links for 2008-01-13

• It Happened to Him. It's Happening to You. - washingtonpost.com
• Bilious Bainbridge - Kids Prefer Cheese
• Freedom for the Thought That We Hate - Book Review - New York Times
• So We Thought. But Then Again . . . - Tyler Cowen - New York Times
• The Moral Instinct - New York Times

Comments

[Farrar]

From "The Moral Instinct" (above)
"...studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians"

Just so, and don't we see evidence of that every day among this very blog's trollers.

[Jan VanDenBerg]

Well, I was taught in Micro 101 that utility maximization is the meaning of life, so, you say, what were they doing to my frontal lobe?

[barry payne - economist]

Steven Pinker is an outstanding psychologist and cognitive scientist who presents brilliant observations of the human condition periodically in articles as this one, The Moral Instinct, filled with insightful passages as:

Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse.

The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions.

Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past.

Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking”). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions.

Perhaps the last paragraph above was directed at Moody's and the financial brotherhood.

The concepts explored in this article go a long way to illuminate the notion that at some point, opposing views on many issues related to morals seem more grounded in nature rather than nuture.

It puts more meaning into the common retort, "You just believe that because of who you are, where you're from, what you were taught, what you've been contaminated with ... i.e. you're not capable of independent, rational deliberation based on 'facts'."

And adds meaning to "the survival of the fittest" to imply "what's fit is what's moral and what's moral is (fill in personal DNA profile here).

Maybe this explains how so many threads dissolve into flame wars of personal slurs, perhaps a self-selection bias driven by some moral instinct that has a craving for attention but coupled with such objectionable conduct that in physical social circles, would immediately be ejected or suppressed as a verbal terrorist.

[Alex Tolley]

I had also selected the Pinker article to send to friends yesterday. What struck me was his interesting separation of different moral spheres as part of universal morals, how the situations that are considered moral ones vary in time and place, and how different moral composition confounds communication.

It will be interesting to see the parallels between morality and religion once science starts to seriously grapple with religion too.

[Bruce Wilder]

"So We Thought, but then again . . . "

Tyler Cowen proves once again to not be a trustworthy narrator. Perhaps he should retitle his essay, "Iz R Economists learning?"

Shall we review?

Revising China's Economy Opening sentence: "Many of the prices in China had not been accurately measured since the late 1980s; in 2007, new data indicated that food, rent and other items had become a lot more expensive than had been accounted for in official measurements." This is one seriously confused sentence. Is he saying China's government does not carry on statistical price surveys? Is he saying there was new data for 2007? Whose "official" measurements?

The World Bank issued a report in December 2007 reporting new Purchasing Power Parity estimates of GDP, etc., for a large group of countries. The previous revision was done in 1993. China has never before actually provided detailed data, so, as far as the World Bank's previous estimates of PPP for China are concerned, they have never been based on detailed and accurate price data, on the standard of the 2005 survey (or 1993 or 1985).

The new PPP estimates still leave China the world's second largest economy. Critics have already questioned the China PPP estimates. It has been suggested that the price data used was for urban China, not rural China, and the large increases in poverty estimates may be largely a reflection of that data collection bias and rising urban price levels. The new PPP rates imply that China's market exchange rate in 2005 undervalued China's currency by about 16%. Why China might want to bias estimates to make their currency undervaluation look less severe is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's Not Just the LendersFirst sentence: "There has been plenty of talk about 'predatory lending,' but 'predatory borrowing' may have been the bigger problem." Steven Pinker, author of that excellent NYTimes article on The Moral Instinct linked above by MT, should probably be called in on this one. It is not the facts that have Tyler confused in this case, rather it is Tyler's deranged moral instinct. Tyler discovers that the there was a lot of fraud involved in that orgy of Alt A and subprime borrowing, but what is interesting is the use he makes of this information. He's not going to criticize the banks or the system; the key for him is being able to blame the victim: "In other words, many of the people now losing their homes committed fraud."

The key, here, for Tyler, is short-circuiting our sympathy for victims. (Really, read Pinker) Oh, yes, and transforming lenders from accessories to fraud into hapless nice guys: "Too often, mortgage originators and middlemen looked the other way rather than slowing down the process or insisting on adequate documentation of income and assets. As long as housing prices kept rising, it didn’t seem to matter."

(Note for the slow: we don't know from Tyler's report that fraudsters were buying homes for themselves to live in; maybe, they were flippers buying houses speculatively; and, the decline in housing prices will take a lot of people "underwater" over the next couple of years -- I've seen estimates of 10+ million homeowners.)

In Music, Hardware Rules Last sentence of this section sums up Tyler's thesis: "A more competitive hardware market would mean lower prices for the music players and eventually higher prices for music, as Apple would be less keen to sell the music so cheaply." I guess Tyler didn't get the memo from Amazon about $0.89 DRM-less, high-quality MP3 downloads.

Tyler's economic analysis, here, is really bad. REALLY BAD. He's right that Apple makes money on the hardware, not the music; but, on everything else, he's out to lunch. That producers' cost might have some relation to price never enters his picture, let alone any inkling that download services might incur only a fraction of the marginal costs of CD sales. I'd say, "don't quit your day job, Tyler," but really, he should quit his day job.

Lethal Cold Fronts I feared that this was all leading to good news about global warming, but, thankfully, no, he did not go there. Mildly interesting.

Tyler gets in one shot on income inequality: "We’re still not sure what is driving the increase in income inequality. It is common to cite globalization and the ability to sell to the entire world, but the surge in top incomes does not seem to be coming in the most globalized sectors." I am pretty sure Tyler will never be sure what is driving income inequality, until he's wrong about what is driving income inequality.

[Bruce Wilder]

Oops!

The World Bank issued a report in December 2007, concerning a 2005 survey . . .

I so need an editor.

[Cynthia]

This passage from Steven Pinker's article "The Moral Instinct" captures the essence of what distinguishes a liberal from a conservative:

"The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberal and the conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five."

And IMO, "harm and fairness" transcend time, whereas "group loyalty, authority and purity" do not! So I'll argue that liberals transcend conservatives...;~)

[Bill Ganzel]

Fascinating article and replies. For what it's worth, there is a free, non-profit educational web site that has several full interviews with Dr. Norman Borlaug -- who is featured in the NYTimes article -- about his work in agriculture. Go to http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org and click on the "Media Resouces" for video podcasts of his interviews. Or go to the "Farming in the 50s-60s" section and click on the "Crops" subsection to see longer articles about the history and debate about the Green Revolution. Again, it's totally free and non-profit.

[Patricia Shannon]

"The Moral Instinct" is interesting and well-written. However, it does exhibit a couple of instances of overgeneralizations. Eg., labeling the desire of some non-smokers for non-smoking rooms or floors as a moral issue of contamination/purity. If you haven't damaged your sense of smell by smoking, a non-smoking room is likely to stink. So of course one would like to avoid that. I would expect that prohibiting smoking on certain floors is easier to keep track of and enforce than designating individual rooms as non-smoking. Also, it would avoid second-hand smoke from other rooms.

[wjd123]

As soon as I read the title "The Moral Instinct" I was suspect of what I would find. Was this article going to offer more psychology and biology than sociology? A sociology or morality like a sociology of knowledge believes that the categories of the mind are social constructs. Centuries ago what people in different societies thought as moral or rational isn't the same as today. People today don't think like people in the Middle Ages.

Examining the process from a perspective of the sociology of knowledge makes the parallel sociology of morality easier to understand since there isn't all the emotional baggage of values.

What was rational then isn't rational now. What forced the new way of reasoning on the mind? Society. If someone today still held to the geocentric cosmos, the flat earth, or trial by ordeal they would be thought of at the minimum as eccentric. What caused the change in how people see the rational. Was it some kind of instinct for rational thinking or the authority of society to make the mind conform?

There could hardly be a society if everyone was allowed to reason as they pleased. Society has a vested interest in conformity. People have to understand what other people are talking about for society to exist. Challenges to what a society accepts as rational are seen as a danger to the conformity and the authority of society. However, if enough people persist in thinking outside the box and gain advocates there is a tipping point where the people that make up a society will in the interest of conformity and the survival of their society change to get everyone reasoning in the same manner. A new social pressure grows to think in the new way. (As understanding becomes more scientific its authority make reasoning more universal and its methodology make social authority less of a roadblock to change.)

Yet questions remain. (Here I'm winging it with pure conjecture.) Why did some of our forefathers find the courage not to confirm to the accepted reality? Why did they think out of the box? Were they just too naive not to understand the problems they would cause for themselves? Did they persist for the good of society, believing that they were saving society from itself? Once they grasped a different reality did they find it intolerable to live in the present reality?

Another question is how are people that are socially conditioned able to change? Could it be that survival imperatives for society make it imperative for people to change. Is there a terrorism of the mind brought about by a growing realization that the presuppositions upon which society rest simply aren't adequate to changing circumstances? Are most people terrorized into change because they see that "the center cannot hold?" Desperate for survival do they become more open to taking a "leap of faith" into a new reality yet fully supported by society. If the new social construct develops and survives do the categories of the mind change in time bringing about a new rationality?

OK, maybe I winged the whole thing. But I'm not convinced that morality much less rationality is a matter of psychology or biological instinct. The flower doesn't unfold because of what is within, but the need to adapt to the forces without.

[Patricia Shannon - continued]

Why the either/or arguments? Most characteristics are a combination of genetics and environment.