php-horde-feed 2.0.1-4 / usr / share / php / tests / Horde_Feed / Horde / Feed / fixtures / lexicon / http-www.aaronsw.com-weblog-index.xml

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  <channel rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/index.xml">
    <title>Raw Thought (from Aaron Swartz)</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/</link>
    <description>"capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman" -- C. Wright Mills</description>
    <dc:language>en-us</dc:language>    
    <dc:creator>Aaron Swartz</dc:creator> 
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        <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/percentagefallacy" />
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  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/percentagefallacy">
    <title>The Percentage Fallacy</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/percentagefallacy</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>There's one bit of irrationality that seems like it ought to be in behavioral economics introduction but mysteriously isn't. For lack of a better term, let's call it <em>the percentage fallacy</em>. The idea is simple:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>One day I find I need a blender. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $40, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same blender on sale at a different store for $20. Now I feel ripped off, so I drive back to the first store, return the blender, drive back to the second store, and buy it for $20.</p>
  
  <p>The next day I find I need a laptop. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $2500, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same laptop for $2480. "Pff, well, it's only $20," I say, and continue home with the original laptop.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I'm sure all of you have done something similar -- maybe the issue wasn't having to return something, but spending more time looking for a cheaper model, or fiddling with coupons and rebates, or buying something of inferior quality. But the basic point is consistent: we'll do things to save 50% that we'd never do to save 1%.</p>

<p>At first this almost seems rational -- of course we're going to do more to save more money! But you <em>aren't</em> saving more money. With both the blender and the laptop, you have the chance to save $20. Either way, you're going to have another twenty in your pocket, which you can spend on exactly the same things later on. Yet we behave differently depending on whether we got that twenty by skimping on a small purchase or skimping on a big one. Rationally, if driving back to the store isn't worth $20 when you're buying a laptop, it isn't worth $20 when you're buying a blender.</p>

<p>On the other hand, don't those small savings tend to add up after a while? If you start blowing $20 every time you buy a trinket, you're soon going to be out of disposable income. Meanwhile, spending several thousand dollars is much rarer, so isn't it OK to slack off a bit on such occasions?</p>

<p>If we work to save 50% on everything, big or small, that's the equivalent of saving 50% of our money altogether. Whereas if we only try to save fixed amounts on every purchase, how much we save is dependent on how many things we buy.</p>

<p>So which is the real irrationality? I'm not entirely sure of the answer.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-07-21T22:43:39-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/comcap">
    <title>Capital and its Complements: A Summary</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/comcap</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p><em>The following is a non-technical summary of Brad DeLong's May 2008 paper <a href="http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/20080521_capital.pdf">Capital and Its Complements</a>.</em></p>

<p>Adam Smith explained that in all countries with "security of property and tolerable administration of justice" citizens would spend all their money (capital), either on consumption or investment, causing the country's economy to grow. After some contention, later economic studies tended to bare this out: a shortage of capital wasn't always the bottleneck, but when it was, removing it could lead to extraordinarily rapid growth.</p>

<p>The problem for poor countries is that, because of high mortality rates (which require more children to have some survive) and low educational levels (which mean those children can find productive employment quickly), they have high population growth and thus low capital-to-labor ratios. Worse, trade allows you to spend your money buying manufactured goods from overseas, for which you have only your very cheap labor to provide in return. The result is that it requires an enormous amount of domestic investment to improve capital-to-labor ratios.</p>

<p>And so rich country economists made "the neoliberal bet" on behalf of poor countries: they hoped that loosening restrictions on international capital flows would send capital rushing in to poor countries and build their economies, the same way that Great Britain's massive investment in a young United States (in 1913 Britain's foreign assets equaled 60% of its domestic capital stock) built up that country.</p>

<p>But what ended up happening was exactly the opposite. Yes, NAFTA led US companies to invest the $20 to $30 billion a year on manufacturing in Mexico that its boosters predicted, but that investment was more than outweighed by the $30 to $40 billion a year fleeing the country from Mexico's wealthy wanting to invest it in the United States. Why? In part because the US was more politically stable, and thus a safer investment climate. And in part because the US treats its own workers so poorly -- with productivity rising 35% since 2000 while real wages remain flat -- it provides an excellent investment opportunity.</p>

<p>But meanwhile, all this investment in the US was dwarfed by the Chinese acquisition of our debt (and thus the political risk it represents). China needed to do this, since US purchase of their exports is the only thing funding the manufacturing-led industrialization of a massive portion of their economy; there would be massive dislocation if that funding dried up.</p>

<p>"Recognition of these facts came slowly." First, Larry Summers said it was our unsustainable current account deficit. (That was the 1990s; today that deficit is four times as large.) Later, economists thought it must have been our large budget deficits. Then they began thinking it was the run-up in housing prices. But that, it is now clear to most economists, was the result of a bubble. And yet the flow of capital to the US continues. But, perhaps even more frighteningly, it could stop at any moment.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-30T15:45:50-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lastgoodbyes">
    <title>Last Goodbyes</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lastgoodbyes</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>It's minutes to midnight and I'm hurriedly packing. Early tomorrow morning I catch a flight to Boston and start <a href="movingon">my new life</a>. I haven't really gotten much of a chance to pack until now, because I've spent the past few days in a rush of meetings, getting in my last goodbyes for everyone I know in San Francisco.</p>

<p>It's been great seeing everyone, but like most locals, they're all puzzled as to why I'm leaving. I've been struggling to explain why. When I say the weather, everyone just laughs. When I say San Francisco is too loud, they start arguing. When I say it's the people, they tell me to find a better group of friends.</p>

<p>And the thing is, they're right. It's none of these. I've been spectacularly unable to articulate it, but the real answer is simpler and more prosaic. And now, after great thought and struggle, I realize the answer is simply this: <em>Cambridge is the only place that's ever felt like home.</em> It's that simple. And when you put it that way, it's clear why I have to go.</p>

<p>So goodbye Stanford, goodbye Palo Alto; goodbye south bay, goodbye peninsula; goodbye Change Congress, goodbye Creative Commons; goodbye Mission, goodbye SOMA; goodbye friends, goodbye loved ones; goodbye San Francisco, home to everyone I've ever loved. You'll always have my heart.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-19T06:50:55-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/scenes">
    <title>Scenes</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/scenes</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>"God, I'm so sick of this stuff. Can't we just go home?" she wines. "Jesus," I say, "would it kill you to go one more place?" It's been a long hot day in strange, busy New York City, and we're not exactly at our best. In fact, the combination of heat and exhaustion has turned our love bitter, brought on the darkness and recriminations. Its at moments like these, the dark depths of a relationship, that you wonder how things could ever work. As we walk down the steps we hear a subway car approach. We accelerate, running to catch it. Its doors open. We're moving faster now, pushing our way through the bustle of Manhattanites to make it. The bell sounds and I jump inside and hear the doors whoosh closed behind me. I spin around only to see her trapped on the other side of the glass. I put my hand up to it, but the train accelerates and she's left standing there, just another face in the crowd.</p>

<hr />

<p>"Hey, want to see the game? Want a ticket to the Giants game?" I do not, in fact, want to see the game -- this or any other game. I hate sports. Yet the scalpers, apparently unaware of this, insist on trying to sell me one. That's what I get for walking near the ballpark, I guess. As I curse my choice of scenery, a cop pulls up. He lowers his window and leans out toward the scalper. The scalper hands him a ticket and the cop speeds off. "But he didn't pay!" a man in a suit walking by complains. "Cops get a special deal," explain the scalper. The man in the suit laughs and marvels at the scene.</p>

<hr />

<p>It's weird being back at Stanford in the summer. Everything's so empty, nobody's around. Well, not nobody -- there seems to be some action near the main quad. There are drum kits spread around and golf carts and purple uniforms lying about. But most of all, there are people -- a bunch of students just standing around awkwardly. I'm about to ask one of them what's going on when a bell rings and a voice shouts "Background!" Suddenly all the students snap to attention, begin walking in perfect lines with bookbags slung over their shoulder, bicycles ridden in perfect formation. These aren't students at all, I realize with a lurch -- they're extras. It's disconcerting. A police guard is at the side, keeping kids from running over the camera crew. I ask her what they're filming. "<em>Disney's High School Musical</em>," she says quickly, trying to keep a student from cycling over the director's cart.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-19T00:08:40-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/movingon">
    <title>Moving On</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/movingon</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>In November 2006, I moved to San Francisco because I had to: my company got acquired and us moving out was a condition of the agreement. It was the first time I'd ever actually lived in San Francisco, as opposed to just visiting, and I quickly realized that although it was a fun place to visit, I couldn't stand living here.</p>

<p>Even after all this time, I can't really put my finger on what it is I don't like -- in fact, I suspect it's probably harder for me now to explain it than it was when I first came here. The first thing that comes to mind is how <em>loud</em> the city is. I want a place where I can live quietly and focus on my work; but San Francisco is filled with distractions. There are always crews tearing up the street, trains that are delayed, buses that have broken down, homeless people begging, friends having parties, and so on. It's impossible to concentrate and without my concentration, I feel less like me.</p>

<p>The other big problem is that San Francisco is fairly shallow. When I go to coffee shops or restaurants I can't avoid people talking about load balancers or databases. The conversations are boring and obsessed with technical trivia, or worse, business antics. I don't see people reading books -- even at the library, all the people are in line for the computer terminals or the DVD rack -- and people at parties seem uninterested in intellectual conversation.</p>

<p>And so I'm moving back to Cambridge, Massachusetts -- Harvard Square in particular, the one place I've ever been to that brings a special delight to my eyes, that warms my heart just to see. Surrounded by Harvard and MIT and Tufts and BC and BU and on and on it's a city of thinking and of books, of quiet contemplation and peaceful concentration. And it has actual weather, with real snow and seasons and everything, not this time-stands-still sun that San Francisco insists upon.</p>

<p>I miss Boston; I'm excited to go back.</p>

<p>But I'm also sad to leave my responsibilities in San Francisco. One of which I'd particularly like your help with. I've been honored and overjoyed to help Lawrence Lessig get his <a href="http://change-congress.org/">Change Congress</a> project off the ground. If you haven't heard, he's trying to build a national movement to get the corruption out of Congress; to pass public financing of public elections, earmark reform, and other pressing concerns.</p>

<p>But they need a full-time day-to-day tech organizer. Someone who knows how to blog and who the bloggers are and can keep them in touch with the community. Someone who knows enough about technology to know the tools that can be built and should be. And someone with enough drive and talent to make sure those things get built. It's a dreamy job and I hope there's someone out there who will take it from me. <a href="http://change-congress.org/blog/2008/06/13/lawrence-lessig-and-joe-trippi-are-looking-best-ne">A more formal write-up</a> is on the Change Congress blog.</p>

<p>Thanks for everything.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-16T21:38:27-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/undercoverover">
    <title>Is Undercover Over?</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/undercoverover</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>My latest piece for <em>Extra!</em> is now up:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3391">Is Undercover Over?: Disguise seen as deceit by timid journalists</a></p>

<p>It's about the rise and fall of undercover journalism. Here's an excerpt:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Undercover reporting has a storied history. Nellie Bly, famous for traveling around the world in 80 days, also did a famed investigation of the conditions in insane asylums for the New York World. Bly feigned insanity for a series of physicians before being committed to a lunatic asylum. There she documented rotten and spoiled food, freezing living conditions, frigid bathwater, abusive nurses and relatively sane fellow residents. "What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?" she wondered. The series, later published as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House, created a sensation, and Bly was asked to join a government investigation of asylum conditions.</p>
</blockquote>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-12T21:57:31-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup">
    <title>How to Promote Startups</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>When people talk about how government can promote startups, there seems to be a fairly standard consensus: we need more economic inequality. <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html">Lower income</a> and <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html">capital gains</a> taxes provide more incentive to work, looser labor laws make it easier to fire non-performers, and large private wealth funds provide investment capital.</p>

<p>But having been through a startup myself, I think there's much more you can do in the other direction: decreasing economic inequality. People love starting companies. You get to be your own boss, work on something you love, do something new and exciting, and get lots of attention. As Daniel Brook points out in <em>The Trap</em>, 28% of Americans have considered starting their own business. And yet only 7% actually do.</p>

<p>What holds them back? The lack of a social safety net. A friend of mine, a brilliant young technologist who's been featured everywhere from PBS to Salon, stayed in academia and the corporate world while all of her friends were starting companies and getting rich. Why? Because she couldn't afford to lose her health insurance. Between skyrocketing prices and preexisting condition exclusions, it's almost impossible for anyone who isn't in perfect health to quit their job. (I only managed because I was on a government plan.)</p>

<p>Anyone with children is also straight out. Startup founders tend to be quite young, in no small part because no one can afford to support a family on a startup founder's salary. But if we had universal child care, that would be much less of an issue. Parents would be free to pursue their dreams, knowing that their children were taken care of. And universal higher education could let parents spend their savings on getting a business started, instead of their children's tuition. Plus, it'd give many more kids the training and confidence they needed to start a company.</p>

<p>And those large private wealth funds that result from growing inequality? A real problem for startup founders is that they're <em>too large</em>. It used to be that you could borrow a couple thousand dollars from friends and neighbors to get your business off the ground. Nowadays, they're too busy trying to make ends meet to be able to afford anything like that. Meanwhile, those large wealth funds I mentioned are now so big they can only afford to invest in multi-million dollar chunks -- much more than the average founder needs, or can even justify. And the large investments come with large amounts of scrutiny, further narrowing the recipient pool.</p>

<p>But imagine if the government provided a basic minimum income, like Richard Nixon once proposed. Instead of having to save up (increasingly difficult in a world in which the only way to survive is on credit card debt) or borrow money to stay afloat, you could live off the government-provided income as you got things started. Suddenly having to quit your job would no longer be such a huge leap -- there'd be a real social safety net to catch you. (Not to mention if those labor laws some people want to loosen required your old job to take you back if things didn't work out.)</p>

<p>Of course, there is some truth to the standard proposals. Some startup founders are encouraged by dreams of financial security, and high taxes can make that dream more elusive. And complex labor regulations can make it difficult to get new companies off the ground. But it's not an issue of whether we should have taxes or labor laws -- it's an issue of how they're targeted.</p>

<p>Estate taxes on inherited fortunes would have basically no impact on startup founders, but could go a long way to funding a social safety net. And since most startups are acquired as stock, income taxes are basically irrelevant -- it's really capital gains tax that gets applied. There's no reason the government couldn't apply a lower capital gains tax to startups that get acquired than they do to the shares of publicly-traded companies that large investors trade.</p>

<p>The same is true for labor laws: preventing large companies from firing people 
at random can provide some much-needed stability to their lives, especially if they're saving up money in the hopes of going into business themselves. But there's no reason such laws also have to be applied to small startups, where the company is more likely to go out of business than to fire you.</p>

<p>Look at social democratic Europe, where these policy prescriptions have been tried. While there's much less of a culture of entrepreneurship and only 15% of Europeans think about starting their own company, nearly all (14.7%) of them actually go ahead and do it.</p>

<p>The fact is, if governments really want to promote startups and the economic innovation they bring, they shouldn't listen to the standard refrain of cut taxes and deregulate. They need to start rebuilding the social safety net, so that their citizens know that if they go out on a limb and try something risky, someone will be there to catch them if things don't work out.</p>

<p><em>Thanks to Daniel Brook's book</em> <a href="http://books.theinfo.org/go/0805088016">The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America</a> <em>for suggesting this line of argument and providing the statistics.</em></p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-06-09T15:25:23-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/falsecon">
    <title>The False Consciousness Falsehood</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/falsecon</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>American intellectual life has a large number of ways of responding to an argument without actually addressing its substance -- namecalling in other words. You can say that someone is "blaming the victim" or spinning a "conspiracy theory" or "assuming people are stupid" or that they're subject to "false consciousness".</p>

<p>Most of these are kind of transparently silly, but even otherwise smart people seem to think the false consciousness charge has some heft to it. The argument is never fully spelled-out, but the argument seems to be that to think that people are systematically mistaken about their own interests is the kind of crazy idea that only vulgar Marxists would believe and, furthermore, it requires assuming that people are stupid and explaining how you've been able to see past the illusion.</p>

<p>Well, I'm personally not under any illusion that providing a rational explanation is going to stop people from leveling this charge, but I figure one ought to, if only to set the record straight.</p>

<p>Let's begin with a parable -- a simplified case that will at least establish whether some of these arguments are logically true. Imagine a new regime comes to power that decides to imprison everyone with red hair. They insist that there is nothing amiss about this -- they were elected democratically, and furthermore, everyone imprisoned is still allowed to vote. But inside the prisons, they only permit limited contact with the outside world. Most prisoners only watch the one prison-provided news station which is systematically biased, constantly suggesting that the Purple Party is in favor of additional rights for red-haired people while their opponents, the Yellow Party, just used the red-haired issue for pandering. (Anyone who's watched, say, Fox News discuss black issues will know how this is possible.) The result is that when election time rolls around, the majority of red-haired prisoners vote for the Purple Party candidate who gets into power and provides no new rights for them.</p>

<p>Call it false consciousness or not, I think it's perfectly reasonable to look at this situation and say while the red-haired prisoners are not stupid, they are systematically mistaken, which is leading them to act against their own interests. If they knew the truth they would vote for the Yellow Party, the party which wants to take steps to get them out of prison, instead. Furthermore, it's possible to imagine that there are some prisoners who, through one means or another, have learned this and thus are able to see this situation while the other prisoners do not. (They try to tell the other prisoners what's going on, but they keep getting labeled conspiracy theorists.)</p>

<p>Now obviously vast portions of America are not imprisoned. But most people do get their news from a small number of sources and I think everyone would agree that, in one way or another, these sources are systematically biased. (You can argue about which way they're biased or whether it makes a difference, but I think it's pretty clear that all the major news sources share a general conception of what is "news" and what isn't.) So why is it so implausible that something similar is going on?</p>

<p>The major difference between the two scenarios is that in the first, people were basically forced to watch the biased news, while in the real world they have lots of other alternatives. But I'm not sure this matters as much as it might seem at first.</p>

<p>First, most people have busy lives that don't revolve around the news or politics and thus are going to get the news in the most convenient form they can. For most people, this is typically television or the newspaper. But starting a new television station or newspaper is very expensive, especially if you want it to have wide reach, and the only projects that can get funding and advertising are those that buy into at least some of the systematic biases. So for most people, there simply isn't a better alternative when it comes to the formats they want.</p>

<p>Second, even if someone gets their news from the Internet or another source where getting started is less expensive, they may not know about the alternatives. If you grew up with your parents reading the <em>New York Times</em> you may simply live your life checking in on nytimes.com, without ever stopping to wonder whether the news you were getting was systematically biased and whether there was some more preferable alternative.</p>

<p>Again, just as there was no way for the prisoners to know they were being lied to, it's not really reasonable for the average person to figure out that they're getting biased news if the only news they read comes from biased sources.</p>

<p>Now I'm not arguing here that this idea is <em>true</em> (that would require more real-world evidence), merely that it's possible. The fact is that we live in a world where most people get their information about what's going on from a very small number of sources which tend to report largely the same things in the same way. This seems like a rather important fact of life and I think we ought to stop dismissing suggestions that it might have some negative effects on people out of hand.</p>

]]></content:encoded>
	<dc:date>2008-05-19T18:56:45-05:00</dc:date>
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/microfoundations">
    <title>Tectonic Plates and Microfoundations</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/microfoundations</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>In 1915, Alfred Wegener argued that all the continents of Earth once used to fit together as one giant supercontinent, which he later named Pangea. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener?oldid=211296230">As Wikipedia summarizes</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>In his work, Wegener presented a large amount of circumstantial evidence in support of continental drift, but he was unable to come up with a convincing mechanism. Thus, while his ideas attracted a few early supporters ... the hypothesis was generally met with skepticism. The one American edition of Wegener's work ... was received so poorly that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists organized a symposium specifically in opposition.... ... By the 1930s, Wegener's geological work was almost universally dismissed by the scientific community and remained obscure for some thirty years.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Today, of course, every schoolchild knows about Pangea. But for a long time the theory was dismissed, not because it lacked evidence or predictive power -- it explained why the shapes of the continents fit together, why mountain ranges and coal fields lined up, why similar fossil were found in places separated by oceans, and so on -- but because Wegener had no plausible mechanism.</p>

<p>A similar problem happens in the social sciences. <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/bartels-alfred-wegener/">Paul Krugman recently noted</a> that while Larry Bartels (in his new book <a href="http://books.theinfo.org/go/0691136637"><em>Unequal Democracy</em></a>) provides solid, convincing evidence that Republican presidents systematically preside over slower growth and increasing inequality, most social scientists don't believe him because we haven't yet identified the mechanisms. Krugman:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Now, I'm a big Bartels fan; I've known about this result for quite a while. But I've never written it up. Why? Because I can't figure out a plausible mechanism. Even though I believe that politics has a big effect on income distribution, this is just too strong -- and too immediate -- for me to see how it can be done. Sure, Republicans want an oligarchic society -- but how can they do that?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Bartels, for his part, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/releases/m8664.html">argues that</a> providing the mechanisms isn't his job -- his goal is to highlight the phenomena and encourage many others to research the mechanisms:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p><em>How do presidents produce these substantial effects?</em></p>
  
  <p>One of my aims in writing <em>Unequal Democracy</em> was to prod economists and policy analysts to devote more attention to precisely that question. Douglas Hibbs did important work along these lines ... He found that Democrats favored expansionary policies ... while Republicans endured and sometimes prolonged recessions in order to keep inflation in check. (Not coincidentally, unemployment mostly affects income growth among relatively poor people, while inflation mostly affects income growth among relatively affluent people.) In recent decades taxes and transfers have probably been more important. Social spending. Business regulation or lack thereof. And don't forget the minimum wage. Over the past 60 years, the real value of the minimum wage has increased by 16 cents per year under Democratic presidents and declined by 6 cents per year under Republican presidents; that's a 3% difference in average income growth for minimum wage workers, with ramifications for many more workers higher up the wage scale. So, while I don't pretend to understand all the ways in which presidents' policy choices shape the income distribution, I see little reason to doubt that the effects are real and substantial.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>When it comes to addressing such arguments more generally, the most famous commentator is Jon Elster. In his classic article "<a href="http://www.geocities.com/hmelberg/elster/AR82MFGT.HTM">Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory</a>", he insists:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Without a firm knowledge about the mechanisms that operate at the individual level, the grand Marxist claims about macrostructures and long-term change are condemned to remain at the level of speculation.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>(To be fair, Elster doesn't make this as a general argument, but his vehemence has led some of his followers to suggest that it is.)</p>

<p>To be clear, I think discovering mechanisms is important work. All I'm arguing is that it shouldn't be a necessity for believing in a theory. Instead, I believe it's an irrational side-effect of an emotional distaste for gaps in knowledge.</p>

<p>As evidence, let me note that such demands for mechanisms never go more than one level deep. Nobody has ever said, "Well, your theory that people are motivated by greed is all very nice, but I just can't believe it until you can explain how greed is manifested in the brain." Neuroscience is obviously the microfoundation of psychology, but psychological theories are regularly accepted without neuroscientific microfoundations.</p>

<p>In general, it seems like such commentators support a double-standard. Theories with mechanisms should be judged by their fit with the evidence and predictive power. Theories without mechanisms should be judged by the evidence and predictive power and whether you can think of any plausible mechanisms. I don't see how this can be justified. There's no reason mechanism should be privileged in the assessment of knowledge; things are true or false, even if we don't know <em>why</em> they are true or false.</p>

<p>Indeed, it we typically only investigate the causes of phenomena once we're convinced that they exist. (Elster admits as much in <em>Explaining Social Behavior</em>, noting that establishing a phenomena's existence is the first step towards explaining it.) So let's stop making the mistake of not believing things are true because we don't know how they happen.</p>

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	<dc:date>2008-05-14T04:13:01-05:00</dc:date>
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    <title>Simplistic Sociological Functionalism</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/socfunc</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>(I thought I should talk about the other form of functionalism for a change.)</p>

<p>Often sociologists notice a pattern in which certain attributes of a social system fits well with a particular social structure. To take an example I have at hand, Rosabeth Moss Kanter notes that because a secretary has access to facts that could embarrass her boss, it's convenient for the boss that the secretary is entirely dependent upon him for wages and status.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, these claims are often phrased as saying X causes Y. Here's how Kanter does it:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The possibilities for blackmail inherent in [a secretary's] access ... to the real story behind the boss's secrets ... made it important that she identify her interest as running with, rather than against, his. Thus, forces were generated for the maintenance of a system in which the secretary ... was to find her status and reward level dependent on the status and, hence, success of her boss. (<em>Men and Women of the Corporation</em>, 82)</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Note that, although she is unusually careful to hedge her comments ("made it important", "forces were generated", "maintenance of a system") Kanter is making a particular historical claim here: the secretary could blackmail, which pushed the boss to tighten control. But this is not the type of claim that Kanter, who's research consisted mostly of direct observation of present-day offices, is likely to have any real evidence for.</p>

<p>Making such claims is problematic, both because most sociologists don't really know whether they are strictly true, and because they lead Jon Elster to show up at your house and yell at you for hours. But both problems can be easily avoided: simply rephrase such comments to describe the phenomena as <em>effects</em> rather than <em>causes</em>.</p>

<p>Instead of saying a secretary's ability to blackmail leads bosses to tighten their grip, simply note that the boss's tight grip has the effect of weakening the secretary's ability to blackmail. You get all the same points across and nobody gets hurt. See? Easy.</p>

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	<dc:date>2008-05-13T08:15:10-05:00</dc:date>
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    <title>How to Fix the News</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/deadnews</link>
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<p>Newspaper circulation continues to decline. The top-selling paper in the country, <em>USA Today</em>, distributes only 2 million copies a day (half, no doubt, placed outside hotel room doors). Around the same number, with an average age of 71, watch <em>The O'Reilly Factor</em> nightly, with the number decreasing as the audience dies off. Everyone quietly concedes the news industry is dying. It's the Internet's fault, they all assure us.</p>

<p>But what if it wasn't? The other day I heard a news program that was so good that I wanted to listen to it again. And I'm not alone -- all my friends have been talking about it as well. And while I don't have exact numbers, it seems as popular as any one of those other news outlets. That show? The <em>This American Life</em> episode on <a href="http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355">The Global Pool of Money</a> -- a comprehensive explanation of the housing mess.</p>

<p>There were three things about the show that made it stand out from the rest of the news pack:</p>

<ol>
<li><p><strong>It believed in the intelligence of its audience.</strong> It didn't try to pander with sex or disasters or quick cuts. It took a serious news story and investigated it thoroughly for a full hour, with only one break. And it didn't try and dumb any of it down -- it explained the whole thing, from top to bottom.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>It didn't assume you already knew the subject.</strong> Most news stories on important topics are incomprehensible to the average person who doesn't know much about their topic. Here's a quote from a random news story about the housing crisis: "They said financial institutions have been unwilling to expose themselves to the mortgage market, and lenders are hesitant to lend to risky borrowers in a declining house price market after the subprime meltdown." Unless you've been following the story (like the reporter, presumably) do you really know what that means? <em>TAL</em> instead assumed you knew nothing and explained every component and term so that you actually had a picture of what was going on.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>It was done in an entertaining and conversational tone.</strong> It didn't treat the news as some important series of facts that had to be seriously conveyed to you. It treated it as something interesting they wanted to tell you about, a story that involved real people's lives (who you got to hear from at length) and was full of genuinely interesting pieces. Look at that news quote above one more time. Can you really imagine someone sitting down and saying that with a straight face?</p></li>
</ol>

<p>At first these things may seem contradictory -- how can you believe in the intelligence of your audience while assuming they don't know anything? how can you be entertaining and yet still explain a subject? -- but the more you think about them you see how well they fit together. Being intelligent doesn't mean you're knowledgeable; it means you're curious. Which means you want to hear the whole story from beginning to end and which means you might actually find it entertaining. And being conversational prevents you from assuming the mask that lets you talk down to your audience while pretending they only need to hear the handful of new facts that you're providing.</p>

<p>In every other field, that kind of formality has been dropped. Even banks run advertisements these days about how their associates will be your friend. And yet the news chugs along with its arrogant formality, watching its audience get older and older, and wondering why its circulation is declining.</p>

<p>Together, these three points seem like the recipe for a genuine news show: intelligent, comprehensive, and entertaining. And yet, I can't think of a single thing that follows them. Surely in an era of desperation and experimentation, the wacky idea of actually respecting your audience has to be worth a try by <em>someone</em>. Anyone want to give it a shot?</p>

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	<dc:date>2008-05-12T08:38:36-05:00</dc:date>
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    <title>Science or Philosophy?: Jon Elster and John Searle</title>
    <link>http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sciphil</link>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>As the name suggests, the social sciences have often seen themselves as an analogue or extension of the natural sciences and have from the beginning aspired to their successes. Like many who want to duplicate success they do not understand, social sciences has been obsessed with duplicating the <em>form</em> of the natural sciences and not its motivations. Just as rival music player manufacturers have tried to copy the look of the iPod without understanding why it takes that look, the social sciences have copied the structure of the natural sciences without understanding why they take that structure.</p>

<p>The greatest success of the natural sciences is undoubtedly the laws of physics. Here, an handful of simple equations can accurately predict the motion of a vast variety of everyday objects under common actions. Seeing this, social scientists have aspired to derive similar laws that predict the behavior of whole societies. (Others, meanwhile insist the entire project is impossible because the society will respond to the creation of the law, making the law invalid -- reflexivity.)</p>

<p>But reflection upon the history of the natural sciences will see that this notion is insane. Physics did not develop thru attempts to discover the laws that explained all of motion. Instead, various kinds of motion (like falling objects) were described, rules for their behavior deduced, and commonalities in those rules discovered. Eventually it was the case that the commonalities were so great and the rules so few that a handful of laws could explain most of the phenomena, but this assumption was not made <em>a priori</em>.</p>

<p>Jon Elster argues that the social sciences should proceed in a similar way: various social phenomena should be described, the mechanisms that give rise to them explained, and the commonalities among mechanisms discovered. Most of his work consists of practicing social science in this way, with a few attempts at laying out a toolbox of these common mechanisms.</p>

<p>Modern social science is so split between attempts at grand law-like theories and modest essays of careful description that Elster's third way seems alien and hard to comprehend. But there is a clear model that social scientists can look to: analytical philosophy.</p>

<p>Analytical philosophers do not take as their task grand law-like explanations for the world. Instead, they set upon a particular piece of conception -- language, free will, ethics -- and try to discover its logical structure. In doing so they often develop tools they shared in common with other philosophical projects.</p>

<p>This similarity can perhaps be best seen in the work of the man who is Jon Elster's closest equivalent in the world of analytical philosophy, John Searle. In his career, Searle has addressed a number of topics: language, intentionality, consciousness, social reality, and rationality. Throughout he has taken has his task providing a clear description of the phenomena and explaining the pieces it consists of. And in explaining those pieces, he frequently develops tools that he reuses in his other explanations.</p>

<p>Take the notion of <em>direction of fit</em>. Searle argues that all statements have a direction of fit, which can be either up, down, both, or null. If we imagine (by convention) that statements float above the world pointing down at the things they represent, then statements like "John and Jill are married", in which it is the job of the statement to change to accurately represent the world, have a downward direction of fit. By contrast, statements like "I want to marry him", in which it is the world must change to match the statement, have an upward direction of fit.</p>

<p>This notion, which Searle and Austin developed for describing language, Searle later reused for describing mental states. Love, for example, has an upward direction of fit, belief downward, and joy null. And in my own everyday life, I have found the same tool useful in thinking about various phenomena I've encountered.</p>

<p>Social scientists don't seem to read much philosophy. I suspect most of them see it as an alien culture consisting of, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html">as Paul Graham put it</a>, "either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand." But perhaps they should, because even if the technical stuff lacks interest (and considering some of the topics involved, I'm skeptical that this is always the case), the tools, and the way they're wielded, should be a lesson.</p>

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	<dc:date>2008-05-12T04:14:12-05:00</dc:date>
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