Joswald1

Bryan Caplan has a post that discusses a hypothetical eugenic regime:

Imagine a Eugenic America where citizens who earn less than median income are forbidden to have children. Enforcement isn't perfect, so 5% of all kids born are "illegals." Over time, this leads to a substantial stock of people who weren't supposed to be born in the first place.

Pundits have the predictable range of positions on eugenic policy. Liberals demand amnesty for the current stock of illegals, and pledge stricter enforcement of eugenics in the future. Conservatives oppose amnesty - partly because they don't want to reward law-breaking, and partly because they don't trust liberals to help them strictly enforce eugenics laws. "Think-outside-the-box" thinkers occasionally chime in, "Fertility policy should be skill-based! Letting talented low-income people breed is good for America."

As this morally blind debate rages on, a libertarian arrives on the scene. He vocally proposes "Open Breeding." Abolish eugenics laws, and let any woman who wants a baby have a baby. Mainstream reactions are diverse, but uniformly negative.

Now of course Bryan probably did think this was an interesting analogy to the immigration debate. And commenters are quite correct that it's possible to argue for immigration restrictions and against birth restrictions. The two cases are not identical. But I think that misses the more interesting point. As I read Caplan, he's not really making a good argument for open borders; he's making a good argument that "we" should not trust our opinions on the open border question. By "we" I mean the 99.9% of people who have a sort of visceral negative reaction to the idea of unlimited immigration.

One can certainly imagine a society where respectable opinion believed in eugenics. Indeed in some respects that society existed 100 years ago (although actual policies were milder than in Bryan's example.) While Bryan's analogy didn't convince me that open borders are a good idea he did change my Bayesian prior on the issue. That's because I now realize that my gut instincts are not reliable. He's completely right that respectable opinion in a eugenic regime would have scoffed at Caplanesque arguments for a 100% open birth policy. That doesn't mean he's right on immigration (or indeed even eugenics), but it does suggest we should be skeptical of claims that open border proponents are somehow "loony," merely because most respectable opinion recoils from the notion of open borders. Bryan showed why respectable opinion would not be reliable in an area where many of the very same "gut instincts" come into play (such as the fear of "our civilized society being overwhelmed by barbaric hoards." My words not Bryan's.)

BTW, there is one country that does view children born in violation of government regulations as "illegals."

IN HER parents' bare brick-built shack in southern Beijing, Li Xue sifts through piles of court verdicts, petitions and other papers that record her family's struggle for most of the 20 years of her life to secure a simple document: a household registration certificate, the basic building block of official identity in China. Because she was born in violation of China's one-child-per-couple policy, local officials will not give her one. As a result she could not go to school. She now cannot get a job, nor get married, nor even buy a train or plane ticket. Despite recent moves to relax family-planning rules, the ordeal for Ms Li (pictured) is still far from over.

Suppose that the Chinese government had instead relied solely on a monetary fine imposed on the parent who violated the one child policy. How do you enforce that? Most peasants are too poor to pay a substantial fine. Yes, you could take away all their wealth and push them into abject poverty. But in that case you'd still be punishing the child. They would not eat well. The parents could not give them medical care; they could not afford to send them to school.

Now ask yourself how many of those academics that supported the one child policy actually thought through what would happen to the millions of children born in violation to that policy? I'd guess not very many. Now let's consider immigration restrictions. Is there a clean, antiseptic way to keep out illegal immigrants?

Bryan has not convinced me that 100% open borders are clearly the way to go. But he has convinced me that my objections to his arguments are not as reliable as I might have assumed. My reservations about open borders are actually pretty similar to the reservations that people in a eugenics society would have had to a proposal for an open birth policy.

Yes, the two cases might be different enough that the analogy doesn't hold. Maybe open births are good and open borders are bad. But the fact that superficially similar arguments against birth restrictions would have been rejected out of hand by a eugenic culture should, at the very least, make us do a bit of soul-searching.

Let's face it, most people oppose open borders at the gut level, and then they search for logical reasons to support the position that had already formed in their reptilian brain. It's all about the prospect of Kolkata on the Hudson, or Kinshasa on the Hudson. I consider myself to be less xenophobic than the average person, but even I recoil slightly at the prospect of the messy third world moving en masse to the United States, so I can understand that fear. But Bryan keeps showing us that our gut instincts on immigration might well be wrong.

Thought experiment: Suppose that in an alternative world eugenics was adopted in the year 1000. By the year 2014 the average IQ in the world was about 115 (using our current scale of 100 being average in our world.) Also suppose that there was no abject poverty, and no war. And suppose I presented a paper saying that society made a mistake in the year 1000, that eugenics should not have been adopted. A professor objects that my alternative scenario would have led to a world with billions of people with IQs in the 70s, 80s and 90s, instead of less than one billion. An alternative world with war and genocide and billions living in abject poverty. A murder rate 5 times higher. For every 10 Einsteins, there would only be one. How would I respond to that professor?

My point is not that eugenics would have been the right way to go in the year 1000. I don't believe that. Rather it is that when something has become the well-established status quo, it's really, really hard to argue for something radically different. Even if you are right.

How People Get Good At Their Jobs

If schools teach few job skills, transfer of learning is mostly wishful thinking, and the effect of education on intelligence is largely hollow, how on earth do human beings get good at their jobs?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice.  People learn by doing specific tasks over and over.  To get better at piloting, you fly planes; to get better at obstetrics, you deliver babies; to get better at carpentry, you build houses. 

For the unskilled, progress is easy.  Given common-sense conditions, it's almost guaranteed.  In the words of K. Anders Ericsson, the world's leading expert on expertise, novices improve as long as they are, "1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance."[1]  Before long, though, the benefit of mere practice plateaus.  To really get good at their jobs, people must advance to deliberate practice.  To keep learning, they must exit their comfort zone - raise the bar, struggle to surmount it, repeat.  As Ericsson and co-authors explain:

You need a particular kind of practice - deliberate practice - to develop expertise.  When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do.  Deliberate practice is different.  It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can't do well - or even at all.[2] 

Fortunately, the labor market offers plenty of sub-pinnacle opportunities.  A few thousand hours of deliberate practice won't make you a superstar, but is ample time to get good in most occupations.[6]  What really counts, of course, is not the mere passage of time, but the amount of practice.[7]   

The Ten Thousand Hour Rule is widely seen as an intellectual victory for effort over talent.  This is a serious misinterpretation.  The Ten Thousand Hour Rule doesn't say that anyone can become a master if he tries hard and long enough.[8]  What the Rule says, rather, is that even the best and brightest must spend years practicing their craft to reach the top.  People don't become skilled workers by dabbling in a dozen different school subjects.  They become skilled workers by devoting years to their chosen vocation - by doing their job and striving to do it better.

In 2013, a group of Lego masters unveiled Cyberpocalypse, a spectacularly detailed, moody, neon-lit cyberpunk city. It's a triumph of EL wire and science fiction aesthetics, a kind of bricky Burning Man theme-camp in miniature. Read the rest

Subjects exposed to the recession are more selfish and more willing to sacrifice equality to enhance efficiency.

That is from Fisman, Jakiela, and Kariv, there is more to ponder here, and also here.

Consider the following three questions (from Lusardi and Mitchell):

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2% per
year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you
left the money to grow.

More than $102. Exactly $102,. Less than $102? Do not know. Refuse to answer.

2. Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1% per year and
inflation was 2% per year. After 1 year, would you be able to buy.

More than, exactly the same as, or less than today with the money in this account? Do not know. Refuse to answer.

3. Do you think that the following statement is true or false? ‘Buying a single
company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.’

T. F. Do not know. Refuse to answer.

Sadly, most Americans rate themselves high on financial acuity but they cannot answer all three questions correctly.

Only about a third of Americans answer all three questions correctly (and that figure is inflated somewhat due to guessing). The Germans and Swiss do significantly better (~50% all 3 correct) on very similar questions but many other countries do much worse. In New Zealand only 24% answer all 3 questions correctly and in Russia it’s less than 5%.

Some of the variation can be explained by experience. The Japanese, for example, don’t have much experience with inflation in recent decades and they perform poorly on that question. The questions, however, can hardly be considered esoteric and a large literature indicates that the ability to answer these questions correlates with the ability to intelligently make real and important financial decisions regarding mortgage refinancing, credit card borrowing, and retirement planning.

Most states now require that financial literacy be taught to high school students and there is some evidence that teaching financial literacy improves financial outcomes later in life but the evidence is not strong and most teachers still feel that they are unqualified to teach the basic concepts.

In my opinion, improving financial literacy is one of the areas in which principles of economics teachers can make a great contribution to their students. Modern Principles, my text with Tyler, contains extensive material on these topics including a chapter on stock markets and personal finance but more needs to be done.

Addendum: Take the quiz here (with a few more questions). Hat tip: PD Shaw and Tim Ogden for an added link.

If the Moon orbited the Earth at the same distance as the International Space Station, it might look a little something like this:

At that distance, the Moon would cover half the sky and take about five minutes to cross the sky. Of course, as Phil Plait notes, if the Moon were that close, tidal forces would result in complete chaos for everyone involved.

There would be global floods as a tidal wave kilometers high sweeps around the world every 90 minutes (due to the Moon's closer, faster orbit), scouring clean everything in its path. The Earth itself would also be stretched up and down, so there would be apocalyptic earthquakes, not to mention huge internal heating of the Earth and subsequent volcanism. I'd think that the oceans might even boil away due to the enormous heat released from the Earth's interior, so at least that spares you the flood... but replaces water with lava. Yay?

In this video, Las Vegas filmmaker Ryan Higa takes a look at the dissonance between your expectations of scenes from action movies and what the reality turns out to be. We’ve previously written about Ryan and his clever collection of videos.

Here is a behind-the-scenes look at Ryan’s numerous action movie fails:

Video game producers utilize music to keep you engaged, increase your achievement, and give you the energy to make it to the next level. So maybe you just found your ideal work soundtrack.

Karltorp has found that music from games he used to play as a kid, such as StarCraft, Street Fighter, and Final Fantasy, work best. Because the music is designed to foster achievement and help players get to the next level, it activates a similar "in it to win it" mentality while working, argues Karltorp. At the same time, it's not too disruptive to your concentration. "It's there in the background," said Karltorp. "It doesn't get too intrusive, it keeps you going, and usually stays on a positive tone, too, which I found is important."

Hat tip: Flowing data. Original?

What do you do when you have a seaplane without wheels, no water, and you need to take off? You put it on a trailer, drag it down the runway until you get the proper speed, and just pull back on the stick:

Damn, that's cool. I knew it was gonna take off and it still baked my noodle a little bit. I think this is why so many people (myself included) had trouble with the airplane on the treadmill question. All that really matters for takeoff and continued flight is the speed of the plane relative to the air -- how it gets to that point or what the surface is doing isn't really relevant -- but when you're observing it, it seems impossible. (via @deronbauman)

androidgyne:

lovelydeck:

arkane81:

prostheticknowledge:

SCiO

This is a bit future-shock …

A small consumer-level molecular scanner lets you analyze the objects around you for relevant information, from food calories or quality, medicine, nature etc … This could be the start of the Internet of Everything

The Kickstarter was launched yesterday and made it’s $200,000 goal within 24 hours - the potential for this tech is huge. Watch the video embedded below to see the potential:

Smartphones made it easy to research facts, capture images, and navigate street maps, but they haven’t brought us closer to the physical environment in which we live – until now. 

Meet SCiO. It is the world’s first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of just about anything around you, sent directly to your smartphone.

Out of the box, when you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to analyze food, plants, and medications.

For example, you can:

• Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more.

• See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel!

• Find out the quality of your cooking oil.

• Know the well being of your plants.

• Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions.

• Authenticate medications or supplements.

• Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself !

You can find out more about the product at it’s Kickstarter page here

WTF!??!?!

Whoa could you drug test your drinks to make sure no one puts anything in it?!

So, you’re saying it’s a tricorder?

The latest video game in the Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, has been revealed by publisher Activision and developer Sledgehammer Games. The video game looks at battlegrounds and warfare of the future, features the voice and likeness of actor Kevin Spacey, and is scheduled for release on November 4th, 2014.

I'm at a conference in San Diego in which the participants are discussing various articles and book chapters on the causes of economic growth. A number of chapters are from Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail, which I posted about here.

There are a number of things about the book to criticize and I criticized some of them. I've heard some more good criticisms at this conference. But I want to highlight a powerful passage:

As an independent polity, Congo experienced almost unbroken economic decline and mounting poverty under the rule of Joseph Mobutu between 1965 and 1997. This decline continued after Mobutu was overthrown by Laurent Kabila. Mobutu created a highly extractive set of institutions. The citizens were impoverished, but Mobutu and the elite surrounding him, known as Les Grosses Legumes (the Big Vegetables), became fabulously wealthy. Mobutu built himself a palace at his birthplace, Gbadolite, in the north of the country, with an airport large enough to land a supersonic Concord[e] jet, a plane he frequently rented from Air France for travel to Europe. In Europe he bought castles and owned large tracts of the Belgian capital of Brussels.

Wouldn't it have been better for Mobutu to set up economic institutions that increased the wealth of the Congolese rather than deepening their poverty? If Mobutu had managed to increase the prosperity of his nation, would he not have been able to appropriate even more money, buy a Concord[e] instead of renting one, have more castles and mansions, possibly a bigger and more powerful army? Unfortunately for the citizens of many countries in the world, the answer is no. Economic institutions that create incentives for economic progress may simultaneously redistribute income and power in a way that a predatory dictator and others with political power may become worse off.

Photographer David Liittschwager captured the little ecosystem of life contained in a splash of seawater magnified 25 times:

It's the microscopic equivalent of the Hubble Deep Field image and worth seeing larger. Here's part of the larger image:

Liittschwager took the photo for National Geographic, but it also might be contained in his book, A World in One Cubic Foot, in which he took photos in locations all over the world of the life that passed through 1 cubic foot of space in 24 hours.

For A World in One Cubic Foot, esteemed nature photographer David Liittschwager took a bright green metal cube-measuring precisely one cubic foot-and set it in various ecosystems around the world, from Costa Rica to Central Park. Working with local scientists, he measured what moved through that small space in a period of twenty-four hours. He then photographed the cube's setting and the plant, animal, and insect life inside it -- anything visible to the naked eye. The result is a stunning portrait of the amazing diversity that can be found in ecosystems around the globe.

Prints of this image are available at Art.com in sizes up to 64"x48". (via colossal)

The New York Times has posted the short film “Verbatim”, a dramatization of a legal deposition wherein a lawyer argues about what does does not constitute a “photocopier,” and whether that question is even fair to ask. The dialogue comes from an actual deposition from 2010 given prior to an Ohio Supreme Court trial about the legality of charging $2 a page for photocopied records. Though the actors are presenting their own take and expressions, the actual words are taken verbatim from the transcript.

The short film, produced and directed by Brett Weiner, first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and marks the first in a series of similar videos from The New York Times.

You're a congenial man, yet these books are incredibly violent. Does that ever feel at odds with these views about power and war?

The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that's become the template. I'm not sure that it's a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that. World War I is much more typical of the wars of history than World War II - the kind of war you look back afterward and say, "What the hell were we fighting for? Why did all these millions of people have to die? Was it really worth it to get rid of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that we wiped out an entire generation, and tore up half the continent? Was the War of 1812 worth fighting? The Spanish-American War? What the hell were these people fighting for?"

There's only a few wars that are really worth what they cost.

Jim Koch is the co-founder and chairman of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of the Sam Adams beers. Part of his job is to drink professionally and he does so without getting completely sloshed. What's his secret? Eating a packet of dry yeast before tying one on.

You see, what [expert brewer] Owades knew was that active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.

"And it will mitigate - not eliminate - but mitigate the effects of alcohol!" Koch told me.

Could have used this tip last night. Does this mean no hangovers as well?

Update: I got two kinds of feedback about this post:

1) What's the fun in drinking alcohol if you're not getting drunk? (Good point.)

2) Yeast doesn't really work. What does seem to work is Pepcid AC and Zantac. From Shenglong on Hacker News:

Again, I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but from my preliminary internet research and anecdotal testing (though I have quite a few different data points), Famotadine (OTC) [Pepcid], and higher levels of APO-Ranitidine (can be prescription) [Zantac] seems to slow the rate of ethanol -> acetaldehyde, balancing out the drunkness effect more, and giving you more time to process the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. I typically go from maxing out at 2 drinks / 3 hour period, to about 11 drinks / 3 hour period on Ranitidine, given favorable conditions. I've had lower levels of success with Famotadine.

And it goes without saying, I don't recommend trying any of this at home. At the local bar on the other hand Nope, not there either. (thx, @natebirdman)

After he won the Nobel, Tom Sargent was “interviewed” in an ad for Ally bank in which his response was simply (and correctly), “no.” The joke is even better than I realized because Sargent has a history of giving very short speeches. In 2007 he gave a graduation speech to Berkeley undergraduates summarizing economics in just 335 words.

It’s a damn fine speech.

I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words.

Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.

1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.

2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.

3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts,
and their preferences than you do.

4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That
is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.

5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.

6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their
choices. That is why it is difficult for well meaning outsiders to change
things for better or worse.

7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are
some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those
promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to
deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about
whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change.
This is how you earn a reputation.

8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.

9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is
what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do
(but not the social security system of Singapore).

10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or
tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.

11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government
transfers (especially transfers to themselves).

12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.

Hat tip to Utopia–you are standing on it via Newmark’s Door.