Crazy Social Artistic Black Widows

Elizabeth Kolbert uses recent genetic studies of the Neanderthals as the frame for discussing what differentiates humans from our nearest relatives (Neanderthals and apes). The article is behind the New Yorker paywall. Here's my quick summary of her main points about our species' distinctive features.

1. To paraphrase the tagline of the movie Black Widow, "we mate, then we kill." In the case of both the Neanderthals and Denisovans our ancestors definitely had sex. And it worked out well for us, as the BBC reports it improved our immune systems. It's not clear we actually killed them after having sex, but they disappeared not long after we arrived in the regions they had previously occupied. And we have a record of causing extinctions of other species that have the misfortune to try to share the same space with us.
2. We painted our cave walls. Apparently the others did not.
3. We crossed oceans. Partly because we were smart enough to develop the technology to do so. And partly because we were crazy enough to paddle off into the open sea.
4. We're not especially impressive problem solvers. An adult Orangutan can solve problems that flummox human toddlers. But the human kids show greater ability to engage in social learning. Neanderthals may have been somewhat autistic.

"In Fact"

Don't you find it annoying when people write "in fact" as a way to assert something without providing actual evidence. One of the reasons people do this (here I can speak from experience) is because that asserted fact is not a fact at all, but merely an assertion we wish to be true.

Example.

In a recent blog entry, Krugman writes

Even people who are supposedly well informed believe that there was a vast expansion of government under Obama, when in fact there wasn’t. (emphasis added)

OK, here are the actual facts obtained from the Office of Management and Budget historical tables. In 2008, total government outlays were 2.98 trillion. The 2011 estimate is 3.83 trillion. As a percentage of GDP, federal government outlays rose from 20.7% to 25.1%.

So unless we want to redefine "expansion", "government" or "under Obama", we have to accept that there was in fact an
"expansion of government under Obama." But was it vast? To me, almost a trillion dollars (28.5% increase) over 5 years is on the big side of things, especially when considering that outlays had been at 21% or below as a share of GDP since 1994.

OK, that is the end of the "Republican" portion of this post. Now we have to point out that the increases in government outlays have come in large part from increases in military spending, pensions, and medicare (medical care for the elderly). Spending is not just foreign aid and "bridges to nowhere". In fact that sort thing is very small.

And while government has indeed expanded, it is equally evident that tax receipts have been shrinking as a share of GDP.

Bees and Blueberries

While at the Kitsilano Farmer's Market, I saw a sign for honey made from the blueberries at G- farms. I asked the honeymaker if he has to pay for his bees to have access to the farm. He said actually they pay him for bringing his bees to their farm.

Why can't the farms rely on wild bees to do the pollination? Well in the Frasier valley, the only wild bees are bumble bees which hibernate in the winter in mouseholes. With the cool spring, the bumble bees were late in getting started. I asked if he could charge extra because of the added need for his bees. Unfortunately for him, prices for pollination services fell this summer due to the arrival of a new competitor from Northern Alberta (of all places!). Where the old established price was $95 (per field? acre? I didn't catch that), this guy went to a farm show and announced his willingness to accept $65.

The newcomer has 20,000 colonies in semis and decided to come to the Frasier valley to nourish his bees here before taking them to the Canola fields of the prairies for the summer. The farmer I spoke to still is able to charge over $65 to some local farms ($75 to G- farm) because of the established relationship which means the farmer can rely upon him to come each year. But the old $95 prices are unattainable.

I bought 250ml of blueberry honey for $4.95. Not only am I looking forward to enjoying it on French Toast, I may use it as a prop for my next lecture on externalities...since now I have my own anecdote to add to the "fable of the bees." (Journal of Law and Economics, 1973, "The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation" by Steven Cheung)

Do winners wear red? Does the truth wear off?

Last week I had to go to three meetings in a row so I wore my red sweater. A non-sequitur, you say? Well, maybe, but I had a theory. Based on this article in Nature, I had decided that wearing red would enhance my performance in conflicts, which I pessimistically assumed would arise in these meetings. Later in the week, I had a meeting where I didn't at all get what I wanted and I attributed it to the blue (loser) sweater I wore that day. Then I heard from my friend Sui Sui, international business professor at Ryerson, that the Nature study had been debunked. In the 2008 Olympics it turned out that the blue-shirted athletes won more often. And in the 2004 Olympics (the source of the data used in the Nature paper), it now appeared that the shirt colour allocation was not really random.

This brought to mind a very interesting article I read last month in the New Yorker, titled "The Truth Wears Off" by Jonah Lehrer. The author describes a variety of effects that were first estimated as being quite strong but were subsequently shown to be weak or non-existent. He attributes the tendency of "decline" to three main forces.

1. Publication bias: In order to get published your paper needs to have strong, significant results.
2. Selective reporting: Scientists screen their own work, tossing out results that don't fit with their priors.
3. Study-level random effects. Although Lehrer doesn't really nail this point, I think what he is getting at is that the significance levels in studies are calculated as if every observation in the study is independent. But what if the "apparatus" used to conduct the multiple measurements has a problem? Then over and over again it will give similar results. If the flaw is random, it doesn't bias the result up or down but it does bias the significance levels so we think that we have something when we don't. In the case of the red-shirt study, there seems to have been something about the 2004 Olympics that tilted contest victories towards red shirts but it was not an enduring effect (i.e. not truly biological or cultural, say) so it didn't show up in the 2008 replication.

One of the letters to the editor points to a case where an estimate started out too low but was only gradually revised upwards.

Mental virtue

In the January 17 issue of the New Yorker, David Brooks has a very nicely written summary of work in psychology and social science title "The Social Animal." He uses the device of a composite character named Harold to convey the work and this is somewhat annoy (especially at the beginning and end where there seems to be some kind of light satire that isn't particularly amusing) but it works very nicely in the parts about human spouse-selection.

I have removed the "biography of Harold" aspects from one part of the article I found very insightful.

There is an important distinction between mental strength, which is the processing power of the brain and mental character, which are the cognitive virtues that lead to practical wisdom. The four virtues are:

1. Collect conflicting information before making up your mind.
2. Calibrate your certainty level to the strength of the evidence.
3. Endure long stretches of uncertainty while waiting for an answer to become clear.
4. Correct for your own biases.

Economics IS a science, BUT...

In the Financial Times today (free registration is required but worthwhile) there is a provocative column by Gideon Rachman arguing that economics is a "pseudo-science" and that historians ought to get more of a hearing. There is also a more valuable discussion in an embedded video between Rachman and Martin Wolf (who makes a lot of eminently sensible points and clearly wins the "debate" in my view).

OK, so what are the criteria we should look at to see if economics is a science? Rachman uses a clever trick and pulls a quote from a winner of the Nobel prize for economics, Joe Stiglitz, who wrote that science was "defined by its ability to forecast the future." Actually, he didn't define science that way; he said "If a science..." is defined that way then economics is in trouble because it didn't forecast the crisis. Rachman seizes on the forecasting definition. But it doesn't take long to realize that many sciences do not forecast the future at least not in the sense of accurately predicting exactly when and where certain things will happen. Astronomers can't stake their claim to forecasting the future since the astronomical future won 't be known until long after they are all dead. And biologists don't predict future evolution of most species. And climate scientists didn't predict global warming fifty years ago. And meteorologists didn't predict Hurricane Katrina in advance of its formation. Earthquake scientists can't tell me the day when Vancouver will be hit by the "big one."

I don't think anyone can seriously argue that forecasting the future is the rule for membership in the science club. Rather it's something about being able to systematically understand the mechanisms at work in the field of study. With that understanding you may get predictive ability or you may not depending on the complexity of the system and how well evolved the science has become. Economics is a science since it consists of a set of mechanisms that help us understand the economy. But the subject matter is highly complex, and it keeps on changing. A crisis is a particular combination of effects that causes the current situation to fall apart. It involves individual agents and their interactions in ways that are hard enough to model and close to impossible to predict.

Two more points.

First, even when astronomers predicted the sun revolved around the earth, they were still doing science. Just not doing it very well. Partly because of limited knowledge--it was a young science. Partly becuase the science was infected by religion. That's my worry about economics. It's a science where certain types of secular "religion" have taken hold. We have to shake of this religion to make progress.

Second, in contrast to the humble vision of historians espoused by Rachman, we know from the case of Niall Ferguson that they are not content to say: "Actually, chaps, it was a bit more complicated than that." Instead look at what Ferguson says in another column in the FT: "there invariably came a point when money creation by the central bank triggered an upsurge in inflationary expectations." That sure sounds a lot like someone who has looked at history and elucidated a general law that holds in all situations. Or how about this one: "American stimulus can end up benefiting Chinese exporters; and at a time when there is much under-utilised capacity, so that deflation is a bigger threat than inflation." Ferguson is doing economics in this sentence; he's just not doing it very well. There is no way to see Ferguson as following what Rachman approvingly deems the true function of the historian: "to concentrate on the particular and the specific and to puncture the pretensions of social scientists, with their constant and futile effort to derive general, predictive laws from the study of the past." We can't get by without economics as a science. We have to have some analytical framework that holds across particular instances in history or we would have no basis to formulate policy. We have to do it better. Theories need to be confronted with historical evidence. But we need to do the maths too.

Churchill's 4 Greatest Hits

1. On May 13th, 1940, Churchill gave his first speech as prime minister. He had been appointed only 3 days earlier on May 10th, the day Hitler launched a quadruple invasion of France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word:
Victory.
Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

2. On June 4th after the completion of the evacuation from Dunkirk, Churchill again addressed the House of Commons. Although the formal surrender of France did not occur until June 22nd, everyone must have seen it coming. The foremost question in English minds was whether an invasion of Britain would soon follow.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

3. On June 18th "in order to counter panic over the coming news of the French armistice" (Roberts, 2009, p. 85) Churchill spoke again:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

4. The Battle of Britain that followed the invasion of France (beginning July 10th, 1940) reached its "zenith" according to Andrew Roberts' Storm of War on September 15 which is "today celebrated as Battle of Britain day." A full month before (August 15th) Churchill, referring to British fighter pilots, gave a line that I will always think of with great affection.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

And that appears to be the last of the wartime speeches that gave us the immortal lines that I knew as rock lyrics ("finest hour" in the "Finest Worksong" by REM, "never surrender" in a Corey Hart song!) before I even knew their true author and the context in which he spoke them.

I believe we owe an enormous debt to Churchill for those words. They make me proud of our history and of our language. They also may have tipped the balance and kept Britain in the war when there were many who might have made "terms" with Hitler leading to occupation and a Vichy-like state instead of what Roberts refers to as "Last Hope Island." It would be almost 5 years after those speeches before the Nazis were defeated. But it was that summer of 1940 when mere words never mattered more.