody, for instance, who is familiar with large numbers of university faculties (and from this point of view the majority of university teachers probably have to be classed as intellectuals rather than as experts) can remain oblivious to the fact that the most brilliant and successful teachers are today more likely than not to be socialists, while those who hold more conservative political views are as frequently mediocrities…

The socialist will, of course, see in this merely a proof that the more intelligent person is today bound to become a socialist. But this is far from being the necessary or even the most likely explanation. The main reason for this state of affairs is probably that, for the exceptionally able man who accepts the present order of society, a multitude of other avenues to influence and power are open, while to the disaffected and dissatisfied an intellectual career is the most promising path to both influence and the power to contribute to the achievement of his ideals. Even more than that: the more conservatively inclined man of first class ability will in general choose intellectual work (and the sacrifice in material reward which this choice usually entails) only if he enjoys it for its own sake. He is in consequence more likely to become an expert scholar rather than an intellectual in the specific sense of the word; while to the more radically minded the intellectual pursuit is more often than not a means rather than an end, a path to exactly that kind of wide influence which the professional intellectual exercises. It is therefore probably the fact, not that the more intelligent people are generally socialists, but that a much higher proportion of socialists among the best minds devote themselves to those intellectual pursuits which in modern society give them a decisive influence on public opinion.

(h/t gnxp and commenter Peter Klein at The Monkey Cage)

Lane Kenworthy takes exception to Paul Krugman’s use of relative poverty rates to compare countries. The idea is that every country has a different level of income below which they classify a family as poor. Ken says one such relative measure of poverty is counting the number of people that earn less than half of the median income. Because the U.S. has higher incomes than most every other country, this definition would classify many more people as poor.

His post explains that by using absolute measures of income (like saying anyone that makes the equivalent of less than $x), the U.S. turns out to be about in the middle of the pack in terms of the number of poor people. He ends the post with this comment:

This is not to suggest that we should be satisfied with our absolute poverty ranking. Given our nation’s economic wealth, incomes for Americans at the low end of the distribution are far lower than they could be.

So he thinks we should care about the relative poverty measure, just that we shouldn’t use it to compare the U.S. against other countries.

Per my discussion the other day, I’m not sure why we should care about a measure of poverty that relies on comparing incomes. We can all agree that in terms of material outcomes, today’s American poor are an order of magnitude better off than the poor just a few generations ago and they’re several orders of magnitude better off then some poor souls living today continents away. To the extent that poverty is relative to the culture and norms of the day and place, the poor see themselves as poor (or the rest of us see them as poor) by comparing themselves to some culturally determined standard. The rich may not be the standard barer. Thus, defining “the poor” as contrasted to “the rich” may be missing the point.

Even if we define poverty in terms of health care (or health outcomes), labor hours, education attainment, or whatever, its worth pointing out that we’re doing so without reference to the behaviors of the rich. I just don’t see why a relative measure of poverty based on income inequality matters for what we really care about.

… does human life have infinite value? Should we spend any amount of money to save someones life?

Clearly the answer is no. But here’s a harder one: If someone has a disease and we have the means to cure it with very expensive treatment, should we cure him no matter the circumstances? Even if the diseased man is sure to die soon? Even if the money could be spent to cure 10 other people?

Are people that have to make these sorts of decisions every day, evil? What if those people have a profit motive? What if they work in a non-profit but non-governmental agency?

For being the best TV show ever, I was hating what happened in the latest episode of The Wire.

Oh, if you don’t have HBO on demand, you should get it. New episodes of The Wire are available the Monday before they air on normal HBO.

UPDATE: I have the feeling this one’s going end like the Sopranos; fade to blah: McNulty gets dumped again and goes on a binge, Bunk doesn’t solve another murder, Bubbles falls off the wagon, Marlo continues his rise in the drug world, Carcetti gets exposed as a fraud (to the audience only… he gets elected governor otherwise) and Omar…

I hate how much I love the idea. But how are they going to pull it off with out looking too much like the Sopranos?

Shocked I say!

Judge Posner advocates higher taxes:

For the first two years of grad school, I TA’d in the Anthropology department for a professor that taught Japanese culture. While I had always been interested in Japan — my original plan in grad school was to study Japanese economic history — I was literally a day’s reading ahead of my students.

Anyway, the readings would drive me nuts. Each book opens with a preface or introduction talking about how important it is to study such and such minority group; that to truly understand Japan, we need to be able to empathize with the Monks on Mt. Haguro or whatever. It took me three or four books to realize that the authors wouldn’t actually support this claim in any way. Instead the book would be 200-300 pages of pure description with an off the cuff comment about the dominant culture or American cultural hegemony thrown in.

Bothered by this, I went to the professor and asked her about normative Anthropology. I introduced the topic by asking something like, “On what basis do Anthropologist compare one culture or sub-culture against another? How do they know that minority cultures are in some way better than dominate cultures?”

I don’t remember her exact reply, but it was something like, “there is no normative Anthropology, there’s only description.” This seemed implausible given the tone of the readings for the course, but I let it pass. Every discipline has its delusions (*ahem* rationality *ahem*); who am I to burst Anthropology’s bubble.

Well, gnxp, who often criticizes Anthropology, out of love I’m sure, says there is no positive Anthropology either. Actually, I would say, there are theories in Anthropology, they’re just not written down. They swim around in Anthropologists heads, refracting observations into descriptions.

UPDATE: Just remembered this critique of Japanese Anthropology I wrote up a couple years ago.

Brad DeLong:

So were workers in London in 1740 as miserably poor as workers in Milan, Leipzig, and Beijing, spending most if not all on their income on bare caloric maintenance in the form of the grain typical of their time and place? Or were the workers of London relatively rich–and deciding to spend their relative wealth on the superior taste and mouth feel of yeasty wheat bread rather than leaden oatcakes and on the associated symbolic declaration that they were proud and free Englishmen, not benighted barbarous Scots (or horses)?

What is the “consumption” we tend to find in our utility functions?

Did you notice Prof. DeLong didn’t ask, “Were the London workers poor because they felt compelled to eat like rich people (and that costs more)?”

Even if you believe consumption is defined relative to ones culture it does NOT follow that income inequality matters. Perhaps the rich set the cultural norm of eating wheat bread, but its just as likely that norm was formed and maintained in the lower income classes.

This is why I didn’t like Frank’s Falling Behind. In the preface, he explicitly says envy isn’t what’s driving people’s natural tendency to compare their lot with their neighbors. He says its culture and the subjectiveness of consumption that matters. He brings up the example of the preference for high quality cars. What’s considered high quality today (GPS, leather seats, whatever) is very different from the what was considered high quality in the past. Its likely, though, that buyers of high quality cars today are no more happy with their purchase than buyers of high quality cars a few decades ago. Cars have gotten objectively better, but subjectively they’re still the same “high quality”.

These are excellent points and its a great example. There is definitely a cultural element to consumption and certainly overall happiness, however measured, isn’t tracking with the vast improvements in quality we’ve seen over the years. Frank, though, spends all of the book talking about income inequality as if the consumption patterns of the rich automatically translate into these cultural factors. He says envy of the rich doesn’t matter, but that’s what he ends up dwelling on.

In Frank’s eyes, the wheat bread norm hurt the lower classes. This is debatable (who would want to think themselves a Scot!), but even giving him that, measuring income inequality wouldn’t tell you anything about that norm. Why would we think increasing income inequality would be correlated with the development of these sorts of norms?

Acting like the rich may be one factor that drives cultural norms of consumption and its likely that cultural trends flow primarily from from elites. But not all elites are rich and more importantly cultural trends can flow uphill (hip-hop anyone?). My point is that consumption norms matter, but thinking only in terms of high and low incomes will have us miss most of the story.

Fan submission:
“Oberg knows an astronaut bent on orbital manslaughter could simply throw any number of switches to do the job, but he said the crews would be safer if the gun was locked up or left on Earth.” — Orlando TV reporter

“Guns kill people, people don’t… except when they do. Still, no guns.”

Just in case you missed it, let me repeat: when it comes to the kind of intra-nation inequality that we should really care about (if we are going to worry about intra-nation inequality at all), we “do not know.” As in “know” and “not” put together. “Not” is the word of negation, by the way. And the last I looked, not = not, as it usually does on most Wednesdays. Would you like to hear more on what is implied by the conjunction of “not” and “know”?

— MR