Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

The sociology of global warming continues to puzzle me. Claims for it are wildly exaggerated. At the same time, however, I hardly ever see mentioned two of the strongest arguments on the pro-action side, to wit:

1. Temperature increases have been concentrated in the interiors of Asia and North America in winter. This is significant, because if increased carbon dioxide is the cause, warming would be strongest where there is the least water vapor– interior land masses with cold dry air. That’s a lot stronger evidence than just the correlation with increased CO2 levels. (Has anyone applied sophisticated time series techniques to that correlation, by the way? Maybe non-economists don’t know those techniques.)

2. There is some possibility of a catastrophic cycle of increased warming, turning the Earth into another Venus. Posner has emphasized this, I hear, in his book. That is much more serious than a few degrees of extra heat, even if less probable.

That these two things get so little play makes me wonder about the judgement of the pro-action people. But it means they may be even more correct than they think, too.

I was just giving advice to my student Changmin Lee about going on the American academic job market. Some of the advice I’ll want to repeat, so I’ll put it here. If every foreign student takes this advice, it will help the market work a lot better. And it is a good illustration of how to apply game theory thinking to real-world situations.

1. On your curriculum vitae (resume), put somewhere “A recording of me speaking English is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mp3, and a movie of me teaching is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mov.”

You might want to omit the movie, but for a foreign student the recording is crucial. Think of it this way. For Korean students, the employer’s prior is that the job applicant can’t speak English well enough to be worth looking at seriously. You need to provide information to possibly change that belief.

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Here are some Caution from a wise woman: about childrearing:

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Maybe I will write a book inspired by reading Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and by fussing with MS Windows, a book about leaders with giant blind spots. Speer’s book is very good on the principal-agent problem and how to manage organizations.

Windows is awesomely bad. How can as big a company as Microsoft do things so poorly? I do not mean that rhetorically. Rather, why don’t they spend a little more money and make a far better product, for which they could charge more? I suppose Bill Gates must be blamed– he controls the company, and he must not have a good feel for technology and so doesn’t understand why good design matters. There is not market corrective for the problem of a monopolistic leader who fails to see something imoprtant. This matters for policy purposes, because such incompetence only survives because of a government-granted monopoly— copyright and patent on software.

Here’s an example, which I’ll list so I can use it as a standard reference. What matters is not that this is so important to operation, as that it shows such incompetence in design.

I want to cancel all my print jobs, because one job is jamming the printer for some reason. Windows has a window that shows print jobs and supposedly allows the user to cancel any one of them, but as often as not, that command is ignored by the computer. Probably that’s incompetent design too, but let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt– maybe there is some technical reason why some print jobs can’t be cancelled without restarting the machine. So I went to the Web.

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For my small group at church, we are reading a Richard Foster book of excerpts. One (which by the way Foster rearranges without telling us) is excerpts from John Wesley’s sermon, THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT. It is a sermon worth pondering, on the topic of the effect of a Christian’s sins. His past sins are imputed to Christ and bear no condemnation, all agree. But what about present sins? And what about self-condemnation?

One thing I realized from this sermon is that when people talk of Wesleyan “perfectionism” as the idea that a Christian can avoid all sin, that can perhaps be true if “sin” is defined, as Wesley does below, to exclude inward and “involuntary” sin. It is a lax standard.

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This is from Proust, either Combray or Times Rediscovered, I forget which:

The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others but I should have understood by the first edition the one I read for the first time. I should seek original editions but by that I should mean books from which I got an original impression. For the impressions that follow are no longer original. I should collect the bindings of novels of former days, but they would be the days when I read my first novels, the days when my father repeated so often “Sit up straight”.

Colin Bird asked what I thought about Hayek’s view of economic methodology, in particular, about his criticism of it in his 1937 Economica article. I might not be understanding it fully, but my impression is that what he doesn’t like about the economic theory of his day is that it:

1. Ignores the fact that people are imperfectly informed and differently informed about prices, products, and methods;

2. Ignores the interesting question of how people become informed;

3. Makes policy conclusions on the basis of theories deficient in their treatment of information (i.e., from points 1 and 2).

This is clearest in his 1945 AER article, the most famous one, which is mostly about the role of prices rather than methodology:

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Doug Wilson has wise things to say about the similarity between liberalism and evangelicalism:

The similarities between modern evangelicalism and liberalism are striking. Both emphasize an experience with Christ over the truth about Christ. Throughout history, some of course have made the opposite error, that of holding to bare propositions instead of holding rightly to the truth — but in our century few have gone in that direction. Our tendency is to exalt personal experience over dogma. Indeed, I at first hesitated to use the word dogma because in today’s climate, it is a dirty word. Taking all this together, I like to tell people that Christianity is not a relationship; it is a religion. Of course it is a religion with a covenant relationship at the heart of it. God promises to be our God, and we will be His people. But the liberal (and modern evangelical) emphasis is on what we are pleased to call a personal relationship (meaning private relationship) — and not the biblical notion of a public covenant relationship. When the relationship becomes “personal,” the truth that undergirds it becomes equally “personal.”

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I enjoyed the Christianity Today debate between Hitchens and Wilson because my guy was winning, but Hitchens was too easy a target. He embarassed himself by misunderstanding The Good Samaritan and he apparently hadn’t ever asked himself about the basis for his moral opinions, which he thinks are both self-evident and universally shared.

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.

I don’t think the big issue here is really the ordination of women. I would not find the document appalling if it said, “There would be more talent in the ministry if we ordained women, so I think we ought to change the rules and allow it.” I don’t agree with that myself, but I think it’s an open question, much like that of ordaining people without seminary training. But that’s not the Denver attitude. Here’s an excerpt that illustrates it.

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The dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is revealing in how it separates morality from human rights and interest in human life.

      Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. See ante, at 28 (”Congress could … conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (”Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at 850)).

I got this joke from href="http://volokh.com/posts/1173037843.shtml">The Volokh
Conspiracy.

Proof that a ham sandwich is better than complete happiness in
life:

1. Everyone agrees that nothing is better than complete happiness
in life;

2. A ham sandwich is better than nothing.

From Overcoming Bias via Bryan Kaplan comes a joke and some practical advice:

There is an old Jewish joke: During Yom Kippur, the rabbi is seized by a sudden wave of guilt, and prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” The cantor is likewise seized by guilt, and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” Seeing this, the janitor at the back of the synagogue prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” And the rabbi nudges the cantor and whispers, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws… [W]e should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess….

Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it. Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that’s not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward.

I had an experience in class recently that bears on the issue
of how to teach and how to evaluate teaching quality. The question
arose of how to learn whether moderate drinking of red wine reduced
the number of heart attacks. I asked the class of twelve or so bus
econ seniors— an elite group within my elite business school– how
they would attack the problem.

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A set of comments at National Review on Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that Islamists have been successful because Islam is hostile to modern Western immorality shows how lost conservatism is. It’s not that the commentors–who include smart people like Victor Hanson and Stanley Kurtz– disagree with D’Souza; rather, they don’t even comprehend his thesis. His argument goes like this:

1. The Left won the Culture War in the Western World.

2. The Left’s immorality is now spreading worldwide, including to Islamic countries.

3. Mainstream Moslems are therefore now turning to the leadership of radical Islamists to fight back against infectious western decadence.

Thus, the Left caused 9-11. This is not moral causation, because it was not the intent of the Left to cause 9-11; it is just “efficient causation”, to use Aristotle’s classification. Or, if you like, it is somewhere in between: the Left wanted to spread its ideas around the World, and it sparked a war that it didn’t intend to cause.

The comments say that the Left is not to blame, which may be right (causing something bad doesn’t mean you are to blame for it), and that the Islamists are a bigger threat than the Left (which any conservative should think is false, as I have posted on before). Perhaps the problem is that many people categorized under “conservative” today are not conservative at all. They are foreign policy realists, or libertarians, or neoconservatives who approve of homosexuality, divorce, and pornography, and thus do not see the Left as a threat except to national security and to their pocketbooks. Naturally, such a person would not agree with D’Souza, and might even have trouble understanding his point, and why the Islamists are so angry.

Via Organizations and Markets I found this book review talking about the history of economic thought: (more…)

I think Proust has a good point in Times Rediscovered about starting from individual attitudes to understand national attitudes. It is the opposite approach of that in Plato’s Republic, of looking at the nation to understand the individual, but both approaches have their place. As always, it is a matter of starting with what is easier. (more…)

BILL BENNETT”S GAMBLING is an interesting story. He is a rich man who thinks many things are sinful, but, typical of Catholics, not gambling, and he does gamble large sums several times a year. The best article is Jonah Goldberg’s in National Review, which says,

“But the biggest reason I find these Bennett articles so troublesome is what they reveal about the kind of society we ‘re building. Hypocrisy is bad, but it’s not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites — particularly in Hollywood — believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.”

The rest of the article is well worth reading too.

Many intelligent men have written at length about God, but none that I know of about ghosts. Ordinary people often believe in both. Belief in God thus does not seem to be just a rationalization of a folk belief.