Worthwhile Sentences on Feelings

From Justin Landwehr: "The evil twins of humility are narcissism and shyness."

From Larry Summers: "I think you have to decide whether achievement is the route to self-esteem or whether self-esteem is the route to achievement."

From Dan Ariely's blog: "Being given the option to determine the time of our own death can transform patients from powerless victims of their illness to willing survivors of it."

From Maya Angelou: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

From James Geary: "When in doubt, remain in doubt." (via Justin Wehr).

How to Tie Your Shoes

Maybe the most practical TED Talk I've ever listened to.



I've since changed the way I tie my shoes.

How Advertisers "Trick" Consumers

I've been skeptical about the benefits of advertising, but I've never bought the idea of how they fool us. Yet our memory can fool our brains. I never could articulate the connection, until now:

One way advertisers convince us to buy something is to remind us that we’ve enjoyed their product before. Unfortunately, we can have fond memories of a product that we’ve never even had. Or that doesn’t even exist.

A hundred volunteers looked at print ads for Orville Redenbacher's "Gourmet Fresh" popcorn—a variety that researchers made up. Some subjects saw an ad with a vivid description of the brand's “big white fluffy kernels." Others saw a less evocative ad.

A week later, subjects who saw the vivid ad were twice as likely to believe they'd tried this fictional product as were subjects who saw the plain ad. In fact, the believers were as confident that they had tried the popcorn as were people who actually ate popcorn after seeing the fake ads.

Add this to my battle against self-verification.

The Limits of Moral Math

One concept I come back to regular is moral math. The idea that we are constantly calculating how good/bad we can/should be. Perhaps there are limits to how much we are willing to sacrifice to feel moral. Here's an environmental example:

For those students for whom the environment was not important to their self-esteem, receiving negative feedback on the ecological footprint questionnaire actually prompted them to be less likely to write to their politician about environmental issues (relative to the students who received positive feedback about their footprint). In other words, for people who aren't green minded, alarming feedback on a footprint questionnaire can actually make them less sympathetic to green causes.

So:

it's been shown that if changing their behaviour seems too difficult, many people change their attitudes instead, in this case ditching their pro-environmental beliefs (as a way to reduce what's known as 'cognitive dissonance', which is when there's a mismatch between our attitudes and behaviour).

But we can combat this by actively writing down our intentions:

The researcher found that the percentage of people who agreed to volunteer didn't differ as a function of whether the instructions invited active or passive responding. Yet there was quite an astonishing difference in the percentage of people who actually showed up to participate in the project several days later. Of those who agreed to participate passively, only 17 percent actually appeared as promised. What about those who agreed to participate through active means? Of those, 49 percent kept their promises. In all, the clear majority of those who appeared as scheduled (74 percent) were those who had actively agreed to volunteer for the program.

On the first day of class I ask my students to write down and get signed by a parent their desired/expected grades. Now I just need to find a way to make them not discount it.

Cheaters Overestimate Their Intelligence

One thing that never ceases to amaze me about typical high school students is their incredible ability to deceive themselves. Here's an example that I'm sure happens in my own classroom:

...asked 76 students to take a maths test, half of whom could see an answer key at the bottom of their sheets. Afterwards, they had to predict their scores on a second longer test. Even though they knew that they wouldn’t be able to see the answers this time round, they imagined higher scores for themselves (81%) if they had the answers on the first test than if they hadn’t (72%). They might have deliberately cheated, or they might have told themselves that they were only looking to “check” the answers they knew all along. Either way, they had fooled themselves into thinking that their strong performance reflected their own intellect, rather than the presence of the answers.

You can read my own attempts to remind myself I'm regularly wrong in my short series against self-verification.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XX

It's always fun when two of your thought hobbies cross paths. If you've read this blog for any length of time you know I'm continually fascinated with the differences (and similarities) between humans and animals. Also, recently I did a short series on issues I was wrong about to remind myself of the self-verification bias. Here's an interesting study using macaques and a computer game covering both topics:

The animals were trained to judge the density of a pixel box that appeared at the top of the screen as either sparse or dense. To give their answer, the monkeys simply moved a cursor towards a letter S or a letter D. 

When the animals chose the correct letter, they were rewarded with an edible treat. There was no punishment for choosing the wrong answer, but the game briefly paused, taking away - for a few seconds - the opportunity for the animals to win another treat. 

But the monkeys had a third option - choosing a question mark - which skipped the trial and moved on to the next one. This meant no treat, but it also meant no pause in the game.
The scientists saw that the macaques used this option in exactly the same way as human participants who reported that they found a trial too tricky to answer; they chose to "pass" and move on.

So monkeys know when they might be wrong, do you? Even weirder, chimpanzees know that other chimpanzees make assumptions:

If chimpanzees are faced with two opaque boards on a table, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, they do not choose the board lying flat (because if food was under there it would not be lying flat) but, rather, they choose the slanted one— presumably inferring that some unperceived food underneath is causing the slant. Here we demonstrate that chimpanzees know that other chimpanzees in the same situation will make a similar inference. In a back-and-forth foraging game, when their competitor had chosen before them, chimpanzees tended to avoid the slanted board on the assumption that the competitor had already chosen it. Chimpanzees can determine the inferences that a conspecific is likely to make and then adjust their competitive strategies accordingly.

When you assume it makes an ass out of u and me.

The Near Future of American Economic Growth

The inspiration for my series against self-verification was inspired by this final example of where I used to be wrong. A common theme of this blog is the recognition of just how rich we are. Whether you're an American, a high school teacher who's married to a social worker, a breakfast eater, a person with too many hobbies, or almost anyone who's been alive for the last 200 years, you're historically very rich. Along with that assumption, I've argued that economic growth will continue as it has since the Industrial Revolution. I'm less sure of that now.

If there was ever a person who could challenge such an important presupposition of mine it's Tyler Cowen. He's smart, well-read, and most of he's reasonable. He's also the only person with his own tag on my blog. Wikipedia (and his wife) describes him as a ""libertarian bargainer", a libertarian who's not so radical that he can't influence those in power. Tyler recently published a new short ebook, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. Thanks to my friend with a Kindle, I was able to read it this weekend.

The thesis of the book is clear and the facts are to deny. Median income growth is down. The economic growth and technological innovation that began with the Industrial Revolution has slowed. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century technological innovation changed the face of America. The use of fossil fuels and electricity, telegraph/telephone, radio, car, refrigerator, penicillin, light bulb, airplane, nuclear power, running water, and germ theory are many examples. Now compare those to the important inventions for last 75 years. Spaceflight, lasers, solar power, DNA/genome/stem cell discoveries, credit cards, heart surgery, cell phones, smaller better computers, and of course the internet. Although those are all very important, collectively they have made less of an impact on the human race.

It's the simplicity of his claim that makes it so believable. The world is not ending and is in fact is still getting better, just more slowly. Per his book's subtitle, he describes the problem as an issue of "low hanging fruit". The first set of inventions I described are fairly simple and more important compared to those in the second list. Finding out mold kills disease is much easier than how to successfully remove and replace a human heart. We've picked the easy inventions off the tree of innovation. The next ones will require more effort. Also, the benefit of the more recent innovations are also not as evenly spread as the earlier ones. The poor gain a lot from running water, light bulbs, and penicillin and very little from Google, smart phones, and heart surgery.

However the biggest problem with this new reality is what it means for debt and investing. Originally I was less worried about our government's debt because, like it has in the past, economic growth can help pay most of it off. If we're richer in the future, it's easier to pay off poor debt. Without even counting the Great Recession, if economic growth will continue to slow down, it will make paying those debts off much more difficult. Less economic growth also means less growth in the stock market. Which means less growth for retirement and savings accounts which can have important changes on how we invest.

But remember this is bad news, not tragic news. The world is still great and getting better. In many ways the irony of this ebook is that it is an ebook. The internet is the great shining hope for, as Tyler predicts, another spurt in economic growth. The book is an example of how good the great stagnation can be. Four dollars for a lesson on American economic growth doesn't add much to GDP, but it sure made a huge impact on my economic and political perspective. I highly recommended the book and for the author's personal words on the book I recommend the interviews from EconTalk, The American, and BloggingHeads.

Politics of the Stimulus Package

There are few issues I've given more blog time than the stimulus package, but I think a trillion dollars is worth my time. And yes, this is the fifth part of my series against self-verification, but no, I'm not a Keynesian now. It's not that I've been wrong about the stimulus, I've just been wrong in my discussion. My main argument has been that we can't know if it works, so why try. Economist Alex Tabarrok gives a much more rigorous argument. Even the most ardent stimulus package supporters agree that the recent package did not stimulate the economy becasue it wasn't big enough. It is very difficult for democratic governments to get the political support required to spend the money supposedly needed to stimulate the economy. Even in the Great Depression, where FDR spent more than 120% of GDP, Paul Krugman admits that wasn't enough. So here's Alex's argument:

Now I will take a large degree of laissez-faire and the chaos of democracy over authoritarian political and economic regimes any day. I assume most Keynesians would as well. Thus, if we can't count on massive increases in government spending during a recession to mop up problems ex-post shouldn't we all, Keynesians and otherwise, be spending more time thinking about ex-ante alternatives to Keynesian politics?

And here are his solutions:

Greater regulation to prevent crises from occurring is a legitimate response, although one that I wouldn't necessarily buy into in all particulars. Along the same lines, increasing wage, price and real flexibilities (e.g. relocation flexibility and public and private savings flexibility) would benefit us in future recessions. Automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance are one area that has worked quite well. What other areas can be automatized? Funding for states? How about an automatic payroll tax cut tied to the unemployment rate? (fyi, Keynes favored the latter).

Even if the economics of Keynesianism works, the politics of it doesn't.

Efficient Welfare Payment

One of the mainstays of libertarianism is that government assistance to the poor decreases economic efficiency in two ways. One, by giving only to the poor, it incentivizes being poor. Two, by paying the poor, you must tax the rich, thereby dis-incentivizing being rich. However, I'd never considered the negative income tax popularized by libertarian icon Milton Friedmen. It starts with a flat tax, at say 25%. Everyone, rich and poor pays the same percentage. Then, a minimum income is established, at say $10,000.  Everyone, rich and poor gets the same $10,000 from the government. It's easier to pay taxes (which now costs hundreds of dollars per person just to file). It's easier to enforce (there are more people in the IRS's tax army than in Iraq). It's more equitable to both the poor and the rich. Here are a couple of examples using different incomes and my numbers of $10,000 and 25%:

Income earned: $0
Taxes paid: $0

Minimum income: $10,000

Total amount: $10,000

Income earned: $30,000

Taxes paid: $7500

Minimum income: $10,000

Total amount: $32,500

Income earned: $100,000

Taxes paid: $25,000

Minimum income: $10,000

Total amount: $85,000

Income earned: $1,000,000

Taxes paid: $250,000

Minimum income: $10,000

Total amount: $760,000

Freidmen supported this idea, but only as a replacement for the current income tax and welfare system. For joint households the credit would be double and there could be an amount given per child, say $5,000. The minimum income credit could also be given in monthly increments so as not to require much money management.

This was part four of my series against self-verification.

Responding to Communication Overload

In the third part of my series against self-verification I'd like to revisit a list I made a while back of things I hate. One of the items on that list was when people do not respond to messages. I had several people in mind when I wrote that, but one of them was the owner of the DSI Comedy Theater, executive producer of the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, and all around busy guy, Zach Ward. I recently mentioned this to him and our conversation was very insightful.

He said that he gets so many messages in the day, by his count in the hundreds, that to give a thoughtful response to each would be a full time job. As Get-It-Done-Guy Stever Robbins puts it, email has changed the burden of communication. In the past the sender had write, stamp, and mail a letter. No one spent 20 cents and 20 minutes writing something that's not worth 2 minutes to read. Now we've written and sent with barely a thought. That doesn't mean, however, that we can't cut out other communication tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, to spend more time responding to personal messages. But as I now understand, there is a major difference between public and private conversations.

Firstly, private messages are only seen by a few. Social networking sites are just that, for building a large social network. A response on Twitter is seen and appreciated by many more people than an email. Also, being successful is partially about being a super-connector. More connections means more messages. So what's the solution? Here's some ideas that might help those who feel overwhelmed:

1) Realize that too many social connections have costs. Each person you connect with is another potential message. There is a cost to being popular.
2) Realize that too many social connections have benefits. An idea from Economist Jeff Ely is that by using public communications tools like Twitter and Facebook you can signal to others that you are busy. If you're too busy, people may assume their message got lost in the shuffle.
3) The more you raise the awareness of your message overload, the more sympathy others will have for your late/no response. Blogger Alexandra Samuel has decided to let everyone know she's too busy with an email auto-reply and a Too Big For One Person (#TB41P) hashtag.
4) There are plenty of messages that only require a little response. If I send you an interesting link, I'm usually just looking for an "awesome, thanks".
5) Any private question that requires more than a simple request can be made public. I've done that with my reader request posts. Try to turn a time consuming private questions into public production.
6) Top economics blogger Greg Mankiw proposes a tax on emailing him (I think Tyler Cowen wanted the opposite, but I can't find the link). Maybe if the email is worth his read, you can get your money back.
7) We can all be more sympathetic. I personally can't remember the last time I had an empty inbox. When I send someone a message, I try and forget about it. If they respond they respond. If they don't, they don't.

One final thing worth mentioning is that I am not overwhelmed by the number of messages I receive. So feel free to email or comment and as always, thanks for spending your precious time reading.

Public Unions are Worse than Private Unions

I am not a fan of unions. I think they complicate what should be simple agreement between a worker and an employer. They infringe on the property rights of business owners. And they often mis-reward workers for union loyalty, not work quality. That said, I've been less harsh on public unions. This is not because I am a public school teacher, but because the government is inherently stronger than a business. In the case of school teachers,  the state school system is a near universal buyer of educational labor. With 9 out of 10 students attending public school, if you want to teach, you almost have to work for the government. Which this monopsony power, state schools can have an undue influence over teachers. So there is an economic reason for a teacher's union. Or that is until I read this:

From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5% going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government.

The government wants to increase the number of people working for the government, so they'll vote to increase the power of the government. Here's more:

Private sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests and, as we've seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. The labor-politician negotiations can't be fair when the unions can put so much money into campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."

Surprisingly, the president who institutionalized progressivism in America, FDR, agrees. This was part two of my series against self-verification.

The Past Wasn't Completely Impoverished

In the first post my series against self-verification, I'd like to try and balance an argument I make regularly. Though like was significantly worse before the Industrial Revolution, in some places it wasn't as bad as I thought:

In the first, with Joseph Cummins and Brock Smith, he shows that England was surprisingly rich before the Industrial Revolution. This assertion is based on the fact the a small share of the population was engaged in farming. The primary sector accounted for 52% in 1817, and even 60% in 1560. These measurements are based on the occupations listed in men's wills and indicate that a substantial fraction of people living in rural areas were in fact not engaged in farming. Thus measuring the urban population share can be misleading in this respect.

In the second, Gregory Clark shows that there has been relatively little growth over these centuries, which means that way back in 1381, England was much richer than we thought. At that date, only 55% of the population was engaged in farming, based on records of the Poll Tax. This is very close to the number quoted above for 1817. Thus standards of living were not that different four and a half centuries apart.

I think I've also been guilty of ignoring the importance of intimate relationships when it comes to measuring wealth. Having enjoyable conversations with friends is one of many things that won't show up in GDP. And let's not forget, that like me, plenty of ancient cultures had time for games.

Your Default is Self-Verification

If there is one thing blogging has taught me, it's that we are drawn to ideas we already have. For example, we only trust experts when they agree with what we believe (I'm guilty too). This is a huge hindrance to our search for the truth. To be truly wise, we must doubt our own fragile understanding and give others' thoughts the benefit of the doubt. That's why this week, I will devote the first post of every day to items that I was once wrong about. Hopefully by reminding myself of my past foolishness, I can prevent future foolishness.