Hi, It's Greg... I've Got Nothing to Say...

I have been doing some travelling recently and will do some more of it in a short while, so blogging will be more sporadic than usual over the next few weeks or so. I may write the occasional post, but the frequency will surely not reach "semi daily". I think I have made 46 posts before this one since I started this blog in March, so if anyone feels inclined to read some of those while I am adding to them at a much-reduced pace, I may help out by highlighting a few of them:

• From March, here is some puzzling evidence on death rates and human capital. In brief, more valuable skills should mean more incentives to improve and maintain one's health, which I believe is generally true empirically, but performers of British chart-toppers still have higher death rates at practically every age than do Brits in general. Why might that be?
• And why, given political competition, do the worst atrocities seem to happen in countries led by parties with totalitarian-sounding names?
• On the topic of questions, what is wrong with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom? This book, by the way, celebrates its 70th anniversary this year.
• A post about women's market incomes relative to those of men within their households. I discuss a well-written paper and suggest an alternative interpretation of its findings.
• Here, I question the power of ideas.
• I talked about building façades and externalities in early May.
• A critique of Rawls, original with me as far as I can tell (so caveat emptor!)
• I don't say anything of particular interest here, but I feel compelled to mention again the tragedy which befell the science of economics when my hero Professor Gary Becker passed away. His passing still makes me feel empty. I remembered him here and here.
• Some Economics of Moral Thought.

These are just some posts to which my thoughts have drifted back on occasion, not my "top ten", though I hope they will amuse nonetheless. Happy reading!

The Futility of Advice

When individuals find themselves in tricky situations, others sometimes offer their advice on how to get out of them. There is an implicit assumption the advisor makes in advising which makes me think most advice is not actually about improving the advisee's circumstances, but rather to signal concern, offer criticism (or threats when phrased right) or make a showing of personal accomplishment. The advice-seeker may on his part not even be that interested in getting advice, but instead just look for human contact, for instance. At any rate, all of this is useless for the purpose of actually ridding the advisee of his problems.

 

The implicit assumption is that the advisee has not already thought long and hard about the issue on which advice is offered. If the advisee's circumstances really are in need of improvement, no-one has a greater incentive than he to seek out ways of ameliorating them. This does not mean that all advice falls into one of the above categories. Sometimes people fail to figure out what to do, even though they try hard. One would expect better advice to be given when the advisee has actually asked for it, although the advisor's incentives to improve the advisee's circumstances still need not be that great.

 

Essentially, advice frequently fails to advise because people are rather self interested. Many people care about specific persons other than themselves, but it would be rare indeed to find individuals who care about themselves less than they care about other particular individuals. This means that the incentive to advise one's self is greater than is the incentive to advise others. Therefore, most advice will turn out to be obvious to the advisee.

How should advisees respond to unsolicited advice? Given that advice sometimes, perhaps often, signals sympathy, and given that sometimes even unsolicited advice is helpful, knee-jerk hostile reactions are not smart. I would write more about this issue, but now I feel a bit wary of being seen just now offering unsolicited advice.

This is perhaps a reason to be sceptical about the efficacy of certain labour-market services of an advisory character, such as the UK's Jobcentre Plus (which is in a sense asked for, but, unless I be mistaken, jobless persons receive no unemployment benefits if they do not go to the job centre). Also suspicious are admonitory efforts by schools to make kids stay away from tobacco and drugs ("drugs are bad, m'kay?"). But again, although the overall quality may not be as high as one might naïvely hope, some advice will turn out to be good. Certain sources of advice, for instance one on how to improve written communication, are in fact really terrific.

First Post

This is my weblog where I will discuss whatever is on my mind. I am Greg Heslop and I am trained in Economics, Social Science and Philosophy. These disciplines I have learnt in my spare time as well as at University, in my case mostly the University of Edinburgh and the University of Chicago. I run a small business over at Le Mot Juste which is essentially a service for individuals who wish to be able to better express themselves in writing. Check it out.

This blog will mostly follow my own interests; mainly society, economics and philosophy, although I suspect additional stuff is likely to appear. I do it because I enjoy writing and speculating about issues of interest, so feel free to leave comments if you think you have got something worthy of being said.