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.

Women Earn Less than Half of Their Household's Income, But Why?

Last year (this bears bringing up even though it is not really recent), I attended an unusually rewarding workshop at the University of Chicago (this is saying a great deal, for almost every workshop is a veritable party in one's mind that never stops - well, at least not until the discussions are over...). This one was given by Professor Marianne Bertrand of the Booth School of Business and the topic was male-female relative earnings in married couples. In a working paper with Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan, Bertrand displays the stunning pattern in marriages that women rather consistently contribute less than half of the household's market income. It looks as if there is widespread aversion to the woman's earning more than does the man within the household. I will offer much praise and one piece of constructive criticism on the thesis, but I start with the praise. The graph is beautiful (click to enlarge):

Households in which the wife earns more than does the husband seem to form much less frequently than do households in which the husband earns more. The discontinuity above is larger for less educated couples. Bertrand and her coauthors also document a tendency for divorce to occur more frequently in couples in which the woman earns more than fifty per cent of household income. Bertrand and her coauthors argue that this is due to a version of identity economics (made famous, most prominently, by research by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton), saying that there is a problem in case the wife earns more than does the husband.

I really enjoyed this paper, which is all the more important considering that women are increasingly acquiring all that is needed to out-earn men (I am thinking specifically of college graduation rates, in field after field).

Now for my piece of constructive criticism. The focus in the paper is wholly on how norms shape male-female relative income within households, but not mentioned is an alternative interpretation of the data based on socio-biology. It goes as follows: Men have more to lose than have women if their spouse is unfaithful. This is standard evolutionary biology (or at least it is my impression of what is considered standard evolutionary biology). If a man is unfaithful, his wife will not spend scarce resources raising some other woman's child. But if a woman is unfaithful, her husband ends up caring for someone else's genetic material.

This means that a husband has particularly strong reasons to look for an effective punishment mechanism so that the wife will be disincentivized to cuckold him. Supposing husband and wife have equal shares in household income, the punishment is greater if the woman's contribution to it was less than half. This also means that women occasionally have incentives to commit to earning less, say by spending less time working and consequently acquiring less human capital (such as experience and on-the-job training), in order to attract a husband.

My explanation is a bit akin to the theory of efficiency wages, according to which workers receive greater compensation than their productivity would indicate in order to instill fear in them not to shirk on the job, since wages higher than marginal product imply a risk of involuntary unemployment. Analogously, if women receive a share of household income greater than the share they contribute, they will be less likely to commit adultery ("shirk"), since there would be more to lose.

However, the socio-biological explanation has no counterpart to involuntary unemployment. The woman could then simply re-marry. However, since initially the man earned more than half of household income, the probability of the wife's finding a man of similar income to her first husband is not as great as it would be if male-female incomes had initially been the same.

I don't believe anybody actually chooses their partner based on explicit thinking along my suggested lines, but evolutionary biology merely gives us certain preferences, not necessarily ready perception of them or the ability to rationalize them.

The Power of Asking

Asking questions is so simple, yet it is not used nearly enough. By posing a question upon hearing some claim, one will learn something new. More precisely, it will be one of three things:

1. The other person has a good answer. In this case, one learns something about what is discussed.
2. The other person has a bad answer. In this case, one might point this out to him and he may revise what he had hitherto thought on the topic.
3. The other person has a bad answer or even no answer. In this case, one can point it out and, if no revision occurs, one is safe to think the other person a fraud.

The best questions are, I think, the ones demanding either a mechanism to back up what was said, or evidence in support of it (including the nature of the evidence so one might judge how believable it is). Except for the risk of appearing a little bit ignorant, (politely) asking questions of this character in no way imperils one's status in front of others and the potential benefits are vast: simply wanting to know stuff can hardly be bad socially as long as one is polite, and getting to learn new things is clearly privately desirable.

 

Frequently in public debates, questions are not asked, particularly not questions of my preferred variety. In lieu of questions, there are attacks on the other person or re-statements of what was said before. Perhaps this happens because the expected retort will insult the asker's intelligence, or perhaps they do not want listeners to hear a potentially very good answer. Not always and everywhere, of course, but this happens a depressingly large fraction of the time I come across such debates. (So I do not watch or attend very many of them.) When this happens, what might have been a Socratic dialogue has turned into something quite ugly. I think in such cases one can conclude that the people involved are not interested in truth but in advancing some agenda of their own.

  

Off the top of my head, here are just some issues in which basic questions can go a long way. The questioned claims may be right or wrong, and I have some tentative answers of my own, but I mention them because I find that there is typically extremely little substance in public discussions about them:

• Why is territorial expansion by one country to be feared by its neighbours? What is the mechanism? What is the evidence?
• Why should we expect men and women to be equally well-represented in most or every occupation, and to earn exactly as much in these occupations? Again, mechanism? Evidence?
• Why is domestic poverty more important to address than poverty in very poor countries?
• Why is it a civic duty to vote?

Lastly, an analogue to the Golden Rule also applies for asking questions: The questions you are asked by others - and by yourself - you should treat as seriously as you expect others to treat the questions you ask them.

What Is Wrong with Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom'?

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of F.A. Hayek's famous book The Road to Serfdom. Its thesis is that democracy is imperilled by citizens' viewing it as a means to just about any ends they might have. One may think of it as two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, a sort of doll's-house view of society in the sense that voters use democracy to order fellow citizens about.

 

Examples include demands for safety nets, public provisions of education and health care, etc. All of these policies use a measure of force to achieve their ends. One may approve of the policies anyway, of course, but the resources to achieve them must come from somewhere and this means individuals' scope to decide their own ends must necessarily decline. One can be served from a government tray, or one can decide how to put together one's own tray with whatever means one has.

 

Hayek argued that such tendencies must inevitably spell the end for liberty and indeed for democratic institutions, because once the erosion of freedom to decide individual ends has proceeded too far, the resultant state control over many, many aspects of life gives it, ultimately, the power to decide who eats and who does not, who prospers and who perishes. The many things at the state's command also necessitate delegation to committees and departments which cannot be subject to democratic choice, or they simply won't be able to run smoothly.

 

There is a lot more to the argument and I encourage everyone to read the book, but what I want to discuss here is why, even in countries in which governments tax around fifty per cent of GDP, tyranny does not seem to lure around the corner. With the growth of government having continued since 1944, why do Hayek's fears appear ill-founded?

 

I believe a big part of the explanation must be that there are built-in breaks in political competition which inhibit totalitarian tendencies. Hayek argued that the only thing that can stop creeping totalitarianism is a popular opinion which favours the liberal principles upon which democracy was once founded. But popular opinion has limited (although not nonexistent) influence on legislation. Given how little influence an individual voter has on political outcomes, it would be foolish to suppose that he keeps himself au courant with what politicians do.

 

This opens the door for special interests. On the surface, it might not seem like an improvement, but there is nothing to suggest that interest groups only favour illiberal policy. They are frequently at loggerheads over all sorts of issues, some wanting more redistribution but others wanting less. Candlemakers might petition the government to block out the sun, but tourist resorts will lobby against such a move. Various Green groups may lobby against GMOs, but if so they are likely to face some opposition, for instance from firms researching GMOs.

 

Furthermore, politicians may try to reap rents by taxing citizens whose willingness to pay for certain policy is relatively great, giving away a share of these rents to other citizens with a negative-but-lower-in-absolute-value willingness to pay for the selfsame policies. If clear-headed thinking is associated with greater willingness to pay, poor policy is at an inherent disadvantage. Of course, clear-headed thinking in politics may be very rare (I don't know), but it is conceivably a force opposing bad policy.

 

Another contender to explain why liberal democracy has survived is that the tax-to-GDP ratio has not climbed quite high enough yet. I think this is a poor contender reminiscent of Marxian explanations that capitalism must progress just a little more before the advent of the workers' revolution. I do doubt that any speck of freedom would survive if governments suddenly started taxing in excess of ninety per cent of GDP, but my favoured explanation above already covers this because the built-in breaks prevent that from occurring. And if what saves Hayek's thesis is that it has, at least so far, been impossible to go far enough, there just does not seem to be much point to Hayek's warning. 'Beware of the Hydra' would be a poor warning for the same reason. Because there is no Hydra.

What's in a Name?

Imagine you want power above all else. "Public service" or "duty by one's nation" are mere catch-phrases without any real meaning. You will do whatever you deem necessary in order to hold sway. This is the kind of thinking that is behind a great deal of standard economic treatments of politics. If a politician does care about stuff other than securing sway, he will lose out to those more focused in their aim.

Strange, then, that the vast majority of the most eye-catching atrocities committed in the 20th century appear to have been committed with either communist or fascist parties in power. If politicians care mainly about power and less about policy, should not who gained power to commit these crimes have been a toss-up between whatever political forces were established at the time of the preceeding election, or between which movements were around to grab power when the country in question was last in an unsteady state? I have no good explanation for why totalitarian names should dominate. Why should not an established party on occasion have changed policy preferences to accommodate communist or fascist tendencies to prevent a party with one of those words in its name from coming to power? The atrocities would have been the same, but the perpetrators would have called themselves the Agrarian Party, the Democrats or the Conservatives. Why did this not happen?

Thoughts?

Does This Strengthen the Case for the Theory of Negative Moral Rights?

A slight proviso: This post is a bit more speculative than is most other stuff on this blog (which, I suppose, is quite often already rather speculative). I am really only wondering aloud whether the following works at all:

If somebody threatens to kill me unless I steal something of questionable significance (say, a peanut) from somebody else (who has never wronged me in any way), I believe most people's ethical compasses would indicate that it is up to me whether I should commit theft or suffer the consequences. Followers of deontological ethics are the ones who may disagree, but they may suppose one has an implicit contract with the peanut's owner and may compensate him later. If the demand were that I do something rather more objectionable (say, kill an unsuspecting family), I am less certain of how others would react. Some people would find my hypothetical murder defensible ("he acted in self-defence"), but others would not ("more deaths occurred this way"). But none of this is really crucial for the points I am going to make (if any!).

 

Now suppose it were known about me that I was a keen adherent of the theory of negative rights (or "deontological libertarianism"). My normative ethics would then tell me that I may do whatever I please with what is mine, but I may not interfere with the ability of others to do whatever they want with what is theirs. In this case, I believe very few people would object to my refusing to steal (and certainly to commit murder). Kantians sometimes confound my predictions about their attitudes, so I will restrict myself to how consequentialists (such as utilitarians and egoists) might reason. Utilitarians would, I think, reason that I am better off this way (at least that I believe I am better off this way; maybe I could not live with myself knowing that I had committed murder or stolen a peanut). An egoist should be OK with it since he is not affected. Thus, it seems it would be hard to argue that adherents of negative rights are wrong to refuse to steal (or kill). These adherents of moral theories different from that of negative moral rights would still oppose my normative ethics, of course, but that being what it is, this is how I think they would react.

 

Now blow up this example to some variant of the common "is it right to steal if it saves humanity"-problem. For instance, suppose an asteroid (which should really be called planetoid since they are more "like" planets than stars) is about to hit the Earth, and that some curmudgeon has invented a ray gun which could blast the asteroid to smithereens. There is no palatable alternative to using the ray gun: if it is not used, the Earth will be destroyed and humanity will cease to exist. The curmudgeon, true to character, does not want to share his ray gun with anyone and intends to let the asteroid hit the Earth.

 

Is it right to steal the ray gun from the curmudgeon? Well, suppose everyone on Earth was an adherent of the theory of negative moral rights. If no consequentialist has a problem with an individual's refusing to violate others' rights, why should the answer change just because now we are talking about many individuals making up their own minds to reach the same conclusion?

 

To object to many individuals' choosing not to violate rights requires, I think, that one in this example cares more about some notion of "humanity" than about the sum of its parts. But what is humanity if not the sum of its parts? I suppose one could argue that unborn generations would suffer from never getting to live, but then in the original example in which only I am affected by my refusal to violate others' rights, critics would have to argue that I am not at liberty to refuse to procreate.

 

The point here is that those claiming that the  asteroid problem shows that adherents of negative rights are wrong would, if I am correct, be OK with the world ending if everyone (or perhaps just most people, depending on how tolerant are the few utilitarians and how they rate their own utility in relation to the utility of the deontological folks) actually believed it right not to steal in this sort of situation. Again, there would be objections to these ideas about negative rights, but given that people have them, I don't think consequentialists would see a problem with the refusal to violate rights.

Notice that those who believe in negative rights do not have to interfere and attempt to protect the curmudgeon if someone else (say, a utilitarian) chooses to steal the ray gun and save the Earth. Why should they be prevented from doing what they want with their own time just because someone else chose to violate rights?

So here is where I end up: If man kind consisted of (almost?) only adherents of the theory of negative moral rights, consequentialists cannot use the asteroid example to criticize their lack of action in the face of looming disaster. If, on the other hand, there were any (or sufficiently many) consequentialists around, consequentialists cannot criticize adherents of the theory of negative moral rights, since their refusal to violate rights had no bad consequences. Either way, the asteroid example cuts no ice with the theory of negative moral rights.

Pacifism and Political Economy (Speaking of the Crimea...)

EconLog's Bryan Caplan rightly criticizes The Economist Magazine today for a stunning lack of substance in discussing what attitude the West should take in response to recent Russian activities. It occurs to me that my post from a few days ago fits well with Caplan's case for pacifism, which can stand repetition: Sometimes, wars have arguably accomplished good things (though one cannot be too sure sans a counterfactual), but other times they have worsened life greatly (again, arguably: it is difficult to know what would have happened had things gone differently). Since, irrespective of final outcomes, the short-run costs are plainly tremendous, wars are to be avoided.

Similarly, from the more theoretical point of view of my recent post, if policy won't change as a result of military takeover, it makes no sense to resist invading armies. Maybe the idea that wars are not worth fighting would make it more tempting for foreign powers, unsympathetic to this idea, to invade, but for resultant policy to be different, it would have to be that the threat of war, now absent, impacts which policies are chosen. But there are many pacific threats which also influence policy (e.g. demonstrations, black-market activities...), so I am not sure how significant the threat of war is.

If my thoughts from a few days ago have any merit, it seems to me that they strengthen the case for pacifism, at least a little bit.