The collapsing math genius gender gap

Via Allison Schrager, Andy McAfee, and others, here comes a chart of the gender gap in upper-tail SAT scores:

As you can see, the ratio has drifted downward at all levels, but at the 0.01% level (about 3.7 standard deviations of the combined score distribution, if you assume normality) it has fairly dramatically collapsed. When Ronald Reagan was elected, girls made up only 7% of the top performers. By the time Clinton took office, it was 20%. As of Obama's reelection, it was 28%.

The key piece of information here isn't the current level of the gender gap, it's the recent rate of change. This sort of rapid shift implies that there's lots going on here that's not genetic - unless biological gender differences can change radically from decade to decade.

It's highly unlikely to be a change in the SAT math section. The SAT math section is the same damn thing year after year after year. "Do you know the ratio of sides of a 30-60-90 triangle?" "Can you factor a quadratic expression, using only a paper clip and bubblegum?" "What was the color of Napoleon's white horse?" And so on.*

If it ain't biology, and it ain't a measurement problem, it must be environmental forces that are causing the gender gap to collapse. And whatever these environmental forces are, they're strong stuff.

Knowing that strong environmental forces are present doesn't rule out inherited ability differences. It could be that there are two forces at work, and that the ratio will eventually settle into its "natural," biologically determined perfectly meritocratic level. But Occam's Razor - or really, any penalty term for model complexity - says that a one-factor model beats a two-factor, all else equal. In other words, if strong environmental forces were still present in 2006, it's a decent bet that they weren't completely gone as of 2011. So this doesn't kill the genetic-determinist position, but it weakens it.

OK, so who cares? Well, this is relevant to a recent Journal of Economic Perspectives article by Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Rouse, entitled "Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem". Bayer and Rouse show that the percentages of PhDs and undergrad degrees awarded to women in the econ field have remained flat for the past two decades:

What this says is that an econ degree isn't just an upper-tail IQ test. If it is, the gender gap would have shrunk since the days of Soundgarden and flannel shirts.

So what is causing the gender gap in econ? Preferences are one possibility. Maybe women just don't like econ as much as men. SAT scores are a great proxy for IQ, but they're a pretty terrible proxy for the desire to spend your life selling a bunch of skeptical colleagues on the merits of your own mildly challenging variation on a highly stylized benchmark model with poor data fit, or sifting through the historical record for plausibly exogenous natural experiments. There's no reason to expect math-geniuses to desire that life in strict proportion to their math-geniusy-ness.

Sociology is another possibility. The econ boys' club might be shutting out the ladies. Perhaps they're afraid that a girl will accidentally brush their arms at a seminar, infecting them with incurable icky girl-cooties. Knowing certain economists, I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly their fear. Or maybe some women think econ has way too high a fraction of creepy libertarian dudes who will subtly try to sink their careers in a misguided attempt at revenge against the cheerleaders who wouldn't sleep with them in high school. Knowing certain economists, I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly their fear.

So anyway, yes, I guess at the end of the day this is just another "Girls RULE!" post. Are we tired of "Girls RULE!" posts yet? Hell no. You know me. I never get tired of anything.

*Answers: 1. 1/2/sqrt(3), 2. Trick question, as we're all out of bubblegum, and 3. C

Do economists have physics envy? (Part 2)

Last year I wrote a post called "Do economists have physics envy?". Historian Philip Mirowski (who I notice also got his econ PhD from Michigan!), who literally wrote the book on the interplay between economics and physics, is not too happy with my post. In a recent interview, he explains why:

Let’s take a recent example of a popular contemporary economist blogger, insisting that economists don’t suffer from physics envy. Instead of looking at the history, or the technical issues involved, he just blurts out some random impressions: economists make more money than physicists (I cannot make this stuff up); an economist can talk about how much progress physicists are likely to make, and get taken seriously, but not vice versa (ditto); economic theorists, traditionally, have been free from the constraints of empirical validation (note the total innocence of the history of empiricism in economics); and that equilibrium means something different in economics than in physics.The level of arrogance combined with parochial ignorance is pretty stunning, but not unusual. He has no conception of the historical track record of the disciplines of economics and physics evolving through time, with earlier points of interaction being masked by later developments, and further waves of strange action at a distance. The result would therefore never appear to contemporaries as strict identity.  

Economists with a tad more sophistication may admit something happened in the 1870s, but they go on to insist that a century and a half of further development has produced a set of doctrines that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with that heritage. So in a weird sort of way, the more sophisticated modern line is that intellectual origins don’t matter to contemporary doctrines. Your average modern economist thinks history has entirely been banished by the activities of subsequent generations. Actually, I would argue against that; it is more plausible to think that it’s a path-dependent process. Neoclassical economists can’t entirely wish away their origins, and there are a number of times where I try to point that out in the book: for example, the eccentric ways in which the early neoclassicals are totally confused about how to deal with production. Moreover, I think the physics origins really instantiates the central metaphor of a market as if it were a kind of machine that takes stuff from a place it’s not supposed to be and puts it in a place that it deserves to be. That leads to this whole idea of allocation as a special phenomenon, which captures the essence of economics. That’s the way the first three generations of neoclassical economists think, in terms of movement in a commodity space. So for them, trade (exchange) is motion in a commodity space. All of these points comprise a deep inheritance of the early appropriation from physics that is really hard to get away from.

A couple of observations here. First, responses that rely on phrases like "I cannot make this stuff up" and "the level of arrogance combined with parochial ignorance", but fail to substantively address the argument in question, are indicative of a degraded discourse. Sputtering disdain is no substitute for an honest attempt to address someone's points. Of course, there's no reason at all that Mirowski should spend time and effort addressing or rebutting my points...but if he's not going to, at least he might consider ignoring my post completely instead of lobbing some sputtering disdain in my direction and moving on!

But anyway. 

Mirowski's work seems to attempt to answer two questions:

1. "How are physics and economics related historically?"

2. "How do current economic methods reflect the legacy of this historical relation?"

But my post was an attempt to answer a different question:

3. "How do economists currently view the discipline of physics?"

Which was related to a fourth question I didn't directly address, namely:

4. "To what extent do economists look to physics for new ideas nowadays?"

Those aren't the same thing. Regarding question 2, it's obvious to anyone who's studied both econ and physics that there are mathematical similarities between the two (e.g. calculus of variations). As for question 1, it's common knowledge that many economists in the past tried to apply physics ideas to econ. So I would never try to dispute those points. For more specifics on exactly how ideas crossed from physics to econ, and on which of those ideas remain to this day, one should probably check out Mirowski's book (though I hope it's written in a different tone than this interview).

But OK, just because economists did get inspiration from physicists in the past doesn't mean they do now. I've never met or heard of a currently working economist who reads physics papers. I'm sure some are out there, but it would seem to be a rarity. In the past, economists probably got lots of inspiration from physics, but I don't think that seems true anymore. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so. That still leaves econ models with a legacy of physics influence (as I notice every time I see a Hamiltonian), but the phenomenon of economists looking to physicists for new ideas doesn't seem very pronounced or significant these days.

Now if that's true - and I'm happy to look at any evidence to the contrary - it leads to the question of "Why?" Why would economists draw less inspiration from physics than they used to?

Some reasons might be sociological. That's what my initial post was about. 

First, if economists don't see physicists as having higher status than themselves, they're less likely to look to physics for ideas about how to make models. And my impression is that modern economists, in general, don't see physicists as anyone that they need to emulate or look up to. In my initial post, I cited 1) money, and 2) popular respect as reasons economists probably no longer see physicists as being higher on the academic food chain than themselves.

Second, if economists value different things in their models than physicists do, there will probably be less impetus to emulate physics. In my initial post, I cited 1) empirical predictive power, and 2) symmetry as two things physicists care a lot about and economists value less (though (1) is changing). Econ and physics are just two different epistemic communities

In addition to sociological reasons for economists to take less inspiration from physics than in days of yore, there are also probably methodological reasons. A lot of modern econ theory is based on game theory. Game theory is not very similar to anything in physics - only a few tentative attempts have been made to connect the two, and generally from the physics side. Nash Equilibrium, as Von Neumann pointed out, is not really the same thing as an equilibrium in a physical system. In fact, some people argue that game theory isn't even part of "neoclassical economics," which is the historical strain of thought that Mirowski studies. 

So what does this all have to do with "physics envy"? The term "physics envy" gets tossed around a lot in public discussions of economics. Some people use it to mean that econ just isn't as good at describing reality as physics. Others use it to imply that economists have a pride and confidence in their discipline that only physicists really deserve. Still others use it in a historical sense, to refer to the links that Mirowski and others have written about. And some use it to imply that economists are just failed physicists. 

But I think most people use it as a simple emotive term, a stock phrase that carries an implication of "econ bad, physics good". Obviously most economists would disagree. Some of that is pure chauvinism, of course, but a lot has to do with the diverging methodologies of the two disciplines. And diverging methodologies come partly from sociology, and partly from the fact that these are just two different sciences attempting to answer two different sets of questions.

David Sloan Wilson's econ critique

There's a new website called Evonomics devoted to critiquing the economics discipline. They've got quite a lot of interesting writers and advisors, including (but not limited to) Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Robert Shiller, David Colander, Jonathan Haidt, Yanis Varoufakis, David Sloan Wilson, and many more. The site appears to be attracting a ton of traffic - there's a large appetite out there for critiques of economics.

In any case, I noticed David Sloan Wilson is writing a series of posts criticizing econ as a whole, and I thought I'd go through one of them and see what I thought was right, and what I thought was wrong. Wilson can get a little grandiose, likening the econ profession to the orcs of Mordor and himself to Frodo. But let's look past that and talk about the substance. Here are a few points in Wilson's essay that I don't completely agree with.

Wilson:

Economists were very smart, very powerful, and they spoke a language that I didn’t understand. They won Nobel Prizes...Nevertheless, I had faith that evolution could say something important about the regulatory systems that economists preside over, even if I did not yet know the details. After all, financial markets and other regulatory systems are products of cultural evolution, based on psychological processes that evolved by genetic evolution. 

Like I said a while ago, I'm not as confident that evolution is the key to economics. Wilson has spend his career thinking about evolution, and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But the analogy between cultural evolution and biological evolution is only a loose one -  nobody yet knows how cultural traits get passed on, or even how to define those traits. And there's no guarantee that the principles involved are similar to those that hold in biology. As for genetic evolution being important for economics, that's possible, but I think the overreach of evolutionary psychology - a field that gets criticized as much as econ itself - should give people pause. So I'd be cautious with the cross-disciplinary analogies. But hey, it's surely worth a shot. I don't want to be a naysayer. Give it a try!

Wilson:

Like the land of Mordor, [econ] is dominated by a single theoretical edifice...The edifice is based upon a conception of human nature that is profoundly false, defying the dictates of common sense, before we even get to the more refined dictates of psychology and evolutionary theory. Yet, efforts to move the theory in the direction of common sense are stubbornly resisted.

I'm not so sure I like the emphasis on common sense.. Science usually places a premium on counterintuitive results, and "counterintuitive" is the opposite of "common sense". If common sense was a good guide to reality, scientists wouldn't be nearly so useful, would they? The list of amazing science facts that seem to defy common sense is long - How can matter be both a particle and a wave? Etc. etc.

In econ, common sense might that when two countries trade, one wins and one loses, but the theory of comparative advantage shows that it's very easy for that not to be true. I'm not saying that comparative advantage is always a good theory of trade, but it certainly shows that demanding that all econ theories conform to common sense is overly restrictive.

Wilson:

There is plenty of dissent among economists, and some of the best are working the hardest for change. The folks who award the Nobel Prize in economics don’t like the edifice that much either, and often add their weight by awarding the prize to the contrarians.

The first sentence is definitely true. But I'm not sure Wilson is right about the Nobel a force for rebellion. The Nobel has gone to quite a lot of people whose work forms the very foundation of the "edifice" that Wilson talks about. In fact, the vast majority of the prize winners from the past three decades have worked within the rational, individual-choice framework that Wilson doesn't like. In fact, people like Thomas Sargent, Ed Prescott, and Bob Lucas built the very modern macroeconomics that Wilson recoils at...and they got Nobels for it.

Wilson:

Economists were much more closely attuned to common sense and evolutionary theory before the volcano erupted. Adam Smith observed that people following their narrow concerns somehow combine to make the economy work well, as if guided by an invisible hand. Today we use terms such as emergence and self organization to describe this phenomenon. It is spectacularly demonstrated by social insect colonies.

I also think this isn't really right. Smith was certainly not inspired by modern evolutionary ideas, since On the Origin of Species was published almost a century after The Wealth of Nations. It's not at all clear that Smith believed the "invisible hand" worked analogously to an insect colony; he didn't really specify the mechanism. (Not that insect colony self-organization is a good example of evolution in action, anyway - though ants certainly evolved the biological means to self-organize, the process by which they do so on short time scales is not really very similar to biological evolution in most respects.) In fact, the general equilibrium economics that Wilson doesn't like is supposed to represent Smith's invisible hand.

Wilson:

The people who inhabit the economic models, often referred to as Homo economicus, are driven purely by self-regarding preferences. Mathematically, this means that they care only about maximizing their own interests without reference to anyone else’s interests. What I want cannot depend upon what you want.

Actually, that's not right. When externalities are present, people's utility can depend on other people's consumption. Externalities are very common in mainstream economics, and the concept is taught in every (good) econ undergrad course.

Wilson:

Next, people who inhabit the mathematical kingdom are infinitely wise in pursuit of their self-regarding preferences.

This is, sadly, true. Economists have played around with a number of ways to drop this assumption, but they haven't reached a consensus yet, and - in my opinion - still have far too much trepidation about modeling incompletely-rational behavior.

Wilson:

Once again, these absurd assumptions were driven not by ideological bias but by the tyranny of mathematical tractability. The theory couldn’t be pushed in the direction of common sense because it would become impossible to grind through the equations.

This is partly true. Ideological bias probably does play some part in economists' unwillingness to allow irrationality, or things like social preferences, into their models. Tractability concerns can play a role too. But there's also the underlying problem that it's just very hard to make a general mathematical model of human behavior.

Anyway, I like that Wilson is thinking about economics, and saying provocative, challenging things. There's really very little downside to saying provocative, challenging things, as long as you're not saying them into the ear of a credulous policymaker. At the very least, Wilson will provoke some fun arguments with economists. At best, he'll inspire some to start tinkering around with models based on evolutionary principles. Who knows - that might even get some good results someday!

But in the meantime, I'll keep trying to help nudge Wilson toward an accurate picture of what's going on in the econ world. After all, if you want to be Frodo and sneak into Mordor, you should make sure you have a good map - otherwise you might just end up in New Jersey.


Updates

David has a response up at Evonomics. He writes:

What stands out in Noah’s critique of my piece is its complacency. It’s like he’s discussing the arrangement of deck chairs aboard the Titanic. There is no sense of urgency about the failure of orthodox economics theory and the need to place it on a new foundation... 

Noah misses the point when he observes that evolutionary psychology, the study of cultural evolution, and their applications to economics are nascent enterprises. He seems to think that they can be ignored until they have reached some undefined state of maturity. He doesn’t get that when your ship is sinking, you need to build a new ship and move onto it as soon as you possibly can...

I wouldn't say I'm complacent at all. Macroeconomics obviously needs some big changes - the crisis and Great Recession showed that, though it should have been apparent long before. The "boat" of macro definitely has substantial holes in its hull.

OK, so suppose you decide that the boat can't be patched up or repaired, and it's time to abandon ship - to completely change the way we do macroeconomics. How do you know which boat to jump to? If you jump into a non-seaworthy boat, you could be in even bigger trouble than before.

David assumes that evolutionary thinking is a seaworthy boat for macroeconomists to jump into. The basic argument seems to be that evolutionary thinking has been successfully applied in many other areas - or at least, that David has made a career out of claiming that it can be so applied. He writes:

My life’s work gives me a panoramic view of the human-related disciplines such as religion, sociology, the humanities, and the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, to list a small sample. The very fact that I and like-minded colleagues can do this (it is a perspective, not an individual talent) suggests that evolutionary theory has a generality that orthodox economics aspired to and failed to achieve.

Well first of all, just because David has made a bunch of similar claims about how evolutionary thinking can be applied to a bunch of other disciplines doesn't mean those other claims were right. In fact, not knowing much about religion, sociology, or the humanities, I'm not in a position to evaluate them - nor, I suspect, are most of David's readers. But if there's a general consensus that evolutionary thinking has successfully improved and transformed most fields of humanities and social science, I'm not aware of it. I should probably read more.

But more importantly, there's just no reason to think that a conceptual framework that works in one discipline should work in another. Why should ideas that work for religion -- whatever that even means -- also work for economics?? It just doesn't make sense. There's no grand theory-of-theories that tells us that all disciplines and all phenomena must act according to some basic universal underlying principles. Physics methods don't usually work for biology. Why should we think that biology methods work for economics?

Yes, mainstream economic models weren't a lot of help in the crisis or the recession. But how confident can we be that making economic policy based on evolutionary analogies would be any better? Before I believe that, I'll want to see some good hard evidence.

Freedom of speech in the digital age

I noticed today that the user "Ricky Vaughn" has been kicked off of Twitter. "Ricky" was a key figure in the alt-right on Twitter, which means that he was a proponent of white-nationalism. He thought that nonwhite immigration is ruining America, that it should be stopped, that there are all kinds of natural differences between races, etc. etc. I had a long and pretty civil discussion with Ricky about a year ago, about immigration, etc. I eventually blocked him, not because of anything he did, but because when he replied to or retweeted me it would result in my mentions getting flooded by a hundred screeching Nazis yelling "get in my oven", etc. I just don't have time for that stuff.

Anyway, Ricky has been booted, just as Milo Yiannopolous was booted. The moves echo a general move by conversation platforms to crack down on alt-right harassment - Reddit's banning of the "gas the kikes" subreddit and 4chan's crackdown on GamerGate are other examples.

Obviously this has upset the alt-right a great deal (though with those guys it's hard to tell). The bannings of Ricky and Milo have been met with frantic cries for Twitter and other platforms to uphold "free speech." Many on the left respond that "freedom of speech" only applies to the government, and that private companies can and should do as they please. (This is an interesting reversal of the traditional position, which saw conservatives take a more libertarian stance. It reflects how our culture's dominant values are in the process of switching from traditionalist to modernist.)

In the old days, the liberals would easily win this argument. Newspapers and other traditional media platforms don't just censor, they also edit. They present a very carefully curated set of voices - letters to the editor, op-eds, and articles. No one would argue that the New York Times has a moral obligation to publish op-eds or letters saying "Gas the kikes". The presumption has always been that if you didn't like what the Times was serving up, you could go read a different newspaper, or start your own. In fact, many many people did exactly that. As long as the government didn't send its jack-booted thugs to shut down your paper, freedom of speech was upheld.

However, new media technologies have changed the game. Should our ideal of "freedom of speech" be different in the age of Twitter and Reddit than in the age of the New York Times and the New York Post?

Some say yes. Scott Alexander brings up the important point that many tech platforms are natural monopolies. This applies especially to Twitter and Facebook (though not as much to Reddit). There's only one Twitter, and there's only one Facebook, for a reason - each of these things has a strong global network effect. That's not true of newspapers. Scott sums the dilemma up nicely: 

So instead of “let a thousand nations bloom”, it ended up more like “let five or six big nations bloom that we can never get rid of”.

This argument says Twitter is really more like a public space than a private one. If there can only be one Twitter, then does the company have a moral responsibility to protect unrestricted speech on its platform, above and beyond the responsibility of the New York Times?

I'm naturally sympathetic to this argument. I've always thought that hardcore libertarians take a much too limited view of what constitutes "liberty." Not all power is government power, so local entities like companies do have a moral responsibility to uphold liberty in addition to the government. 

BUT, that's not the end of the story. Remember that in the real world, different freedoms conflict with each other. My freedom to speak my mind on a street corner is compromised if 5 people stand in my face screeching at me at the top of their lungs. But face-screeching is also a form of speech, so if you ban it, those 5 people are having their freedom of speech curbed. 

Traditionally, we usually came down against the face-screechers, with laws against public harassment. Why? I think it's because we recognized that speech that disseminates ideas is more valuable than speech whose purpose is to intimidate others. When forced to choose between two mutually exclusive types of speech, we usually chose to protect the one we deemed less intrinsically harmful to others.

Twitter, as a technology, is unusually conducive to face-screeching. The first reason is that anyone can talk to anyone else. In the real physical world, a mob will find it hard to find you; on Twitter, they always know right where you are. People don't need to get up in your face; they're already there, all the time.

The second reason is that it's very easy to coordinate mobs on Twitter. In the real world, to create a mob, you have to get a bunch of people out of their houses and across town, and you can only recruit the mob from people nearby, and the cops might disperse you while you're forming. On Twitter all you need to create a mob is a hashtag or a call-to-arms by a well-followed leader - the mob forms instantly and can't be dispersed. The sheer volume of harassment on Twitter comes from the fact that there are roving mobs of harassers who spend all day going from target to target. One minute you're talking to your friends and colleagues, the next minute there are a hundred pseudonymous accounts screeching at you. Two hours later they're screeching at someone else, but now you know, if you say the wrong thing, the mob will be back in a heartbeat. 

If you're a really unlucky high-profile person like Leslie Jones (who committed the unpardonable sin of being a black woman and being alive), you become a perennial target, and the mob never goes away until you quit Twitter.

So Twitter, by the nature of its technology, facilitates the kind of speech whose main purpose is the shutting down of other people's speech. It automatically empowers a very small number of harassers - I'm guessing the Twitter Nazis' total population, for example, to be only a couple thousand or so - to intimidate and silence enormous numbers of people who only wanted to say their ideas out loud (or, in Jones' case, just wanted to be there, period).

Twitter knows it has these problems - user growth has flatlined and a number of high-profile users are leaving - and it is finally starting to address them. Human moderation and banning is obviously their first approach. Future strategies might include algorithmic blocking, which Google is already working hard on. But it's possible none of these will work, and the screechers will simply always overpower the non-screechers. That could lead to Twitter becoming a ghost-town, inhabited only by 4chan types, unable to make much money off of advertising. It might be that a technology like Twitter, fun and useful as it is, might not be something that works out in the long run.

But more broadly, internet technologies are forcing us to face a sharper conflict between freedom of idea-expression and freedom of targeted disapproval. The tradeoff faced by Twitter is just an acute version of the tradeoffs faced by Facebook, Google, and any other communication technology with a global network effect. The nature of "speech" changes with the advent of new technology, and our intuitive notion of "freedom of speech" will eventually have to change along with it.  

So what do I think about the banning of Milo, Ricky, and other prominent alt-righters? I'm not at all upset about it. I think it's arbitrary and unfair, and unlikely to bring an end to harassment. But I also think it's probably inevitable. Technologically, banning and corporate censorship seem to be the only way (so far) to create an online world where people who mainly value freedom of idea-expression can coexist with people who mainly value the freedom to yell mean things at other people. That's probably going to lead to a "two-tiered" internet, as Scott Alexander calls it - a "top layer" where everyone plays nice, and a "bottom layer" where genocide jokes and death threats are the order of the day. But maybe that's the only possible long-term equilibrium.

Hunting the Rational Expectations whale

1. Why is Rational Expectations still around, anyway? 

Rational Expectations is (are?) one of the key features of almost every macro model in existence today, and has been for decades. Why? One reason is that it's easy to work with, mathematically - just stick an "E" in front of things, and voila, that's what the agents in your model believe! Another reason is that RE is appealing to folks who think that the government shouldn't be able to trick people consistently. A third reason is that there's just no obvious alternative way of modeling expectations. Classic alternatives like adaptive expectations are rigid, simplistic, and just generally very weak. And more sophisticated alternatives, besides being unwieldy to model, also tend to be hyper-specific - if there are actually a number of different ways that RE fails, each of these models will only catch one of them.

But the real reason is that it's hard to test people's expectations directly. Instead, what macroeconomists do is to just throw the expectations assumption into the model along with a million other things like Euler equations, transversality conditions, industry structure, etc., and then test the model against macro facts. If the model fails to match enough macro facts, or the "right" macro facts, to garner interest, the problem is assumed not to lie with the expectations, but with some other assumption of the model. So RE survives. In Lakatos' jargon, it's part of the "hard core" of modern macro.

2. Observing expectations directly

But in recent years, a few brave souls have started to hunt the great Rational Expectations whale. These intrepid hunters are doing the simple and obvious thing that economists previously didn't dare to do: Just ask people what they expect.

Duh, right? Actually, tons of people have collected and analyzed survey measures of expectations. But there's a reason macroeconomists haven't relied on these surveys much in the past (and it's not just fear of getting yelled at by Bob Lucas). First of all, it's not clear that people's stated expectations have anything to do with their functional expectations. I might say that I think inflation is going to rise, and I might even feel deep in my bones that this is truthy, but does that mean I'm buying TIPS and shorting Treasuries? Not recently, it doesn't. What we care about isn't what people "believe", whatever that means, but what they act as if they believe. 

So the RE-hunters have to take an extra step - they have to show that stated expectations explain actual behavior. And explaining actual behavior requires assumptions, about all the other stuff that might be affecting behavior. And unless you want to be a "heterodox" person shouting in the wilderness, those assumptions are going to have to come from currently respected theory. So that's what the RE-hunters are now doing - showing that stated expectations, e.g. from surveys, explain behavior well when you stick them into popular theories.

3. The RE-hunters

One of the RE-hunters is Andrei Shleifer, who along with coauthors like Robin Greenwood, Yueran Ma and Nicola Gennaioli has started working with survey expectations in finance. Finance is relatively easy to work with because a lot of the popular models are partial equilibrium. Examples of Shleifer's work include this paper on investor expectations and this paper on CFO surveys and investment. He's also made a general equilibrium asset-pricing model, along with some other co-authors, using extrapolative expectations (which surveys seem to show some evidence for). 

In macro it's a bit harder, since most top people now agree that you need general equilibrium for anything important. So the burden of proof is on the RE-hunters - they have to show that an alternative model of expectations, together with some other fairly standard model elements, can explain macro facts in a general equilibrium type model.

One of the most popular non-RE models is the "sticky information" model of Mankiw and Reis, which says that people update their information with a time lag. Along with Justin Wolfers, Mankiw and Reis showed over a decade ago that survey expectations line up with this model in many ways (though as the comments at the bottom of the paper show, they had difficulty persuading certain folks).

Another popular model is Chris Sims' "rational inattention" model. This says that people only get imperfect information because it's costly to filter out noise. Mike Woodford has also worked with models like this.


4. Coibion and Gorodnichenko

Now there is a powerful new team hunting the Rational Expectations whale: Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko. In 2012, they showed that survey expectations of macreconomic stuff match many of the predictions of sticky information and noisy information models, using a method that's largely agnostic between the two. In other words, they show that stated expectations look like real expectations no matter which of the two models you believe in.

Then in 2015, Coibion and Gorodnichenko came out with a new paper out that's even more general. Their old approach required them to specify the shocks in the economy, but they figured out a way to avoid having to do this. It's really neat. 

Here's the idea. Forecasters make forecasts of things many years in the future. I might forecast the 2020 inflation rate in 2015. But they also update their forecasts - in 2016 I'll make another forecast of 2020 inflation. In general the 2016 forecast will be different from the 2015 forecast. Under RE, the differerence - called the "forecast update" - should have no relation to the eventual forecast miss. In other words, under RE, if my 2015 forecast for 2020 inflation is 2.5% and my 2016 forecast is 2%, that shouldn't mean that my 2016 forecast is more likely to overshoot than undershoot.

But it does. That's what Coibion and Gorodnichenko show. Forecast updates predict forecast misses. That's consistent with a model where information is "sticky" and one where it's "noisy".

That's the paper's central insight, but it has lots more in it than that. The authors test whether the result could come from forecasters intentionally "smoothing" their forecasts, i.e. giving intentionally stale forecasts in order to cater to some clients. But they don't find evidence for this. 

They also find that the degree of "noisiness" or "stickiness" of information varies depending on what's happening in the economy. After big shocks like 9/11, the amount of apparent stickiness/noisiness goes down. But in the Great Moderation, it went up. So when macroeconomic stuff is more important, people either pay more attention, or spend more effort making accurate projections, or whatever. That reassuring.

So Coibion and Gorodnichenko's new method shows that professional forecasts behave like true expectations for a very wide class of models. Not for all models, obviously, but for two of the mainstream alternatives to RE. And this is independent of all kinds of other things, like consumption behavior, industrial structure, or the nature of the shocks that drive the economy. In other words, it's getting harder and harder to dismiss direct measurements of expectations - maybe you really just can ask people what they believe, and get a useful result!

5. So what?

Interesting note: There are both "behavioral" and "non-behavioral" explanations for this failure of Rational Expectations. Information could be "sticky" or "noisy" because information is costly to acquire and process, or because people are just slow to believe or accept new information. (I call this "Smith's Principle": Any behavioral explanation will have an observationally equivalent explanation based on information structure and/or costs. I can name stuff after myself because this is my blog, hehehe. And because I'm too lazy to find out if anyone else has made this claim.) As the authors point out, it's perfectly possible that a bunch of individually rational but information-constrained agents can produce an aggregate forecast that does not take into account all of the available information in the economy:

This predictability of the average forecast error across agents from forecast revisions is an emergent property in both models, i.e. a property which arises only from the aggregation process and not at the individual level. 

Nice to see economists using the term "emergent property"! In other words, it's perfectly possible to have rational agents without Rational Expectations.

But anyway, if you believe this result, it means two things: 1. that forecasts are good measures of expectations, and that 2. sticky/noisy information should be a much more standard feature of macro models. If on the other hand you disbelieve the result, you must believe that A) forecasts don't represent true expectations, and B) sticky/noisy information models aren't good models, and also C) forecasts fail to reveal true expectations in precisely a way that makes it look like sticky/noisy information models are good!

Now, RE defenders may shrug and say "So what? No one expects RE to be exactly right, it's just a useful approximation." But as Coibion and Gorodnichenko point out, that's not true in this case. Sticky/noisy information models differ in very important ways from RE models. Ways that are very important for policymaking. In other words, by linking their test of RE to a model that we already know has economically significant implications, Coibion and Gorodnichenko's claimed failure of RE must be economically significant too. This isn't just a wrinkle on a largely successful theory; it's a claim that the theory fails in big, critical ways.

Nothing is for certain, especially in macro, but this is another harpoon tossed into the side of the Rational Expectations hypothesis.

(No whales were harmed in the making of this blog post. Noahpinion condemns the practice of whaling, and also believes that whale meat tastes like stale hamachi.)

The new heavyweight macro critics

I got tired of lambasting macroeconomics a while ago, and the "macro wars" mostly died down in the blogosphere around when the recovery from the Great Recession kicked in. But recently, there have been a number of respected macroeconomists posting big, comprehensive criticisms of the way academic macro gets done. Some of these criticisms are more forceful than anything we bloggers blogged about back in the day! Anyway, I thought I'd link to a couple here.

First, there's Paul Romer's latest, "The Trouble With Macroeconomics". The title is an analogy to Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics". Romer basically says that macro (meaning business-cycle theory) has become like the critics' harshest depictions of string theory - a community of believers, dogmatically following the ideas of revered elders and ignoring the data. The elders he singles out are Bob Lucas, Ed Prescott, and Tom Sargent.

Romer says that it's obvious that monetary policy affects the real economy, because of the Volcker recessions in the early 80s, but that macro theorists have largely ignored this fact and continued to make models in which monetary policy is ineffectual. He says that modern DSGE models are no better than old pre-Lucas Critique simultaneous-equation models, because they still take lots of assumptions to identify the models, only now the assumptions are hidden instead of explicit. Romer points to distributional assumptions, calibration, and tight Bayesian priors as ways of hiding assumptions in modern DSGE models. He cites an interesting 2009 paper by Canova and Sala that tries to take DSGE model estimation seriously and finds (unsurprisingly) that identification is pretty difficult.

As a solution, Romer suggests chucking formal modeling entirely and going with more general, vague but flexible ideas about policy and the macroeconomy, supported by simple natural experiments and economic history. 

Romer's harshest zinger (and we all love harsh zingers) is this:

In response to the observation that the shocks [in DSGE models] are imaginary, a standard defense invokes Milton Friedman’s (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed authority that "the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (p.14)." More recently, "all models are false" seems to have become the universal hand-wave for dismissing any fact that does not conform to the model that is the current favorite.  

The noncommittal relationship with the truth revealed by these methodological evasions...goes so far beyond post-modern irony that it deserves its own label. I suggest "post-real."

Ouch. He also calls various typical DSGE model elements names like "phlogiston", "aether", and "caloric". Fun stuff. (Though I do think he's too harsh on string theory, which often is just a kind of math that physicists do to keep themselves busy, and has no danger of hurting anyone, unlike macro theory.)

Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier, Narayana Kocherlakota wrote a post called "On the Puzzling Prevalence of Puzzles". The basic point was that since macro data is fairly sparse, macroeconomists should have lots of competing models that all do an equally good job of matching the data. But instead, macroeconomists pick a single model they like, and if data fails to fit the model they call it a "puzzle". He writes:

To an outsider or newcomer, macroeconomics would seem like a field that is haunted by its lack of data...In the absence of that data, it would seem like we would be hard put to distinguish among a host of theories...[I]t would seem like macroeconomists should be plagued by underidentification... 

But, in fact, expert macroeconomists know that the field is actually plagued by failures to fit the data – that is, by overidentification. 

Why is the novice so wrong? The answer is the role of a priori restrictions in macroeconomic theory... 

The mistake that the novice made is to think that the macroeconomist would rely on data alone to build up his/her theory or model.  The expert knows how to build up theory from a priori restrictions that are accepted by a large number of scholars...[I]t’s a little disturbing how little empirical work underlies some of those agreed-upon theory-driven restrictions – see p. 711 of Lucas (JMCB, 1980) for a highly influential example of what I mean.

In fact, Kocherlakota and Romer are complaining about much the same thing: the overuse of unrealistic assumptions. Basically, they say that macroeconomists, as a group, have gotten into the habit of assuming stuff that just isn't true. In fact, this is what the Canova and Sala paper says too, in a much more technical and polite way:

Observational equivalence, partial and weak identification problems are widespread and typically produced by an ill-behaved mapping between the structural parameters and the coefficients of the solution.

That just means that the model elements aren't actually real things.

(This critique resonates with me. From day 1, the thing that always annoyed me about macro was how people made excuses for assumptions that were either unverifiable or just flatly contradictory to micro data. The usual excuse was the "pool player analogy" - the idea that the pieces of a model don't have to match micro data as long as the resulting model matches macro data. I'm not sure that's how Milton Friedman wanted his metaphor to be used, but that seems to be the way it does get used. And when the models didn't match macro data either, the excuse was "all models are wrong," which really just seems to be a way of saying "the modeler gets to choose which macro facts are used to validate his theory". It seemed that to a large extent, macro modelers were just allowed to do whatever they wanted, as long as their papers won some kind of behind-the-scenes popularity contest. But I digress.)

So what seems to unite the new heavyweight macro critics is an emphasis on realism. Basically, these people are challenging the idea, very common in econ theory, that models shouldn't worry about being realistic. (Paul Pfleiderer is another economist who has recently made a similar complaint, though not in the context of macro.) They're not saying that economists need 100% perfect realism - that's the kind of thing you only get in physics, if anywhere. As Paul Krugman and Dani Rodrik have emphasized, even the people advocating for more realism acknowledge that there's some ideal middle ground. But if Romer, Kocherlakota, etc. are to be believed, macroeconomists aren't currently close to that optimal interior solution.


Updates

Olivier Blanchard is a bet less forceful, but he's definitely also one of the new heavyweight critics. Among his problems with DSGE models, at least as they're currently done, are 1. "unappealing" assumptions that are "at odds with what we know about consumers and firms", and 2. "unconvincing" estimation methods, including calibration and tight Bayesian priors. Sounds pretty similar to Romer.

Meanwhile, Kocherlakota responds to Romer. He agrees with Romer's criticism of unrealistic macro assumptions, but he dismisses the idea that Lucas, Prescott, and Sargent are personally responsible for the problems. Instead, he says it's about the incentives in the research community. He writes:

We [macroeconomists] tend to view research as being the process of posing a question and delivering a pretty precise answer to that question...The research agenda that I believe we need is very different. It’s hugely messy work.  We need...to build a more evidence-based modeling of financial institutions.  We need...to learn more about how people actually form expectations.  We need [to use] firm-based information about residual demand functions to learn more about product market structure.  At the same time, we need to be a lot more flexible in our thinking about models and theory, so that they can be firmly grounded in this improved empirical understanding.

Kocherlakota says that this isn't a "sociological" issue, but I think most people would call it that. Since journals and top researchers get to decide what constitutes "good" research, it seems to me that to get the changes in focus Kocherlakota wants, a sociological change is exactly what would be required.

Kocherlakota now has another post describing how he thinks macro ought to be done. Basically, he thinks researchers - as a whole, not just on their own! - should start with toy models to facilitate thinking, then gather data based on what the toy models say is important, then build formal "serious" models from the ground up to match that data. He contrasts this with the current approach of tweaking existing models.

My question is: Who is going to enforce this change? If a few established researchers start doing things the way Kocherlakota wants, they'll certainly still get published (because they're famous old people), but will the young folks follow? How likely is it that established researchers en masse are going to switch to doing things this way, and demanding that young researchers do the same, and using their leverage as reviewers, editors, and PhD advisers to make that happen? This doesn't seem like the kind of change that can be brought about by a few young smart rebels forcing everyone else to recognize the value of their approach - the existing approach, which Kocherlakota dislikes, already succeeds in getting publication and prestige, so the rebels would simply coexist alongside the old approach, rather than overthrowing it. How could this cultural change be put into effect?

Also: Romer now has a follow-up to his original post, defending his original post against the critics. This part stood out to me as particularly persuasive:

The whine I hear regularly from the post-real crowd is that “it is really, really hard to do research on macro so you shouldn’t criticize any of our models unless you can produce one that is better.” 

This is just post-real Calvinball used as a shield from criticism. Imagine someone saying to a mathematician who finds an error in a theorem that is false,  “you can’t criticize the proof until you come up with valid proof.” Or try this one on and see how it feels: “You can’t criticize the claim that vaccines cause autism unless you can come up with a better explanation for autism.”

Sounds right to me. The old like that "it takes a theory to kill a theory" just seems wrong to me. Sometimes all it takes is evidence.

Books to help you understand Japan

So you want to understand the real Japan. You have a sense that the typical stereotypes are wrong and outdated and full of derp, and you want to go deeper than anime or "crazy Japan" blogs will take you. So you decide to ask your friendly neighborhood Noah: "What books can I read that will help me understand the real Japan at a deep level?"

Unfortunately Noah hasn't had his requisite 3 daily cups of oversteeped black tea, so he grouchily responds: "How about instead of reading a book, you learn the language fluently, live there for a few years, talk to a bunch of people, and learn for yourself?" But then Noah gets his caffeine fix, and the norepinephrine flows freely through his brain, and he says "Oh, BOOKS? Sure, I got books." And walking over to his lovely fake mahogany Wayfair bookshelf, he proceeds to make you the following list:


Culture and Daily Life

1. New Japan, by David Matsumoto

This book, which you can read in an hour or less, basically summarizes a bunch of social psych studies to prove that Japanese culture changed dramatically in the 1980s. Most of the old stereotypes - conformity, group orientation, etc. - used to be pretty true, but now are totally false. Japan used to rate as more conformist, group-oriented, etc. on most measures than the U.S., but now rates as individualistic and independent as the U.S., or more. Feel the power of data destroying your preconceived notions!


2. Nightwork, by Anne Allison

Also from the 90s, but also still relevant. Nightwork is about two things: corporate culture and sex culture. Japan's corporate culture is, without a doubt, the biggest difference between the West and Japan - although Don Draper might find it a little less alien. Sex culture is different too, mostly because most kinds of prostitution are both legal and well-accepted in Japan. This book is about the convergence of the two - about how Japanese companies solidify their corporate cultures by paying for employees to go to pseudo-prostitutes (actually, more like in-house escorts) called "hostesses." Anne Allison, who is one of the best English-language anthropologists who studies Japan, actually lived and worked as a hostess for years to do research for this book. It's really pretty amazing.

See also: Office Ladies and Salaried Men, by Yuko Ogasawara


3. Capturing Contemporary Japan, ed. by Satsuki Kawano

This is just a bunch of vignettes of modern Japanese people's lives. Kind of dry, but pretty wide-ranging.

See also: Bending Adversity, by David Pilling, Goodbye Madame Butterfly, by Sumie Kawakami


4. Fruits, by Shoichi Aoki

This is a picture book of Japanese street fashion from the 1990s. It's mostly just photos, but it also has mini-interviews of colorful kids at the bottom of each page. These are actually excerpted from a magazine of the same name that was popular back then.

See also: Tokyo: A Certain Style, by Kyoichi Tsuzuki


Economics and Business

1. Can Japan Compete?, by Michael Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi, and Mariko Sakakibara

This is basically a history book about Japan's industrial policy - what it was, where it seems to have worked, where it went wrong (spoiler: almost everywhere, after the 1970s). It also contains Michael Porter's theories about competition, but you really don't need to believe those in order to appreciate the history here.


2. The Japanese Economy, by David Flath

This is an overview for people who have studied econ. The author, David Flath, is a friend of mine (we met on the streets of Tokyo, where he recognized me from my blog photo), and also happens to be the PhD advisor of Karl Smith, the former econ blogger and prof.

See also: Reviving Japan's Economy, ed. by Takatoshi Ito, Hugh Patrick, and David E. Weinstein


3. Reimagining Japan, ed. by Brian Salsberg, Clay Chandler, and Heang Chhor

This is a bunch of articles written write before the big 2011 earthquake, mostly about Japanese business, but also a little about the economy and culture. The authors are a collection of business leaders, writers, consultants, etc.

See also: The Power to Compete, by Hiroshi and Ryoichi Mikitani, Saying Yes to Japan, by Tim Clark and Carl Kay


History and Politics

1. Democracy Without Competition in Japan, by Ethan Scheiner

This book explains a lot about Japanese politics - most importantly, why one party has ruled Japan for most of the postwar period, despite strong democratic norms and a free and fair election system. The reason, according to Scheiner, is that the Japanese fiscal system and electoral system combine to make it easy to basically just buy votes. But you don't have to accept this thesis in order to appreciate the political history here.


2. Japan at War, by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook

Modern Japan's institutions were partially shaped by a big war that almost no one now remembers. This book consists of a bunch of first-hand accounts of Japanese people from that war period. Just remember that these old people's way of thinking is just as alien to that of modern young Japanese people as your grandparents are to you.

See also: The Rising Sun, by John Toland, Dear General MacArthur, by Sodei Rinjiro


3. Japanese Destroyer Captain, by Tameichi Hara

The war memoir of Japan's (probably) best naval captain, this book gives great insight into Japanese military culture. It also shows how traditional samurai culture (the author is from a samurai family) clashed with the modern militaristic culture of WW2-era Japan. Finally, it displays some interesting Japanese cultural quirks - women hitting on men! - that seem to have survived through the ages.

See also: Zero, by Masatake Okumiya, Jiro Horikoshi, and Martin Caidin


On my list to read: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, by W. David Marx, Embracing Defeat, by John Dower, Tokyo Vice, by Jake Adelstein

So there you go. Happy reading. If you know of any other books along these lines, send them my way. And remember, even the best books will only scratch the surface of any culture...

Free-market ideology: a reply to some replies

I recently wrote a Bloomberg View post about political-economic ideologies, and how society is quicker to change than individual human beings. The upshot was that free-market ideology seems - to many Americans, and also incidentally to me - to have mostly hit a wall in terms of its ability to improve our lives, and so society will inevitably embrace an alternative, despite the protests of diehard free-marketers.

Bryan Caplan is flabbergasted at the notion that free-market ideology (aka "neoliberalism") has actually been tried in the U.S.:

The claim that "free-market dogma" is the "reigning economic policy" of the United States or any major country seems so absurd, so contrary to big blatant facts (like government spending as a share of GDP, for starters), that I'm dumb-founded.  

This is pretty much exactly the attitude I described in my post! "Of course neoliberalism hasn't failed; we just never really tried it."

David Henderson has a longer and more measured response. He challenges the idea that free-market ideology has demonstrated any failures at all.

Now I could simply make a weak claim - i.e., that free-market ideology seems to have hit a wall, and that in the end, that general perception is much more important than what I personally think. But instead, I'll make the much stronger claim - I'll defend the idea that free-market ideology has, in fact, really hit a wall in terms of its effectiveness.

Exhibit A: Tax cuts. Tax cuts, one of free-marketers' flagship policies, appear to have given our economy a boost in the 1960s, and a smaller boost in the 1980s. But any economic boost from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 was so small as to be invisible to all but (possibly) the most careful econometricians. Notably, a number of attempts to encourage savings - capital gains tax cuts, estate tax cuts, and the like - have not halted the steady decline in personal savings rates.

Exhibit B: Financial deregulation and light-touch regulation. It seems clear to me that under-regulation of derivatives markets and mortgage lending played a big role in the financial crisis. The counter-narrative, that government intervention caused the crisis, has never held much water, and has been debunked by many papers. This was a private-sector blowup.

Exhibit C: Light-touch regulation of monopoly. The evidence is mounting that industrial concentration is an increasing problem for the U.S. economy. Some of this might be due to intellectual property, but much is simply due to naturally increasing returns to scale.

Exhibit D: The China shock. While most trade booms seem to lead to widely shared gains, the China trade boom in the 2000s - which free marketers consistently championed and hailed - probably did not. High transaction costs (retraining costs, moving costs, and others) lead to a very large number of American workers being deeply and permanently hurt by the shock, as evidenced by recent work by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson.

Exhibit E: Faux-privatization. True privatization is when the government halts a nationalized industry and auctions off its assets. Faux-privatization is when the government outsources an activity to contractors, often without even competitive bidding. Faux-privatization has been a notable bust in the prison industry, and school voucher programs have also been extremely underwhelming. Charter schools have fared a bit better, but even there the gains have been modest at best.

Exhibit F: Welfare reform. Clinton's welfare reform saved the taxpayer very little money, and appears to have had little if any effect on poverty in the U.S.

Exhibit G: Research funding cuts. The impact of these is hard to measure, but cuts in government funding of research appear to have saved the taxpayer very little money, while dramatically increasing the time that scientists have to devote to writing grant proposals, and increasing risk aversion in scientists' choice of research topics.

Exhibit H: Health care. The U.S. health care system is a hybrid private-public system, but includes a proportionally much larger private component than any other developed nation's system. Free-marketers have fought doggedly to prevent the government from playing a larger role. Our hybrid system delivers basically the same results as every other developed country's system, at about twice the cost. Private health care cost growth has been much faster than cost growth for Medicare and other government-provided programs, indicating that much of our excess cost has been due to the private component of our system, not the public part.

I could go on, but these are the big ones I can think of. In some of these cases, free-market policies seem to have produced some gains in the late 20th century, but by the 21st century all appeared to be either having no effect, or actively harming the economy.

No, this is nowhere near as big a failure as that of communism (though in some ways, notably health care and financial deregulation, we've done worse than the somewhat-socialist nations of Europe). The analogy with communism was a way of illustrating a certain mindset, not to draw an equivalence between the results of neoliberalism and communism.

Also, I personally think there is still scope for many neoliberal policies to improve our economy. Reduced occupational licensing, urban land-use deregulation, simplification of the tax code, and various other kinds of deregulation all seem to show promise. If free-market policies have hit a wall, it's a porous wall - in real life, nothing is as cut-and-dry as in our ideological debates.

But overall, I think the last decade and a half have shown clearly diminishing returns, and sometimes negative returns, from neoliberal reforms. So our society is right to be looking for alternative policy packages. Though that doesn't necessarily mean we'll choose a good alternative - I think Sanders-style socialism would probably be a mistake.

Is Firefly overrated?

The whole world is in need of a break from the madness, and someone on Twitter asked me to do a blog post about whether Firefly is overrated. So instead of econ or politics or serious stuff, let's talk about a television show that got canceled 13 years ago! :-)

The answer to the question in the blog post title is: "Of course not." In the strictest sense, no sci-fi show is overrated, because people in general ought to watch more sci-fi and less of whatever they're watching now. Science fiction has taken over movies, but not TV. Fortunately, with great programs like Black Mirror, Stranger Things, etc., there's still lots of good stuff out there.

But Firefly, more than probably any other show, holds a special place in the heart of my generation of geek-Americans. And it really is a great show. It's consistently at the top of user-generated lists of the best sci-fi shows ever. It's the subject of countless...OK, I'm not even going to finish this paragraph, because we all know that all geeks love Firefly like economists love envelope theorems.

Well, maybe not all geeks. A few have been known to write grumpy Tumblr posts about how the show is racist and/or sexist. But aggrieved identity-politics driven Tumblr rants are like death and taxes, except that Peter Thiel can escape the latter two. 

But buried deep within those overdone rants, I see the seeds of something that really did make Firefly different from other sci-fi TV shows - besides the snappier dialogue and Western motif, I mean. It has to do with the culture the series drew on for its mythos. Firefly was, at its root, a Southern show.

First of all, there's the well-known connection of the Firefly backstory to the Confederacy - Joss Whedon has said that the show was inspired by a Civil War novel. The Browncoats are the Rebs, and the Alliance is the U.S. Mal is the outlaw/pioneer/cowboy who went West after the Lost Cause was lost. Everyone knows that. But Firefly's connections to the South are more cultural than political. Almost every character on the show is some sort of traditional Southern stereotype.

Mal is the classic ideal of the Southern gentleman. He's brave, rigidly honorable, quick to violence...gallant, protective, and respectful toward women. He's sharp and clever but no intellectual. I imagine him as a planter's son from Virginia, who can trace his ancestors back to the Cavaliers in the English Civil War.

Jayne is the poor white Southern guy. He's the overseer, the patroller, the farm hand. He's tough, mean, not too bright, selfish, opportunistic, uneducated, and a bully. He's often the villain of the show, barely kept in check by Mal's aristocratic alpha-male dominance. He's shown improving a bit as the show goes on, though of course it was canceled before this could get very far.

Inara is the fallen Southern belle - the kind of woman who once ruled a plantation, then was forced to prostitute herself to make ends meet after the war, but who still maintains some kind of honor and dignity. An R-rated Scarlett O'Hara. 

Wash and Zoe are the Yankees (despite the fact that Zoe fought for the Browncoats, which is something I suspect Whedon threw in to muddy the parallels a bit). Wash is a geek, effeminate, playing with his dinosaur toys - Jayne calls him "little man." He's somewhat dominated by his wife, who is strong, independent, and sexually uninhibited. They're also a mixed-race couple, which of course was a Southern stereotype of the North. Shepherd Book is a black man whose violent past has been tamed by the civilizing power of Christianity. Kaylee is a simple backwoods country girl. The doctor and River are also Yankees, though they are external plot drivers and hence less stereotypical. 

And as a Southern show, Firefly is notably devoid of intellectual characters. There are no scientists on Serenity - Simon the doctor is the closest thing, and his uppity smarty-pants attitude earns him repeated face-punches from the dashing Mal. Kaylee, the engineer, works by intuition alone.

So the characters are mostly from Southern culture, but so is the theme of the show - it's all about honor. Mal's honor is central to his decent, noble conduct, and is the reason the Serenity crew is sympathetic instead of being a bunch of rascally piratical n'er-do-wells (which they probably would be if the show were Japanese or British). Serenity's captain is an upright man in a lawless, dirty world.

But honor is also the reason why Serenity is out there in space in the first place. Mal and the rest could presumably go live as Alliance citizens - it's not clear how repressive the Alliance government is, but the people seem to be pretty wealthy. We don't know what cause the Browncoats were fighting for. But it's pretty clear that Mal went to space to become an outlaw because his sense of honor makes him refuse to knuckle under to his conqueror. "You can't take the sky from me," as the theme song's lyrics go.

And this, really, is why I was always a little dissatisfied with Firefly. In most space opera shows, the cosmos is vast, exciting, full of wonders - the final frontier. Humans go to space because it's our destiny. We go in search of our better selves - to learn new science, to meet aliens, to teach others about our culture and learn about theirs, and to bring a better, more just order to the Universe. In Star Trek (The Original Series and The Next Generation) we go just to go. In Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 we go to make the galaxy safe for liberal values. In Robotech and Farscape we go to fall in love with aliens (hey, why the hell not). Battlestar Galactica and Space Battleship Yamato are darker shows about survival, but also depict a struggle to preserve liberal values in the face of overwhelming existential threats. Now you know I've watched way too much space opera in my life.

But in Firefly, why do we - meaning the crew of Serenity - go to space? It's not for a higher purpose. There's no science being done, no galaxy being saved. The show's theme song may be about freedom, but unlike many of the people around them, Mal and his crew aren't colonists. They aren't going to found a new, more liberal republic on the virgin soil of a distant world. They aren't going to build a city on a hill. They have no quest, they seek no knowledge, they fight for no cause, they meet no aliens. Their existence is simply a big fat middle finger to the government in the distance.

And that's fine. It's fun, it's exciting, it makes for some great gunfights. But it doesn't resonate with me. I grew up in Texas, but I don't really have the Southern honor culture, and even if the Civil War hadn't been about slavery the Lost Cause would have little or no romance for me.

That's why Firefly, as fun and as well-written and as adorable as it was, can never quite be the Greatest of All Time as far as I'm concerned. I mean, guys - you're in space. You're on a spaceship. You're flying around from planet to planet, and instead of looking out the window at the incredible sweep of the unknown, you're thinking about your honor, and how you lost a war, and how to earn your next dollar. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the stuff of inspiration. I don't know about y'all, but when I gaze up at the night sky, I hope my first thought isn't "Damn...somewhere out there is a place where I could evade some federal regulation."

No, U.S. elections are not "rigged"

Tyler Cowen, my esteemed Bloomberg View colleague, has a post about Donald Trump's comments predicting a "rigged" election. Though Tyler states explicitly that he is not defending Trump's comments, the post certainly reads like a defense. Tyler's main points seem to be:

1. Elections really are "rigged" in some sense, and

2. Accusations of election "rigging" often come from the Left.

I don't want to put words in Tyler's mouth, though, so I'll repost much of his post:

[O]ver the last few years or indeed decades I also have seen the following: 

1. Numerous arguments insist that money buys elections and campaign finance reform is imperative... 

2. Numerous arguments that Republican-backed voter registration requirements are keeping significant numbers of voters, most of all minority voters, away from the polls... 

4. Do we not all teach the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem to our Principles classes on week three?  In case you forget, the theorem shows that under some fairly general assumptions elections processes are manipulable in a rigorous sense... 

5. A related branch of social choice theory, stemming from Dick McKelvey’s work in 1979, suggests that when the policy space has more than one dimension, the agenda setter in Congress has a great deal of power and typically can shape the final outcome... 

6. Major political scientists from schools such as Princeton tell us that elites determine policy and ordinary voters have very little say in what happens... 

7. The American electoral system is designed to give the two major parties a huge initial advantage... 

How many Democrats have alleged that the 2000 Presidential election was rigged?  Or that today most Americans want some form of tougher gun control, but that the system is rigged against that outcome happening?

Many people are not a big fan of this post. I would count myself among that number. Here are my points in response to Tyler:


Point 1: Let's not muddy the definition of "rigged". 

When most people hear the word "rigged" in the context of an election, they probably think that means the results have been falsified - that the numbers of votes recorded for each candidate differ meaningfully from the number actually cast.

To most people, a "rigged" election probably does not mean that the franchise ought to have been extended to disenfranchised groups. For example, in 19th century America, women could not vote. That was bad. But were all 19th century American elections therefore "rigged"? Most people would say no. Similarly, there is a good argument for extending the franchise to 17-year-olds in America right now. If we eventually do that, would that mean that all elections in the 20th century were "rigged"? Again, most people would say no.

Similarly, I've never heard of anyone who says that tactical voting is a form of election-rigging. Since tactical voting is universal (that's what Gibbard-Satterthwaite is about!), it also doesn't seem very helpful to label this a form of "rigging".

How about campaign finance? There are certainly a few people on the Left in America who would define this as election-rigging. I personally think that's silly. First of all, most evidence shows that money doesn't really give that much of an electoral advantage. Second of all, stringent campaign finance laws - such as those found in Japan - will still result in some groups and individuals having disproportionate power over election outcomes. Again, it seems worse than useless to define something that is inevitable and universal in a democracy as "rigging".

The only item Tyler mentions that seems to me like it could significantly count as vote-rigging is intentional disenfranchisement of voters who are officially afforded the franchise. For example, if eligible voters are intentionally and systematically purged from voter rolls to produce a certain outcome, that probably counts as "rigging". There is at least an outside possibility that this sort of manipulation made a difference in Florida in the 2000 election, thus throwing the election to Bush.

But when Trump says that the election will be "rigged", he doesn't mean any of these things - he's suggesting that vote totals will be falsified.


Point 2: Watering down the definition of "rigging" gives aid and comfort to those who would deligitimize our democracy.

If politicians like Trump consistently claim that election results are falsified, it erodes confidence in the electoral process itself - the people on the losing side will distrust the results of any election. That seems like it could eventually lead to a lot of bad outcomes. Election losers, convinced they actually won the vote, could become more intransigent and refuse to work with winners. Polarization could increase, eventually leading to outright civil conflict and the disintegration of the nation. Support could increase for military coups to depose election winners on the grounds that these winners were not elected legitimately. In other words, false claims of election-rigging seem pretty clearly to lead to the breakdown of our institutions, our democracy, and our country itself.

Now, I think those are bad things. Maybe Tyler disagrees. Though he has affirmed his support for democracy in the past, his mind might have changed since 2008. Certainly not all of his colleagues at GMU support democracy as the best system. Similarly, Tyler might believe that the United States of America ought to be split up, along regional, economic, or ethnic lines - or that nation-states themselves shouldn't exist. Certainly, there are others who do believe this.

But I believe that countries where democracy has lost its popular legitimacy, like Russia, Turkey, and Thailand, have not seen good outcomes over the past couple of decades. I also pretty strongly believe in nation-states, and in the United States nation-state in particular. So I think that when Tyler claims that U.S. elections are "rigged" in any substantial sense, it is probably a bad thing.

Of course, I support calls for ensuring that the franchise be extended as broadly as possible, and I'm interested in improving our campaign finance laws, but - see Point 1 - I don't think that calling for these reforms is anything even remotely similar to making allegations of election-rigging.


Point 3: Just because some on the Left do this doesn't make it OK for Trump to do it, nor is there an equivalence between the two.

Yes, there are some people on the Left in America who claim from time to time that elections, especially Democratic primaries, are "rigged". These claims are very rare, but I have heard them, especially from diehard Sanders-then-Stein supporters in the current election. Here is a Salon column alleging "rigging", but defining rigging down much as Tyler does. Here is an Inquisitr article alleging true election-rigging, i.e. vote-falsifying.

I see these allegations as obviously false, reprehensible, and dangerous in much the same way Trump's are. But to point out that "the Left does it too!" only reinforces the need to fight back against delegitimization of our democracy. It does not merit a shrug or a "Hey, dude, both sides do it".

Also, there is an asymmetry here. Diehard Sanders-then-Stein supporters are a fringe, and there will always be a fringe in politics. Trump is the nominee of one of the two major parties. Al Gore certainly never alleged vote-rigging in 2000, even after everything that happened in Florida. There is no equivalence at all here, and to try to draw one is a de facto defense and excusal of Trump's dangerous, unacceptable behavior.


So for these reasons, I am not a big fan of Tyler's post. American elections are not perfect, but - unless there is major evidence that has not yet come to light - they're pretty darn good. And Trump's questioning of their legitimacy is truly unprecedented, and not a part of partisan business-as-usual.


Updates

On Twitter, Rajeev Ramachandran hits the nail on the head:

[T]here's a diff b/w "systematically favours X" and "result won't depend on votes actually cast". The first calls for reform. The second is a call to armed insurrection.

Yes. Exactly. I couldn't have said it better (as evidenced by the fact that I didn't!).

Here is some new evidence that Republicans, but probably not Democrats, are starting to question whether votes are counted accurately in American elections. I view Tyler's post as contributing to this very negative and asymmetric trend.

As Trump intensifies his campaign to preemptively delegitimize the election result, Tyler's post is looking more and more spectacularly ill-timed...