November 2009 Archives

I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of expertise. Alvin Goldman, a philosopher at Rutgers, has written some interesting papers on the interaction between novices and experts. Next week I’m going to be leading a discussion on the topic.

I restarted my research on this topic after participating in some other recent discussions about economics and the reactions to the recent recession. How can economists propose such dramatically different explanations and remedies to the current crisis? The result is Paul Krugman asking How did economists get it so wrong?

Chris Dillow posts some interesting thoughts on whether economics is more certain about it’s conclusions now than it was 80 years ago when John Maynard Keynes was writing his General Theory.

To answer the question Dillow looks at two recent papers by economists about the rationality of markets. In comparison to Keynes the contemporary papers are more advanced, referencing more empirical data and having greater theoretical clarity. But they reach opposite conclusions by studying the same data, one finding evidence of rationality and the other finding evidence of irrationality.

Keynes wrote without any reference to empirical data. So which case is better? Someone of prestigious economic intelligence writing without any empirical data or two contemporary economists analyzing the data but reaching different conclusions.

This suggests that, if it is firm beliefs you want, economics regresses. Reading Keynes, you’d infer clearly that markets were somehow not rational. Reading the later papers you wouldn’t know whether they were or not. 70 years of advances in economics has merely generated doubt.

This kind of situation puts the novice economic observer into a major pickle. The novice must rely on the experts to analyze the information and data because the novice lacks the knowledge to even begin the analysis. But after the experts finish the conclusions are contradictory. Is there a way for the novice to resolve this problem?

I wanted to like the new version of The Prisoner on AMC but so far it’s been a failure.

A big part of the problem is the absence of Patrick McGoohan. He was the key to the success of the original series and Caviezel is an inadequate replacement. What made McGoohan so good was his anger and a sense of danger. You really felt like he wanted to destroy the whole village if he didn’t escape. Caviezel is upset but never really angry, he yells a bit but it doesn’t feel genuine. McGoohan’s anger was always on the knife edge of erupting in unexpected ways.

And consider the opening credit scenes. In the 1960s series McGoohan stalked down the hall and sped away in his sports car through the streets of London. In the 2000s series we get intercut visuals of Caviezel spraypainting “resign” across the windows of his office and blurry surveillance video. The former reeks of danger, risk, and spy games a la James Bond. The latter is corporate, the panopticon.

Perhaps it’s an indication of how spying has changed in our imaginations as well as reality. The glory days of the spy were the height of the Cold War; when the enemy was well-defined and the game had rules as portrayed in the works of Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, Alistair MacLean. McGoohan even played a role in a film of a McLean novel - Ice Station Zebra.

Today spying is pervasive. The city of London is constantly monitored by CCTV. No one is followed by a “tail”, instead it’s just recorded on video. We’re living in the Foucauldian panopticon where everyone is being watched. Spying and data-mining are a way of life, hidden beneath every thing we do in the West. It is the water we swim in. During the Cold War we could at least pretend that we were fighting for something else, fighting against the reds to be a free economy, fighting against becoming a number. Today the fight is mostly over. We’re all numbers now and either don’t know it or are resigned to it.

Perhaps that’s why the remake of The Prisoner feels so empty. This time around it’s less about finding the truth, if it’s really out there, then doing our time in purgatory.

Why are libertarians so afraid of governmental interference in personal freedoms but seemingly so blase about business or management interference in worker’s liberty?

Two recent essays and posts by Timothy B. Lee and at Reason magazine reminded me of this conundrum.

It seems obvious to me that a worker surrenders plenty of freedoms as soon as he or she enters the workplace. In some cases it is a surrender of political opinions in workplaces where having a different political point of view from your boss can get you fired.

But at a most basic level it is the routine of the workplace that is a loss of freedom. How many times have you gone into a meeting with a brilliant idea and been shot down by the boss for some reason? The decision wasn’t made by you - it was made by a bureaucrat in the home office who just happens to work at the same company that you do. How is that less of an infringement on your freedom than some bureaucrat in Washington D.C. telling you to pay more taxes or requiring you to pass a background check before you can purchase a gun?

For many people working in blue-collar jobs freedom is curtailed by the schedule, which determines when you can eat, when you can rest, when you can go to the bathroom. See Robin Hanson on borg at work, but not home

Robert Charles Wilson, in his most recent novel Julian Comstock, describes a future American society in which indentured servitude has returned after economic decline. In one conversation the landed gentry describe the justness of indenture by saying that people can only own their selves if they have the right to sell themselves. If someone has the right to inherit the estate of their parents then they should also inherit the debt or indenture.

I’m just as susceptible to the siren song of freedom as the next person but I see the limits on my freedom around me all the time, not just at the state capital or in the White House. We are all subject to limits on our freedom. The problem with libertarianism is that it sees only a single obstacle to freedom - the government.

I just finished rereading A Theory of Justice by John Rawls for a philosophy reading group. One of the themes I noticed is the attempt to deal with contingency in politics.

Rawls acknowledges that everyone approaches political decisions from their own point of view, with unique biases and ideas. The original position is designed to overcome these biases by acknowledging them and then rationally agreeing to make decisions while ignoring individual personal biases. For Rawls it is possible for people to use reason to overcome their prejudices. Once those prejudices are slaked then the real work of political justice can begin by the four-stage process of building just institutions based on the two principles of justice agreed upon behind the veil of ignorance.

A few days ago James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario wrote a post on whether hard working people deserve to make more money. Kwak acknowledges that contingency is as important to financial success as hard work. Sometimes people just get lucky and get very rich as a result. Is Bill Gates really work so much harder than any other software CEO that he deserves a financial result that is orders of magnitude greater than other CEOs?