Monthly Archives: May 2008

Jeff Sharlet on Free Will

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In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Jeff Sharlet, author of the shocking new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I’m prone to skepticism about shadowy cabals, but I found this book both believable and upsetting. Jeff (a contributing editor to Harpers and Rolling Stone) was apparently a bit worried about talking to a Cato suit, but it seems to have turned out okay:

When Bloggingheads TV, the website that produces those video “diavlogs” you see these days in the fold of the online NYT, told me they’d given my new book, The Family, to Will Wilkinson of the conservative libertarian Cato Institute , I was a little concerned. The elite fundamentalists about whom I write are particularly passionate about what some call “biblical capitalism,” a literally religious devotion to free markets. Wilkinson, as you can imagine, is a big believer in free markets, too, and for that reason I thought he and I might have a very contentious conversation.

Oh me of little faith in the wisdom of Bloggingheads. Wilkinson turned out to be an ideal respondent — indeed, he may have understood aspects of the book better than I did when I wrote it. Most importantly, he recognized that biblical capitalism uses the veneer of free markets as a cover for the cronyism of the anointed. It’s dishonest libertarianism, “self-interest by proxy,” in Wilkinson’s brilliant phrase — the exact opposite of the responsible, transparent libertarianism championed by Wilkinson.

I’m glad that came across!

The Politics of Human Capital

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At Club Troppo, Don Arthur has an excellent long post on the politics of the human capital approach to poverty and inequality. An excerpt:

These research findings on early childhood [which show the importance of the development of cognitive and emotional/self-regulatory capacities for later economic achievement] create a dilemma for egalitarians. On the one hand, the research suggests that publicly funded investments in early childhood could significantly improve the well being of children from disadvantaged families. But on the other hand, they seem to be stigmatising less educated adults — particularly those who are unable to work and depend on welfare benefits. The poor are portrayed as underdeveloped human beings — ignorant, lethargic and unable to control their impulses. Worse still, their parenting practices have been identified as an important cause of intergenerational disadvantage.

This has a familiar ring to it. In the early 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville warned that England’s system of poor relief was cultivating a class of unproductive and disorderly citizens:

The number of illegitimate children and criminals grows rapidly and continuously, the indigent population is limitless, the spirit of foresight and of saving becomes more and more alien to the poor. While throughout the rest of the nation education spreads, morals improve, tastes become more refined, manners more polished — the indigent remains motionless, or rather he goes backwards. He could be described as reverting to barbarism. Amidst the marvels of civilisation, he seems to emulate savage man in his ideas and his inclinations (pdf).

It’s a fear that’s never really gone away. Recently, the Age’s Russell Skelton spoke with a group of Indigenous elders in Walgett about the effect of the Australian government’s baby bonus:

“My daughter has four kids and she cannot read or write,” says a member of the group, who feels powerless as a parent. It will become a terrible circle, predicts another: “Kids who cannot read or write have babies that won’t be able to read or write. But nobody can tell them that. They don’t want to listen.”

Some egalitarians worry that embracing the rhetoric of human capital means joining with conservatives to slander to disadvantaged. Social welfare initiatives become less about social justice and more about social control. Instead of focusing on the obligations of the rich, the human capitalists increasingly focus on the behaviour of the poor.

I think this is a profound insight. And I think one can see the outlines of a workable third way here. On the one side are conservatives and libertarians overly attached to genetic explanations of socioeconomic achievement, who therefore see spending on early childhood development as futile. On the other side are liberals overly attached to abstract structural explanations of the reproduction of class, who therefore see a focus on state interventions in early childhood as elitist victim-blaming. I find that I actually side more with the liberal complaint than with the conservative one, though not so much for the reason that it is victim-blaming. Many poor parents are to a large extent to blame for the under-development of their children. There doesn’t seem to be a way around that. But I worry very much about the social control of the poor by elites, which Don mentions. However, I worry about the harms of self-reproducing poverty even more. At this point, I’m not sure where I really stand, though I think I’m tilting in favor of Heckmanesque early childhood programs as part of the liberaltarian package, which also would include wage subsidies and beefed-up unemployment benefits together with a radical deregulation of the labor market and the economy at large.

Arthur Brooks on Religion and Happiness

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In Arthur Brooks’ Gross National Happiness, he makes a great deal of the effect of religiosity on happiness. And there is no disputing the data: in the United States, religious participation is positively correlated with higher levels of self-reported happiness. But he makes rather too much of it, I think, largely because he has decided not to take into account international comparisons but rather stick exclusively with evidence from the U.S. I think this is a huge mistake.

In the AEI forum Thursday, Brooks responded to my criticism by correctly pointing out that cross-country comparisons can be muddied by various cultural differences. Sure. But if you are more or less thoroughly satisfied with the general validity of survey measures, as Brooks claims to be, then there is really no principled reason not to compare results between the United States and Western Europe, which aren’t all that different. Indeed, the differences that do show up in the data are very telling, and they cut strongly against both the substance and rhetoric of Brooks’ strongly pro-religion argument.

I think Brooks is rather too willing to slide from local individual-level correlations — for example, that other things equal, religious folks in the United States say they are happier — to macro-level generalizations — for example, that more religious cultures are generally happier ones. At one point, Brooks implies that the ACLU is hurting national happiness by fighting against public displays of religion.

What you do not learn in the chapter on religion in Gross National Happiness is that countries with some of the lowest levels of religious participation in the world, such as Denmark, Norway, or Finland show up again and again in international rankings as some of the world’s happiest places, usually ahead of the U.S. Moreover, many of the most religious places on Earth are deeply miserable.

You’d think this would be relevant. But Brooks just doesn’t bring it up. He seemed to me to encourage the idea that the relationship between religiosity and happiness is deep, perhaps universal. But it just isn’t. According to a 2007 paper by Lisbeth Snoep in the Journal of Happiness Studies, there is no significant individual-level correlation between religiosity and happiness in the countries she looked at: Denmark and the Netherlands — both among the happiest countries. In his concluding chapter, one of Brooks’ “Happiness Lessons for our Leaders” is “America must defend it’s tradition of religious faith.” But it’s really hard to see why.

Please compare these two charts (click for full size):

That’s from Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.

And that’s from Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox“[pdf].

Secularization has been rapid in much of Europe over the last several decades. But according to Stevenson and Wolfers’ recent paper, happiness has been steadily increasing there all the while — unlike in the U.S., where the measured trend has been flat. It doesn’t take an econometric wizard to eyeball the relationship: religion down, happiness up. Doesn’t this fact simply devastate Brooks’ strong implication that secularization is antagonistic to national happiness? Yes it does.

Note that you don’t have to believe in cross-country happiness comparisons to take this seriously. All you have to note is that average happiness rose while rates of religious participation fell here, here, here, here, and here, etc. And then, given that fact, Brooks may owe us a special story about why he doesn’t think that relationship would hold in the United States, too.

So what are we left with? Brooks rightly points out that in the U.S. a great number of community organizations are anchored in religion. And sociality and community are key to happiness. So, sure, non-religiosity in the U.S. is likely to be a socially alienating and stigmatized kind of non-conformism. I’m trying to track down a paper I think is in the Diener and Suh collection, Culture and Subjective Well-Being, which I recall as saying something to the effect that a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values predicts self-reported happiness. So, for example, people with collectivist values are more likely to be happy in a collectivist society than are people with individualist values in collectivist cultures. But, overall, individualist societies tend to be happier. It seems to me that Brooks has simply found that America has a religious culture, and therefore it’s less trouble to be religious in the U.S., not that religiosity has some kind of deep connection to happiness.

But Brooks writes:

You may not go to church — you may be an atheist. But if you enjoy living in a happy country, you can thank — well, you can thank your lucky stars–that so many of your American compatriots are religious.

Looking at the data, this strikes me as conservative bluster. Almost all the countries that consistently score higher than the U.S. in happiness are much less religious. While conservatives and the religious are indeed more likely to say they are happy in the U.S., it would be a simple error to infer that “gross national happiness” would be damaged were the culture to become less conservative or religious. In fact, cross-national data seem strongly to suggest the opposite. Perhaps we should thank our lucky stars for the salutary influence of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris!

Equality or Priority, Again

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In a post titled “Inequality and Death,” Ezra Klein writes:

I guess this goes into the unsurprising category, but a new study shows that the risk of premature death plummets as you wander up the educational ladder. To make a meta-point, I post on these sorts of socio-health studies frequently for a reason: We tend to think of inequality in terms of some people having more stuff than other people. That’s true, to an extent. But the poor in our society are also sicker, in more everyday pain, and have a greater chance of dying young. We’re comfortable with inequality of stuff, but are we really very comfortable ignoring such gross inequality of pain, of illness, and of death? That’s not to suggest that we’ll ever have a society where everyone feels the same amount of pain, but it is to argue that the poor are not just different because they have less money, but because their lives are substantially worse, and worse in ways that better social policy could help alleviate.

Naturally, I share Ezra’s concern for the alleviation of illness, suffering, pain, and death and think better social policy would help. (We disagree about those policies, I’m sure.) But isn’t the problem here illness, suffering, pain, and death and not inequality? Don’t we have reason to worry about these things just because they are bad? Because it is possible to help? I accept that our standards for adequate health and our expectations about suffering are contextual. In a decent society, the acceptable minimum rises over time. But whether people have enough stuff or experience too much illness is not therefore a question of inequality.

That said, not having looked at the study Ezra cites, it seems natural that educational attainment and health will have a common cause: time preference. The causes of differences in dispositions to act now to gain distant future rewards are unknown to me. I guess it has a great deal to do with an early sense of the stability or volatility of one’s practical environment. If you come to feel that involved plans tend to be dashed and that resisting gratification leaves you with less than you could have had, you’ll learn not to form involved plans or defer desire. I think having consistently enough money is a major factor in developing the sense that long-term projects can be successfully carried through. But having enough is itself largely a function of being able to carry through long-term plans. Poverty can be so pernicious precisely because it carries with it the conditions for its own reinforcement.

Procrastination Is Not Laziness

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I’m sympathetic to but ultimately must disagree with Seth Stevenson’s take on procrastination, a topic I sadly know a great deal about.

Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.

I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.

Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too. It’s why you procrastinate. When there’s a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don’t want to do it. So you don’t. Until you have to.

It’s just that simple, my slothful friend.

I’m sure I procrastinate as much as Stevenson, but the thing is, I’m not lazy! I am in fact super-industrious. It’s just that I am always motivated to do something other than the thing that most needs to be done. Stevenson mentions Da Vinci was a flaky, distractable procrastinator. OK.  But lazy? That’s retarded. Doing something else is not laziness; it’s misdirected industriousness.

No discussion of procrastination is complete with John Perry’s now-classic essay “Structured Procrastination.” You can even buy a “I’m not wasting time, I’m a structured procrastinator  t-shirt!”

Haggling

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I hate it. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus. Sure, there is a lot of successful gouging going on, but add up millions of instances of “I know you’re going to screw me,” and I suspect that the average retailer is doing worse rather than better under the haggling system. And how about the average native consumer? In competitive posted-price markets, the system basically pre-haggles the price down to the point where the consumer gets most of the surplus. This is why Wal-Mart is a humanitarian triumph, and a shining symbol of civilization. In the world of Wal-Mart, when it comes to divvying up the surplus from exchange, the retailer has very little freedom to try to take you to the cleaners, but profits by assuring you that you will win the argument.

Back from Turkey

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We got back yesterday afternoon, after a layover in Vienna. Austrian efficiency turned out to be a refreshing contrast to the customary Turkish goat rodeo. I’ll have a few posts this week inspired by thoughts about Turkey.

Selimiye

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Yesterday Kerry and I rented a ridiculously large boat with a crew of two in the little fishing village of Selimiye, near the point where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean. They took us around to little islands off the coast and to good swimming spots. The water, as you can see, is astonishingly clear and, in the shallows, is the color they paint the bottom swimming pools, I guess to make them look like the Aegean. The highlight of the trip was our time exploring a small island containing the ruins of a Greek Christian monastary, now inhabited only by a herd of goats and a lonely donkey.

Today, we’re in Pammukale, which is weird and awesome. Kerry’s got a pic.