A Simple Morality Test

If we are more likely to choose the moral choice if the framework is simple, then here's the best tool I've ever heard. From economist and author Steve Levitt: "How would I feel if my daughter were engaged in that activity?" I don't have a daughter, but I bet little sister is a comparable substitute. I can honestly say I wouldn't mind my sisters working at Walmart, playing online poker, marrying interracially, not voting, buying from China, refusing panhandlers, speculating on oil, or smoking legalized pot.

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.

Osama bin Laden Never Scared Me

Last night I came across part of an episode of This American Life. It's a conversation with a college student, Lexi Belculfine, who was one of thousands of Penn State students who took to the streets in celebration after announcement of Osama bin Laden's death. This celebration is something the interviewer, and myself, have struggled to understand. The student explained that people currently under thirty experienced 9/11 in a very different way than people over thirty today. To them bin Laden was the boogeyman who convinced a generation that they weren't as safe as their parents said they were.

I'm under thirty and I didn't have that reaction. When my wife called me and told me they found Osama bin Laden, I couldn't wait to watch the trial. To see what I saw when they captured Saddam Hussein. A sad old man who lived in a hole with his tired eyes and shabby beard. But when my wife called me the second time to say they killed him I was a little disheartened. I didn't understand why until I listened to the Penn State student's story. Unlike Lexi, I was never scared of bin Laden. I think it's a combination of 1) being in a mid-sized southern town, far away from NYC, DC, and the eyes of terrorists and 2) my general lack of empathy. For me, 9/11 was sad, in the same way the earthquake in Haiti was sad and the tsunami in Japan was sad.

And I wanted that for everyone else. I wanted them to see just how sad, tired, and foolish bin Laden was. I wanted the world, east and west, to agree that he was a terrible man whose plan on 9/11 actually failed miserably at it's goal of getting America to stop meddling the affairs of the Middle East. He was not a shadowy figure, but a self-righteousness propagandist. I'm not convinced the vengeful feelings of satisfaction are helpful. I don't think we should celebrate the death of America's scariest enemy. I think we should recognize that he was never that scary to begin with.

Benign Violation Theory of Humor

Similar to my earlier reality and absurdity post on comedy, professor of psychology Peter McGraw has his own theory:

Their paper, “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny,” cited scores of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists (as well as Mel Brooks and Carol Burnett). The theory they lay out: “Laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign.” That is, they perceive a violation—”of personal dignity (e.g., slapstick, physical deformities), linguistic norms (e.g., unusual accents, malapropisms), social norms (e.g., eating from a sterile bedpan, strange behaviors), and even moral norms (e.g., bestiality, disrespectful behaviors)”—while simultaneously recognizing that the violation doesn’t pose a threat to them or their worldview. The theory is ludicrously, vaporously simple. But extensive field tests revealed nuances, variables that determined exactly how funny a joke was perceived to be.

Here it is in diagram form:

Here's the social explanation:

The ultimate takeaway of McGraw’s paper was that the evolutionary purpose of laughter and amusement is to “signal to the world that a violation is indeed OK.” Building on the work of behavioral neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, McGraw believes that laughter developed as an instinctual way to signal that a threat is actually a false alarm—say, that a rustle in the bushes is the wind, not a saber-toothed tiger. “Organisms that could separate benign violations from real threats benefited greatly,” McGraw says.

Here's how you make a moral violation benign:

Dirty jokes violate social norms in a benign way because the traveling salesmen and farmers’ daughters that populate them are not real. Punch lines make people laugh because they gently violate the expectations that the jokes set up. The BVT also explains Sarah Silverman, McGraw says; the appalling things that come out of her mouth register as benign because she seems so oblivious to their offensiveness, and “because she’s so darn cute.” Even tickling, long a stumbling block for humor theorists, appears to fit. Tickling yourself can’t be a violation, because you can’t take yourself by surprise. Being tickled by a stranger in a trench coat isn’t benign; it’s creepy. Only tickling by someone you know and trust can be a benign violation.

If you want to hear more from Mr. McGraw's own words, here's his TED Talk:

Economic History of Gas Prices

Here's some much needed context:

But in constant 2010 dollars, that 1919 price of gas was $3.14. True, at the moment we’re paying a bit more—about $3.96. However, keep in mind that in 1919 there were 7.58 million motor vehicles on America’s roads. Today, Americans own about 254 million vehicles. That means that gas prices have risen 26 percent since 1919, while US vehicle ownership has risen 3,250 percent. And those vehicles are being driven more intensively than their 1919 counterparts. We now drive 6,800 percent more miles per year than in 1919, while gas prices have stayed pretty much stable.

War is Destruction Not Production

From Tyler Cowen:

Put aside Bob Higgs’s points about restricted consumption, Alexander Field has another angle:

Had trends persisted in the absence of war, employment, TFP, and labor productivity would all likely have been higher in 1942…housing construction was robust and growing in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and when the postwar housing boom emerged with full force in 1946, it took off from where it had been arrested in 1941. Since the failure of residential construction to revive fully was one of the major contributors to the persistence of low private investment spending during the Depression, its signs of revival in the years immediately preceding the war suggest that had peace continued, investment, output, and employment growth would have continued as the economy reapproached capacity.

…There continues to be a popular perception that war is beneficial to an economy, particularly if it does not lead to much physical damaged to the country prosecuting it. The U.S. experience during the Second World War is the typical poster child for this point of view. Detailed research into the effects of armed conflict, however, has usually produced more nuanced interpretations…In that spirit, the research reported in this chapter represents a revisionist approach to the analysis of the Second World War, although one that is not entirely unanticipated.

You can buy Field’s excellent book here and here is my previous post on the work. Here is Kling on Field, very useful.

You can't use scarce resources to blow things up and count that as wealth. Just another reason why GDP isn't the best measure of wealth.

Gross Downtime Product

In my two posts on Tyler Cowen's new ebook, The Great Stagnation, I described a concern (but not crisis) about the possibility of future economic growth. But perhaps even if we don't don't get more productive at work, we are getting more productive at play:

recent advances in technology are actually increasing per-hour productivity by much more than we realize. But then workers are absorbing those gains by goofing off more at their desks, spending their time on Facebook and surfing the web, and completing their tasks only marginally faster than they used to despite much greater productivity. Admit it: the typical white collar office worker under 35 is spending at least a quarter of his or her day on social networking, reading blogs and chatting with friends. Hours worked are shrinking much faster than hours “worked,” and we’re enjoying a lot more leisure time than is reflected in the data.

Maybe this is the solution to our money > time problem.

Worthwhile Sentences on Work

From Sallie James: "Oh sure, you can pass lots of laws to creates jobs. You could pass a law saying we can no longer use computers. You can pass a law saying no more use of heavy earth moving equipment; we should all use spoons."

From Bryan Caplan: "In a society of Einsteins, Einsteins take out the garbage, scrub floors, and wash dishes."

From Tim Ferriss' email auto response: "Thank you for your email. Sadly, it will be deleted. To regain sanity, I am taking a break from e-mail until March. If still relevant, please email me again in the month of March."

From David Brooks: "One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work."

From former UC President Clark Kerr: "The chancellor's job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni."

The Dogs of War

U.S. soldier and his dog leap off the ramp of a helicopter

Who would have guessed one of the most interesting stories I came across after the death of Osama bin Laden (great summary) would be about the role of canines in the military:

Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they're a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset.

So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in Operation Neptune Spear that resulted in Osama bin Laden's killing, there was one dog -- the elite of the four-legged variety.

I recommended the who article quoted. It's short, full of great links and more wonderful photographs of humans and their animals.

Economics Of The Jetsons

From blogger Matt Yglesias:

Earlier today, Annie Lowrey drew our attention to the fact that George Jetson enjoyed a nine-hour workweek—thee hours a day, three days a week. Mike Konczal rightly connected this to JM Keynes’ essay on “The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren” (PDF) highlighting the consequences of a super-abundance of material prosperity.

Here's the economic reality:

Essentially imagine a world in which productivity grows by an average of 2.5 percent per year for the next fifty years and Mr and Mrs Jetson have chosen to take the cumulative 418 percent increase in income by reducing hours worked to one quarter of present-day standards rather than vastly increased consumption.

Here's the most fascinating conclusion:

You can imagine two different equilibria here. One is that maybe with so many people able to comfortable support themselves on nine-hour workweeks, that entertainment is done entirely on an amateur basis. Maybe Jet Screamer earns $0 from his music, and instead works three days a week at a nursing home to earn a living. He performs music because it’s fun and because he enjoys the groupies.

This would work great for someone (like me) with more hobbies than they know what to do with.