Some notes on information and policymaking.

I was going to post this on Facebook, but it got too long...

This post is to lay out some key points and ideas for my classmates, who apparently were disappointed by today's lecture.

First read Hayek's classic paper on tacit knowledge. This describes the essential informational problem in economics (and generally): information is dispersed and impossible to perfectly transfer.  That information needs to be aggregated into some form useful for decision-making.

This is an especially relevant problem for policy-makers, who (ideally) try to choose and design the best policy for the most people. Without good information, success in that isn't about skill but dumb luck.

The wisdom of crowds is the simplest method of aggregating information, relying on some statistical ideas (the most likely single value for a random variable is its mean, and that over- and under- estimates will tend to cancel each other out) and some cognitive psychology (lying is generally more cognitively burdensome than honesty, so people will tell the truth unless they have some other reason to lie).

The classic example is from a contest held in 1906 in rural England. Now apparently rural England is quite boring,  and there is a prize after all, so a crowd 800 people decided to try to guess the weight of a cow. Now along comes a statistician, Francis Galton, who decides that it would be fun to analyze the guesses of the crowd. He does this, and discovers that the mean of the crowds estimate (1197lb.) was almost exactly the measured weight of the cow(1198lb.) and even more interestingly, was closer than an individual person's guess.

The contest aggregated the diverse information of the crowd into information more accurate than what any single person possessed. This is one of bases of the argument that "diversity trumps ability" (there is some academic argument around that, but that it is not immediately obvious is itself somewhat startling).

The cow-contest also illustrates the problems of this method. Almost immediately people begin trying to cheat: sabotage, bribery of the owner of the cow, and all manner of rural shenanigans, since a person can better improve their odds by attacking the structure of the contest, instead of, say, practicing their cow-weight-guessing skills at home.

The cow-contest also illustrates the problem of groupthink very clearly. In the original contest, participants wrote down their guesses of the cow's weight and submitted them privately - each person using their private information. In other contests, where peoples guesses were not private, the wisdom of crowds failed. Why? People were communicating with each other, and while a lie is cognitively costly, social discord is even more costly - thus agreement is more important than honesty. I am sure we have all experienced the social pressures of the white lie.

I could explain this by references to human evolution (better to go along with the tribe in a bad decision than strike out on your own), to social dynamics (people like other people who agree with them, even about trivial things), and of course, to sabotage and intimidation (one way to rig the contest is to circulate false information, or to threaten to break the legs of everyone who doesn't guess 0).

Now, in general, markets also perform this function - especially when talk is not cheap, and agents are sophisticated or engaged in frequent and repeated transactions. This is the idea behind decision markets.

Informational problems are also fundamental to political systems. One way to think about democracy (and about the importance of secret ballots) is as a way of aggregating diverse tacit information.Even in authoritarian systems, like China, the Communist Party uses secret ballots and elections for Party and local elections.

I hope this has been fun, informative, or useful.

The Intellectual Death of Conservatism

I was going to write an ambitious, highly speculative piece tying together brain drain, anti-intellectualism, and disinvestment from education in the context of rural America. All that assumed that rural people are more anti-intellectual. But this paper from Jay A. DeSart of Utah Valley University blows that assumption out of the water.

If I’m reading his table right, he finds that rural people not significantly more likely to be anti-intellectual per-se, only that they’re more focused on practical education. But since rural America is older, less-educated, more religious, and more conservative, it looks like that at first glance. But some regression analysis to control for various factors causes that to drop away. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) after controls for, e.g. education income too is unassociated with anti-intellectualism.

So now I’m dipping into the literature to see what there is to see. DeSart’s paper, very helpfully, reports the strength of his findings and finds only 4 clusters of factors that are relevant with high confidence: Education, religiosity (church attendance, biblical literalism, etc.), political beliefs (ideology, sense of power over one’s life, trust in institutions, etc.) and gender.

So this is a cross-sectional snapshot. What about over time?

Enter Gordon Gauchat of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has a 2012 paper examining trends in politicization of anti-intellectualism and distrust of experts over time. SPOILER ALERT: American conservatives have been gradually getting more anti-intellectual and less trusting of experts since the 1990s. Liberals have trended in the opposite way. Quoting from the abstract:

“Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative.”

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X17719507

A more recent and in-depth study by Matthew Motta of University of Minnesota-Twin Cities finds the same thing in 2016 and shows further that support for Trump was associated with anti-intellectualism above and beyond the support for Trump from conservatives in general. That is, more anti-intellectual Republicans were more likely to support Trump.

So where does that leave the project that motivated this exploration? Sunk and gone. There are two real questions. First: why has conservative anti-intellectualism has grown and hardened? And second, what does this mean going forward. Here I will resume wild mass guessing – since after all I write this for my own amusement.

You may remember this poll that found that a majority of Republicans, for the first time ever, said they thought higher education was bad for the country.

Here’s one hypothesis: pure tribalism. Education tends to make people less conservative, and less anti-intellectual. If you want to keep people in the “tribe” of conservatism, you want to keep them away from higher education. This is, on an individual level, fairly rational. Of course you want to avoid the strife, the arguments, the emotional distance and social fracturing that will result from little Connor going off to college and forming a worldview that differs from your own. 

But this is somewhat hard to do, since it’s a well-established result that higher education generally leads to higher earnings and better life outcomes.

So, what you have to do is say to Connor “college is bad.” Not bad for Connor – because it plainly isn’t – but bad for society, bad in general.

You can see the shape of the intergenerational dynamics of this: the most intellectually inclined “educate out”  on the margin, becoming less anti-intellectual and less conservative. Leaving the rest more conservative and anti-intellectual.

But how did anti-intellectualism become so intertwined with American right? It could be religion, if religiously motivated anti-intellectuals have sorted into the GOP since the 1990s.

But my guess is that it is something more fundamental.

The death of expertise in the GOP and the anti-intellectualism of the conservative movement are intertwined. Why do you need experts? Because you care about what’s true and understand that the world is complicated and difficult to understand. But what if what is true is (politically) inconvenient? You could change your beliefs. Or you could change your beliefs about beliefs, and cease to care about the truth at all. But if the truth doesn’t matter, if facts don’t matter, if ideas are no longer tested by experience – why have experts? Why seek to know, why welcome knowledge at all?

And if your party doesn’t care about the truth, about knowledge, and intellectuals, almost definitionally, do, then of course you aren’t going to have much support among them, and every new cohort is going to look at the existing cohort and think – “why bother, they don’t care about my work”.

The GOP’s position on a host of issues follows this pattern – with climate change being the most clear-cut and obvious example. The entire trajectory of the policy minds around that man in the White House follows this pattern and I think it’s important to point out that this is not a break with the norms of the American right, but rather a continuation of decades-long trends.

So now for the second question: What does this mean going forward?

I don’t know, but I doubt its good. One possibility is that the conservative movement suffers an intellectual “death spiral” with each round of intellectuals exiting (or not entering) causing more hostility or indifference to intellectual thought, leading to more exits, etc.

That leaves a political movement that’s nothing but a seething ball of white rage with absolutely no regard for the facts and even the minimal restraints of reality. That seems… bad.

Another possibility is that intellectual collapse proceeds political collapse, and from the rubble a new, saner, coalition can be built. That would be a good outcome, but I imagine the process would be chaotic and uncertain.

One thing I do not see happening is this trend reversing anytime soon. For now, this is American politics.

I thought we won the Cold War?

In 1992 the Soviet Union finally collapsed. And so did life expectancies for Russian men. Between 1990 and 1994 life expectancy at birth for males fell by 5 years, plummeting to less than 60 years.

Why?

The collapse of the Soviet Union caused tremendous (momentous!) social and economic disruption. Workers, places and firms were thrown from a predictable planned economy into the open water of free-market capitalism. It was sink or swim – and many sank. The death rate for employment-age men shot up, driven by cardiovascular disease, drug and alcohol consumption, accidents, homicides, and suicides. This collapse in male life expectancy cost 2.5-3 million lives. I want to restate that for everyone. If death rates had stayed what they were under the Soviet Union 2.5 million deaths would have been avoided.

And what does this pattern of deaths look like? It looks like rusting out Russian factory towns dying on the vine, like millions of men thrown out of work and dropping out of the labor force, and like thousands of factories shuttering- unable to compete in a global economy. And all alongside millions of men dying quiet deaths of despair. It looks like country where since 1992 the number of drug addicts has risen 9-fold, where the rate of HIV infection has doubled every year since 1992, where today 6% of the population are drug users, a country that has a GDP per capita less than a quarter of the United States' but is home to as many billionaires per capita than the United States.

This is what it meant for Russia to lose the Cold War.

So why does that story sound so familiar to Americans? Why does Magnitogorsk remind me of Youngstown? Is this what winning means?

Why has America been plagued by “deaths of despair”. Why is it that, for the first time since the end of WWII, life expectancy at birth declined in 2015, driven by suicides and drug use? Why have rates of opiate addiction and death increased sharply? Why has male labor force participation declined and not recovered? Why are Americans more depressed than the citizens of other developed countries? Why is our infant mortality rate so high, why are our bridges falling down, why this, why that, why the other?

Didn’t we win the Cold War?

I can’t answer those questions. That’s a project for a whole pack of scholars. Some of those links try to. But I want to ask the big question, the fundamental question, for myself and for anyone who’s reading this. For 60 years the United States was locked in a titanic, life-or-death, global struggle with the Soviet Union that repeatedly threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. Both made massive investments, and implicitly and explicitly, massive sacrifices, to pursue that struggle. The Soviet Union lost. But looking at these statistics, at America, I have to ask: did we win?

Because this is not what success looks like. Where is our peace dividend? All the sacrifices we made, the resources we spent, the civilian projects and peaceful goals once sidelined to confront the Soviet Union –  was this all that was gained, waiting out the Red colossus until it collapsed under its own weight? Why haven’t we enjoyed the fruits of peace? To ask the question it to express my disappointment (this cynic is ever disappointed, but seldom surprised) and anger that this has come to pass. The United States of America does not have to resemble – should not resemble! - a broken-down, declining superpower, limping along with a legacy nuclear arsenal, run by a regime of authoritarian oil-loving kleptocrats, plagued by corruption, drug addiction, and violence.