Marginal Revolution

When should you take photographs?

JKottke, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What's better, a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son's first steps or a one-time in-person viewing?

If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it.  The fact that your memories will in part be "false" or constructed is besides the point; they'll probably be false anyway.  In other words, there's no such thing as the "one-time in-person viewing," it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other.  Daniel Gilbert's book on memory is the key source here.

Furthermore you don't need the later viewing for the photo or video to be worthwhile.  It's all about organizing your memories in the form of narratives and that is what cameras help us do, if only by differentiating the flow of events into chunkier blocks of greater discreteness. 

A photo that requires retakes might be more effective than a photo you get right the first time.

Personally, I take pictures of Yana only when she tells me to, which I might add is often.  I've never owned a camera, but for most people I recommend the photos. 

By the way here are 21 ways to take better photographs.

The infinitely bad sneeze

Zack writes to me:

You're in an airport, about to go through the security line. You sneeze, which delays you by two seconds. It doesn't just delay you by two seconds, though; it also delays everyone waiting in line behind you. And everyone who will show up while the people currently in line haven't gone through yet. In fact, if you assume that the queue is never empty, which even at 3 in the morning is true for the major airlines, we're talking about arbitrarily large quantities of wasted time.

I believe that airport queues do eventually empty out, if only at 4 a.m., so is there any setting where this result might hold?  And if so, what is your obligation to produce infinitely good outcomes, say by cutting off your nose?  On the philosophical side, you might find this debate relevant.  By the way, here is Zack on ranking the babies.

Excellent sentences

To think more objectively, become less allied.

That is Robin Hanson, the rest of the post is interesting as well.  Don't forget that: "people ignore info more when they feel powerful."

I also like this (older) sentence from Megan Non-McArdle:

Once you believe your opponents are disproportionately powerful liars, you have completed the Devil Shift.

Here is more.

Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example

Let's say a bunch of poor kids all pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball.  Wilt gets the money, the kids get to see the game.  At the end of the day Wilt is richer and the kids are poorer.  Since we wouldn't object to any one of these transactions, why should we object to the resulting pattern?  Robert Nozick went further and argued that any "pattern-based" notion of justice would require continual and unjustified interference in personal liberties.  That was one of the most famous claims in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia; here is another summary of the argument. 

I'm all for the NBA but I've never been overwhelmed by this approach.  I agree that there is "nothing unjust" about the Chamberlain outcome but still perhaps we can do better in consequentialist terms.  Nozick's argument defeats egalitarian leveling but does it really refute, say, mildly progressive taxation?  What if we could tax Wilt a bit and make life much better for the kids?  Without invoking public choice skepticism about government (which indeed is important), what's so bad about that?  Is it morally wrong?  Wilt is still quite free and we get some social good in return.

I'm usually skeptical of moral arguments that don't confront the question of "at what margin" straight up.  I will, however, buy this (abbreviated) argument:

1. A doctor is not required to devote his entire life, or even a part of it, to helping poor kids in Africa, even if he could create greater good by doing so.  Personal autonomy matters.

2. The right to keep the product of your labor -- money! -- is a big part of autonomy, even though it is not always recognized as such.

3. Barring end-of-the-civilized-world exigencies, no one should be forced to part with more than a certain percentage of his or her income, even when valuable public goods are at stake.  There is, after all, no end to good ideas for redistribution, not the least of which is the helicopter drop to Malawi.  We all draw the line somewhere, so it's not enough to cite benevolence to defeat the claims of property rights and the demand for low taxes.

4. Adhering to such a percentage rule will have desirable consequentialist properties, given the public choice problems with government behavior.  Thus a kind of consilience supports this moral view.

That all said, I do not believe we have a very clear or very scientific answer as to what the right percentage is.  Furthermore "the proper percentage" is likely contingent upon historical circumstances.  I take that as representing a partial -- but only partial -- endorsement of Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument and of course I reject the deontological ("just don't!") nature of Nozick's approach altogether.

Warning to extreme libertarians: Don't even try to argue that zero is the maximum permissible rate of taxation.  Would you abolish all taxation today, immediately, if it meant a rapid collapse into social chaos?

Warning to social democrats: You are used to citing beneficience arguments to argue for raising taxes.  But you reject beneficence arguments yourself, when you refuse to step into the shoes of Peter Singer and call for even more redistribution.  I want to make you feel guilty about this tension.  What you'd like to do is dismiss Singer with a separate argument and then turn your fire to the anti-tax types and feel that beneficence is always on your side.  It isn't. 

Here is my earlier post on Nozick's experience machine.  Here is Will Wilkinson with more on Rawls.  Going back to our earlier discussion, Ross Douthat has provided an excellent discussion of notable conservative books.  I am a big fan of Nozick's book although a) I don't consider it "conservative," and b) I like the obscure sections best, such as the discussion of anarchy and government in the first part.

Aphorisms by Juan Ramón Jiménez

I liked these ones:

The true poet reanimates in his work, in abbreviated form, the complete history of poetry.

The rose: how can it be naked and clothed, all at the same time?

In order to read many books, buy just a few.

I am humble among the serious, proud among the vain.

Here is a brief biography.  Here are more of his aphorisms.

Why I am not a Rawlsian

The Difference Principle is not so much excessively risk-averse as excessively jerry-rigged.  OK, we can't aggregate as utilitarians but then we resort to some notion of primary goods with intersubjective validity.  OK, the size of the worst-off group is itself endogenous to the contractarian process.  But just how big is that group supposed to be?  Can it be 99 percent of society?  OK, people behind the veil don't know their particular identities, but just how "thin" is their knowledge supposed to be?  And must their choices be purely self-interested?  All these criticisms are well-known.  You might try to shore up Rawls on any one of these points but the entire apparatus is simply too wobbly. 

The bottom line is that you can't get lexical orderings out of a moral theory unless you build them in upfront.  And without lexical orderings, well, Rawls, like many illustrious minds before him, does not succeed in sidestepping the dirty mess of aggregation.  The critical moral question is how we should compare the interests of some people to others in a real world setting; don't expect to find an easy way out of that one. 

Rawls's Principle of Equal Liberty is if anything on weaker ground than the Difference Principle.  Equal Liberty?  Who says?  At what margin?  At what cost?  Lexicality can't plug all the leaks in this shaky boat, and no it can't save Robert Nozick either.

The biggest problem is simply why the imaginary agreement behind the veil of ignorance should have moral force.  Now I like preferences as much as the next guy, but imaginary preferences take me only so far.  That is just one piece of information in a much broader comparison of plural values.  I'm not even sure that imaginary preferences should override the very real preferences of very real people in very particular situations.  Why should they?  "Fairness" is just one value of many.

I read Rawls as a very very smart and intellectually honest guy, determined to resurrect Kant, avoid the aggregative problems of consequentialism, and move at least one step beyond Sidgwick.  He knew how hard it was to even attempt such a success and he makes all the requisite moves to get us there, albeit without, in the final analysis, squaring the circle. 

Matt Yglesias adds commentary; he notes, correctly, that for the current Left Rawls doesn't offer such an inspiring vision.  I'll put it this way: if you have to work that hard to establish "Sweden is great," you should be spending more money on plane tickets.

Just to clarify, there are at least three Rawls doctrines: "Justice as Fairness," TJ, and Political Liberalism.  I like the first one best, but won't cast my lot with any of the three.  At the end of the day I come away thinking that it is Sidgwick (and maybe Kierkegaard?) who is the central moral theorist of the last two centuries.

Moral puzzles about collective action

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so that’s morally bad. If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly that’s also morally bad. Which is the morally correct thing to do?

That question is considered by Will Wilkinson.  Don't argue the facts of carbon emissions (you can choose another scenario if you wish), focus on the moral dilemma.  Will says fly, the plane is going anyway.  That makes my brain hurt with game theory and the probability of threshold effects and triggers.  (Isn't there some chance that your patronage, eventually, sets another flight in motion, if only stochastically?)  Under an alternative approach, say you are allowed some quota of carbon emissions; otherwise suicide or residence in Iceland as a pedestrian would be required.

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount.  So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all.  Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Here is a good new piece on our carbon footprints.

A simple ethical conundrum

A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me.  I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver.  I explained someone had left it there.  Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being.  But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn't.  But wait, maybe I couldn't have gotten the purse to the woman very easily.  But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down.  But wait, isn't it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place?  But wait, what is the default point for defining "in the first place"?  But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab?  But wait, isn't a purse really really important?  But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?

Claims my Russian wife won't even deign to laugh at

If you get up late in the morning on weekends, you must think sleep is very valuable.  And if sleep is very valuable, that means we should go to bed early.  Because if you go to bed early, you always have the option of sleeping later -- that is sleeping more -- and getting even more sleep than if you had gone to bed late.  (You can't just shift your sleep into any hours block you want, given the coordination issues.)  And if sleep is very valuable, the option to sleep more must be valuable as well.  Therefore it's time to go to bed.  Now.  Early.

No response was forthcoming.  The argument, of course, gets at whether "sleep" or "postponement" enters the utility function as the final good.  There are some economic papers on procrastination, but overall postponement, or for that matter its closely allied cousin "preemption," is an understudied topic in economics.

Settling

The Atlantic Monthly had an interesting story on why women should settle for "Mr. Good Enough."  Eugene Volokh had some insightful comments.  I am sympathetic to the idea of modest expectations but I don't favor cheerleading for settling.  More precisely I worry about The Paradox of the Underrated (is Shawn Marion still underrated?  Nope, and by the way Phoenix had nothing to lose from that deal).  If this article talks you into the prospect of settling, settling will start to seem pretty good to you.  If your expectations were too high in the first place you'll keep your old set of unrealistic expectations (personalities and pathologies don't change so quickly) and simply apply them to a new option, namely a marriage to a dullard.  "Settling" works best when you are stuck on a desert island and you do not expect so much from your surrender to the inevitable.  The AM article would do more good if it tried to convince people how terrible settling would be.  You just have to plant the idea in people's minds, as they'll make their own decisions anyway.

In other words, "have modest expectations -- it will be great for you!!!" can't really be winning advice.

Do we undervalue routine?

The always-interesting Gretchen Rubin offers up this one-minute movie.  I take the point to be that we under-appreciate the routine time we spend with our family and friends.  Cherishing this time would give us better lives, it would seem.  But why is this time so hard to cherish properly?  Don't we want better lives?  Are we passing up a free lunch?

In the movie the little girl says that she loved that time with her mother, namely doing the routines of taking the bus.  The routines are an investment in later good memories.

Are our memories determined by the value of the average bus trip, or by the value of the marginal bus trip?  (Of course to some extent it is a weighted average of both.)  I suspect the fun of the marginal trip weighs fairly heavily in our backward-looking assessment of our routines.  Most of the bus trips don't get noticed or perhaps they are even a drag.  But whenever the pressures of the day occasionally slacked off, and the mother had more time with her daughter, that time seemed so wonderful.

So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don't spend too much time with your kids?  If I ate chicken in mole sauce every day my memories of it wouldn't be so special.  (Perhaps we measure peaks rather than computing the area under the integral?)  But now the making and tasting of the mole stands as an occasion to remember.  High total value equals low marginal value and perhaps poor memories.  Low total value equals high marginal value and better memories.  Of course if your total time with your kids is truly low, they will hate you and your marginal time with your kids will be crummy as well.

Is divorce bad for the children?

Rereading Tim Harford's chapter three, this question runs through my mind.  Numerous studies correlate divorce with subpar outcomes for the children, though Justin Wolfers once told me he was not convinced these studies had proved a causal relationship.  Perhaps divorce-prone families have other dysfunctionalities which correlate with the kids having later problems in life and that the divorce is not causing those problems.

My wondering is more fundamental.  Does a marginal (expected) increase in divorce increase or decrease the number of children who end up being born?  On one hand the prospect of divorce may cause some people to limit the number of children they have.  On the other hand, there is a surplus of women on the marriage market.  Divorce, followed by male remarriage or at least siring, tends to increase the total number of children.  I suspect this latter effect predominates.  If divorce is unexpected, this latter effect almost certainly predominates.

If divorce causes more children to be brought into the world, it is hard for me to believe that divorce is bad for "the children" overall.  It's better to be born, at least for most kids.  You might argue that "children existing now" have a special moral privilege over "children in the abstract."  Sometimes, yes (we don't value human life at replacement cost), but if we are asking "will divorce be good for children thirty years from now" currently they are all "children in the abstract."

I believe this defense of divorce is consistent with Tim's overall take.  Of course a person who fears overpopulation might see this as additional reason to oppose divorce or make it more costly.

Tyler whines to an Indian readership

Here is the opening of the piece, in the latest Mint:

Sometimes my life feels like a series of never-ending frustrations. The last three products I bought at Best Buy—a large electronics store—had to be returned because they simply didn’t work. The DVD from Amazon has a fatal skip. My wife’s new Mac computer doesn’t function on our wireless network. I dread any call to customer service. A wait is followed by a transfer, which is followed by two more transfers, which is in turn followed by a promise to call me back. The return call never comes. My billing dispute on my AT&T credit card dragged on since May, mostly because they simply didn’t find it worth their while to respond to my letters.

But there's a happy ending, sort of:

If you need consolation, I have two suggestions.

First, count your blessings and read some Buddhist or Stoic philosophy. Second, take your revenge in the form of lower prices.

In the short run, one supplier can rip you off pretty easily. In the long run, it is harder for the world as a whole to avoid giving you a pretty good deal.

What do you owe the world, and what does the world owe you?

Steven Landsburg writes:

Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

Progressive taxation, some would say in response!

Tim Harford, however, nails it:

...people lose their jobs all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with foreign trade. I'd argue that they deserve some help. Why are jobs lost to foreign competition so privileged?

I am most interested in Dani Rodrik on the same, most of all when writes:

The question of how we should respond to a trade-induced change in income distribution is not one on which economists can offer any expertise.  This is a question about ethics, values, and norms, none of which is part of an economist's training.  Landsburg's take on this is as good as mine--which is as good as that of any person on the street.

Every now and then I feel a deep responsibility to rebut an argument.  In my view anyone doing policy economics has an obligation to learn more about ethics -- much more -- than the guy in the street would know.  Would someone doing experimental economics feel free of the obligation to learn some empirical psychology?  Would someone doing trade feel free of the obligation to learn some trade law, some history, and some political science?  No.  What's the difference?  Economists like to separate the "positive" and "normative" aspects of what they do, but this distinction has not much impressed the moral philosophers who have looked at it nor has it impressed Amartya Sen.  The very decision to use economic tools emphasizes some considerations and excludes others.  The final policy analysis is not just pure prediction but rather it is also an implicit presentation and weighting of both different kinds of information and different values.  So if you are doing policy economics, it is imperative that you think about ethics at a very deep level, and read widely in ethics.  You are doing ethics whether you like it or not!  Furthermore I don't doubt that Dani already has a deeper understanding of ethics than the (often very crude) man in the street.

That said, I don't agree with the ethics Dani does discuss, noting that he must have felt he had some good reason to put forward the concerns he did and not others.  (As a rule of thumb I'll note that those who profess the impassability of ethical terrain have just in fact traversed it.)  I don't worry much about the procedural fairness if a poor country trades at better prices by paying its labor less or by polluting.  Low wages are precisely the wages we want to see bid up, and if there is a concern for the losers I would not call the issue a procedural one but rather one of outcomes.  And pollution can be a moral crime but attacking trade is not usually a good way to go after it.  Tax the pollution, not the trade.

Sentences of Great Sadness

Andrew Olmsted, a blogger who posted at Obsidian Wings as G'Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq.  He gave one of his co-bloggers a final post in the event of his death.  It's very painful to read and also funny and sad.  Here is one of the few sections that I can bear to post.

Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven't agreed with them. If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them.

Where do our beliefs come from?

We all like to think that our beliefs come from rational thinking, deep experience and good judgment.  But suppose that you had to predict someone else's beliefs, let's say their beliefs about taxes, welfare, regulation....economic policy of all kind.  Let's put some money on it, the better your predictions the more money you make. 

I will give you one piece of information to improve your predictions.  Either I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is an economist or a biologist or I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is American or French.  Which piece of information do you want?

What does this say about where beliefs come from?

Addendum: Suppose I asked you instead to predict the types of arguments that the person will use to justify their beliefs.  Now which piece of information do you want?  What is the role of education in determining beliefs?

Laissez-Faire Marriage

Should the state be involved in marriage?  Writing in the NYTimes professor of history Stephanie Coontz notes:

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

By the 1920s, 38 states prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese, Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a “mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after divorce.

It's no accident that the state began restricting and intervening in the marriage contract at the same time as it was restricting and intervening in economic contracts.  It was of course the evil Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who dissented in Lochner v. New York and who also upheld forced sterilization laws in Buck v. Bell (writing that "three generations of imbeciles in enough.")  Economists don't like to talk about social externalities but the connection between economic and social regulation is very clear in the progressives.

I think it's time to restore freedom of contract to marriage.  Why should two men, for example, be denied the same rights to contract as are allowed to a man and a woman?  Far from ending civilization the extension of the bourgeoisie concept of contract ever further is the epitome of civilization.  Our modern concept of marriage, for example, is simply one instantiation of the idea of contract.

People will claim that this means a chaos of contracts for every form of marriage.  This is wrong factually and also conceptually misguided.  Factually, we already allow men and women to adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials.  Moreover, different states offer different marriage contracts with some offering more than one type.  Partnerships of other kinds have access to all manner of contractual arrangements without insufferable problems. 

More importantly, the chaos of contracts argument is fundamentally misguided.  The purpose of contract law is to give individual's greater control over their lives.  To make contract law a restraint on how people may govern themselves is a perversion of the social contract.  To restrict people from accessing the tools of civilization on the basis of their sexual preference is baseless discrimination. 

It is time to restore freedom of contract to marriage,  Laissez-faire for all capitalist acts between consenting adults!

Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer.

A dialog

T.: I love you.

N.: Which number is that?

Bryan Caplan peers into my heart

And I believe he doesn't like what he sees:

Who wouldn't want to see Tyler Cowen publicly debate Robin Hanson? Well, aside from the masses? I think they'd both be willing, if they could only pinpoint a good topic. A while back they had an extended blog dialogue (see here, here, and here); can you extract a resolution from it?

Personally, the bottom line of Tyler's latest post reminds me of a debate topic that someone suggested after a recent seminar: "Few major changes in the policies of modern democracies are desirable." Depending on when you ask him, Tyler might deny that he believes this, but in his heart, he does. And no matter when you ask Robin, he'll be ready to argue the contrary.

Other topic suggestions?  If Tyler and Robin wind up using your novel suggestion, lunch is on me.

Here is the link.

When to say "I love you"

No, this question applies not at the beginning of the relationship, but after a few years or more.  Sure, you love the person but this is economics and we think at the margin.  Why did you say "I love you" right now rather than two minutes ago?  I can think of a few reasons:

1. Anxiousness and a desire to reassure oneself in the face of self-doubt.

2. Irritation at the other person, leading to #1.

3. Desire to manipulate the other person by first making him or her feel compliant and secure.

4. Being overcome by suddenly stronger feelings of love, perhaps because of a Proustian reminder.

5. The simple feeling that too long has passed since having said "I love you," presumably combined with the belief that the words are uttered rarely enough to still have potency.  You need to signal you are keeping track of such things.

6. The sex was either very good or very bad, see #1 and #4.

7. One has work or chores to do, and is hoping to create a distraction of some kind.

8. To announce that a conversation is over.

Natasha asks whether in a marriage one hears "I love you" more or fewer times than is optimal.  We both think "fewer" is usually the answer, although given the low cost of generating the message, and the possibility of reaping gains from trade, it is not entirely clear why this equilibrium persists.

Repugnance is Repugnant

Many people find the idea of selling human organs for transplant to be repugnant which is why Roth argues that we should focus more on improving efficiency through kidney swaps.  I'm all in favor of swaps and have also suggested that one argument in favor of no-give, no-take rules is that they are ethically acceptable to more people than organ sales.

Nevertheless, I think Roth assumes too quickly that repugnance is a constraint to be respected rather than an outrage to be denounced and quashed.  People's repugnance at inter-racial dating or homosexual sex is no reason to prevent free exchange - the same is true for organ donations.  Repugnance itself can be repugnant.

Is it not repugnant that some people are willing to let others die so that their stomachs won't become queasy at the thought that someone, somewhere is selling a kidney?

What people think repugnant can change rather quickly with changes in the status-quo.  Adam Smith said that in his time there were "some very agreeable and beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration; but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution."  What were these talents that people in Smith's time thought akin to prostitution?  Acting, opera singing and dancing.  How primitive, how peculiar.

In the not to distance future I think people will look back on the present and think us primitive and peculiar.  Letting thousands of people die while organs that could have saved their lives were buried and burned.  So much unnecessary pain; all for fear of a little exchange.  How primitive, how peculiar.  How repugnant.

Speaking to the Swiss

A group of Swiss businessmen will hear first Pascal Lamy on economic globalization and then me on cultural globalization.  I must keep in mind the fundamental principles of speaking to the Swiss.  Unlike virtually all American audiences, the listeners do not expect to be entertained.  Efforts to entertain will insult some of them.  I need not reach my main point until the end of the talk.  Taxonomy for its own sake is not detested, but PowerPoint is viewed with suspicion.

Ethnic food here is improving rapidly, but a simple daal with bread and rice can cost $20; the lovely scenery isn't the only reason immigrants wish to get in. 

Ed Glaeser

Why I write.

Worst-Case Scenarios

That's the new book by Cass Sunstein, and yes it works through how choice theory should approach disasters and irreversible events.  It is the most accessible presentation of this material to date and it is recommended to anyone who follows issues of global warming, pandemics, asteroid impacts, and the like. 

The concluding chapter opens with the old quotation:

"If you make a plan, God laughs.  If you make two plans, God smiles."

When it comes to this book, the worst case scenario is that you are out $24.95, you despair at mankind's ability to actually address these problems, and you come away enlightened.  I would have wished for more material on public choice issues -- how good a job can governments do with these problems? -- but the more salient point is just how much Sunstein does cover.

The virtues of inegalitarian American philanthropy

This fascinating article raises the question of whether charity is worthwhile and how charity -- "imposing" the desires of the rich on social priorities and wealth redistribution -- fits a theory of social justice.  In particular, why should the charity of the wealthy receive such significant tax breaks or even be seen as morally legitimate?  Henry Farrell adds much more.

I am a fan of the tax break for American philanthropy for several reasons:

1. Organized religion is the biggest beneficiary.  Religious organizations help poor people, help shape a unique and vital American ethos, and encourage people to have more children.  The demographic effects alone probably makes this self-financing. ($40 billion in foregone revenue is one estimate.)

2. The arts receive about five percent of U.S. charitable donations.  I am more than willing to stomach this degree of anti-egalitarianism in the non-profit subsidy, and yes we do get more beauty for it.  Furthermore the alternative of more direct government arts funding would not work out well in the relatively Puritan United States, even if you think it has worked well in Europe.

3. Philanthropy for higher education is a major reason for American strength.  Note that American higher education a) benefits the entire world, and b) is a major reason why we are richer than Western Europe (wasn't there a recent NBER paper on measuring this effect?)  The tax break is a politically acceptable way to subsidize elite intellectual activities -- which benefit virtually everyone -- yet without having government control those activities.

4. Allowing and encouraging people to give away their money causes them to work harder.  Demonstration effects spread the power of this subsidy by creating social networks which favor philanthropy.

5. The general proliferation of non-profit institutions makes America a much more innovative and diverse place, intellectually and otherwise.

6. Relying so much on private philanthropy chips away at the dangerous attitude that there are clearly defined social priorities to which everyone must pay the same heed.

But do read the NYT article and Henry's post for very different perspectives.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the NYT pointer.

The best sentence I read today

First, your model of the individual is very likely based on you.

You'll find lots of contrarianism (for libertarians, that is, and note we should always be polite to contrarians) here and here.  I also enjoyed this bit:

This is the other thing I don't get about small government types. You protest so vociferously that government takes choices away from you. But a whole lot of choices are BORING. If I never once think about car bumper safety standards for 25mph crashes, I will never miss it. I do not want to carefully match my car safety standards to my most likely driving patterns and save two grand in the process. I would not enjoy that process. (Perhaps you would, and you would rather have the money.) I've never been a comparison shopper or a meticulous consumer. Maybe my model of the individual is too biased by my experience. But I don't want to figure out how much coliform bacteria I can tolerate on my spinach, given my health...

...*I can hear you already: "But you are FORCING me to take that deal too.". Yes. But right now our system FORCES me to comparison shop. Either way, someone gets FORCED to do something, and I don't see a justice interest on one side or the other. Absent a justice interest, we might as well just go with the system that creates the most utility overall.

Stop whining

OK, people, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy.  I'm fed up!  No more moderation, no more namby-pamby conciliations to those I disagree with, at least not today.  I am plain, hopping mad.  And who has pushed me over the edge?...

iPhone early adopters.  (I'm one of them, though a virtuous one.)  You may have heard, they just cut the price on iPhones.  Get this:

“I just felt so used as a consumer,” he said. “They hyped up the iPhone for six months and built up our expectations, and then they grabbed our extra $200 and ran.”

Here is another guy:

“I feel totally screwed,” wrote one iPhone owner on the Unofficial Apple Weblog site. “My love affair with Apple is officially over.”

It is you people, you who resent Coase (1972), you people who induce wage and price stickiness and widen the Okun gap.  You people, who don't know what it means to sit back and enjoy your consumer surplus.  You beasts! 

And to think you are all carrying around these wonderful icons of modernity in your pockets...

AAARRRGGGHH!

(I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.  Please note this post was published from my iPhone.)

Scary thoughts

When we look at ourselves in the mirror, in any given session we tend to anchor on the time slice image that makes us look our best. That, we decide, is the "real" us.

Photographs, however, are a random sample of the various arrangements of light, angle, and facial expression that we can be found in. The median photograph of you is probably the best approximation of your physical attractiveness. But that wars with your self image, which is anchored on other, better combinations.

You're also biased by the fact that no one ever tells you you're ugly. It's not merely that people inflate what they tell you (they almost certainly do); it's also that people who think you're ugly tend to drop out of the sample. They may not cultivate an acquaintance with you, and those that do will probably not spontaneously let you know that they find you kind of repulsive.

You're stuck in a web of congitive biases and a positive feedback loop.  It's a wonder anyone does get married.

Here is the link.  This next part made me feel much, much better, though I can't quite agree:

...the best gauge of how attractive you are; how attractive are the hottest people who want to go out with you? They're probably only slightly more attractive than you are.

The final deflation then comes:

If you're married, of course, this is not useful.

Robin Hanson crushes the Doomsday Argument

Robin writes:

It is interesting that doomsday argument proponents seem to challenge our usual way of doing inference, by preferring an extended state space where we explicitly model the idea that "I could have been you." However, if we try to do this in a physics-oriented way, avoiding describing states directly in abstract features of interest to humans but not the universe, we get seem to get the same chance of doom as if we hadn't extended states at all. Humanity may in fact face doom soon, and we have many reasons to be concerned about this. But I do not think the doomsday argument is one of them.

Here is the full argument.  This piece is not new, but I believe most of you do not know it.  Here is a previous MR post on the Doomsday Argument, also not supportive.

The bottom line: You still have to save for your retirement.

How important is overcoming bias?

Arnold Kling summarizes Robin's argument:

If you have a cause, then other people probably disagree with you (if nothing else, they don't think your cause is as important as you do). When other people disagree with you, they are usually more right than you think they are. So you could be wrong. Before you go and attach yourself to this cause, shouldn't you try to reduce the chances that you are wrong? Ergo, shouldn't you work on trying to overcome bias? Therefore, shouldn't overcoming bias be your number one cause?

Here is Robin's very similar statement.  I believe these views are tautologically true and they simply boil down to saying that any complaint can be expressed as a concern about error of some kind or another.  I cannot disagree with this view, for if I do, I am accusing Robin of being too biased toward eliminating bias, thus reaffirming that bias is in fact the real problem.

I find it more useful to draw an analogy with statistics.  Biased estimators are one problem but not the only problem.  There is also insufficient data, lazy researchers, inefficient estimators, and so on.  Then I don't see why we should be justified in holding a strong preference for overcoming bias, relative to other ends.

When I think of a blog that tries to eliminate or reduce bias, say by considering a wide variety of views and methods, I think of Dan Drezner or Matt Yglesias.  I view Robin's blog as exemplifying bias, and indeed showing that bias can be very useful, especially if embedded in a broader discovery process with checks and balances.  (I would describe Robin's blog as one of the dozen "must reads" out there.)  Robin's blog is one very select group of very smart people, pushing one unpopular, specialized, but very interesting and analytically powerful research method as far as it can go.

If I were allowed to retitle Robin's blog (and I am not), I would call it "Reaping the Fruits of Bias."

Discover Your Inner Economist India

I've been to India twice and both times I have been received with the utmost hospitality and enthusiasm.  I loved the food, the music, the diversity, and the more-than-occasional chaos.  Most of all I loved how the people engaged me so directly, and how every moment was so full of human drama and stories. 

Since India has given me so much, I wish to make a merit-based gift to India in return. 

My new book Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist offers a chapter on how to help other people.  In the book I suggest several principles:

1. Cash is often the best form of aid.

2. Give to those who are not expecting it, and,

3. Don't require the recipients to do anything costly to get the money.

I would like to live by these principles, and I am asking you to help me.

If you want to try a new form of charity, keep reading here, because I am about to send money to people in India, to people who are not expecting it and who will not be asked to do much of anything to get it.

You are about to tell me the names of people I should send money to.  I will then send money.

Simple. 

Here is the plan in more detail:

1. The recipient must live in India and receive the money in India.  I just need enough information to send the money via Western Union.

2. Send your email to DiscoverYourInnerEconomist@gmail.com. Only emails to this address will be considered.  The email must contain the legal name (as documented on ID papers) of a person who will receive the money, his or her state in India, and the city of his or her local Western Union branch.  You can be the person yourself, or you can send the information on behalf of someone you know.

3. With your email, send a one sentence proposal of how the money will help India.  I am keen to send much of the money to poor people, either directly or indirectly, but of course India is not just about poor people.  Proposals of all kinds are eligible, including using the funds to help expand your steel factory, and yes using the money to open a new call center.  But you must not give the money to beggars. 

4. Only one email per person is allowed.

5. By the end of the week I will send $1000 to India, via Western Union.  One person will receive $500, the other recipients will get $100 a piece; I will email the wire numbers to each approved person.

6. Recipients of the money will execute their plans for helping India.

7. If/when Discover Your Inner Economist is published in India, further names will receive transfers.  I will send at least the net, post-tax value of my Indian advance.  (If the sale of foreign rights is a multi-country deal, I'll apportion it by relative sizes of book markets for this kind of title.)

I've thought long and hard about how to keep the funds away from scammers, and here is the best I can do: All responders are eligible, but the selection algorithm will favor early entrants.  In other words, MR readers (and their friends) with connections to India have the best chance to read this post early, respond, and thus receive a transfer. 

So I would like to ask you a favor, especially if you are Indian or have connections with India.  Please make your nomination as promptly as you possibly can.  (It is also OK to forward this link to people you trust for their nominations; please do.)  This will ensure worthy entries toward the beginning of the email directory.  I believe that MR readers and their friends will put the money to good use and I am asking you to help me in this manner.

One final request.  I am asking my readers -- yes that's you -- to also make merit-based donations to India.

You may have noticed that Alex and I have stopped asking for MR donations; we are happy to be prospering.  Would you instead consider sending some money to India?  I already have had several people pledge money off-line.  Remember our MR motto?: "Small steps toward a much better world."

Making your gift is simple.  Just email me at IndiaMerit@gmail.com and ask for names and emails of recipients.  You also can specify whether you want your money to go to the poor or to an Indian business.  You then send the money yourself and email the recipient the Western Union number of your transfer.  You can even send the money on-line.

No, you do not get a tax deduction but your money goes right to the source, with zero overhead and waste.  Have you ever believed that remittances do more good than bureaucratic foreign aid?  I know I have.  I believe we should be experimenting more with zero-overhead giving (see pp.192-6 in my book), and I am asking you to be in on the ground floor of that experiment.

I know that MR has some very wealthy and very generous readers who even make seven-figure donations.  If you are one of these people, would you consider a larger gift of $10,000 or more?  You can distribute the money to as many or as few names as you like.  Just let me know your plan, and how many email addresses I should forward, and the rest is up to you.  I will keep your identity anonymous unless otherwise instructed.  (If you are a potential recipient of money, but want money only from me and don't want your email forwarded to others, just let me know in the email itself.)

Addendum: In the comments section, please offer your ideas to others for how to use or give away the money.  You can do this whether or not you have a connection to India.

The Kissing Game

The Kissing Game

A and B play the intention of kissing each other passionately on the mouth.  If you know that you're not actually going to kiss, then you can commit yourself to that intention completely.

The game is to play the approach to the kiss, and at the last moment, to subtly change your mind; not to retreat, as you would if you wre playing a reversal, but to continue in the same direction as before, and instead of recoiling you let your lips just slide past your partner's lips, as close as possible, without touching.

That is from the quite interesting Why is That So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy, by John Wright.  The book discusses how improv comedy "models" human behavior, and where else will you find a discussion of how the "Principles of Simple Clown" differ from the "Principles of Pathetic Clown"?

Merit-based gifts

Last week I gave Bryan Caplan a gift.  Not being much of an egalitarian, I explained the gift on the grounds that he is extremely meritorious.

What if we generally gave gifts on the basis of sheer personal merit?

Most gifts are for "occasions," such as birthdays and Christmas.  The value of the gift may be correlated with how the giver perceives the merit of the recipient, but rarely is merit the pretext for the gift.  Perhaps a general practice of explicit merit-based gift-giving would create too many perceived slights.  In contrast, when a holiday is the pretext and the value of the gift is (possibly) linked to merit, we can self-deceive and believe that a small-valued gift simply represents a cheap gift-giver, or a friendship of uncertain strength, rather than our own lack of merit.

But every now and then it is important to stand up to social convention and do what is right.  Please give a merit-based gift -- to someone who deserves it -- sometime this month. 

Where do I disagree with Robin Hanson?

This one is long enough and idiosyncratic enough to go under the fold...

A few days Robin wrote in the comments:

As you well know, I am sensitive to the fact that on facts people disagree too easily, and so I try to disagree reluctantly if at all. But this doesn't apply to disagreements about styles or personal values. So I accept that we have different styles and place a differing value on overcoming bias. But if there are factual disagreements central to the position of mine you see yourself rebutting, then I would love to see those stated as clearly as possible. I won't limit your word budget.

For background here is Robin's home page. 

Of a randomly chosen three hundred persons, I am probably closer to Robin's views than anyone else in the group.  It is also common at lunch that he and I gang up together on Bryan and Alex (can you guess on which issues?).  And I'm already on record as citing Robin as one of the most important thinkers of our day; keep that in mind throughout this discussion.  But we have many differences.  Here's a non-exclusive list of my disagreements with Robin:

1. I see the chance of people becoming uploads -- even within centuries -- as less than one percent.  Apart from the technical issues (ever get a flat tire?), I think it is easier to graft greater intelligence and computational abilities onto already-existing biological beings.

2. I don't think that futarchy -- using betting markets to shape government policy -- can succeed on anything but a very partial basis.  I stress the expressive function of democracy, and its ability to maintain public morale and cohesion, rather than the computational abilities of the system to find and implement the best policies.  I would bet against the future of futarchy, or its likelihood of succeeding were it in place.  Robin says "vote on values, bet on beliefs," but I don't think values and beliefs can be so easily separated.

3. Robin is much more attached to the fact-value dichotomy than I am, and he is also more attached to seeing facts and theories, or facts and frameworks, as logically separable.  Robin therefore believes all meaningful claims can be stated very precisely in terms of basic facts.  This is his logical atomism.  Reread the comment from Robin at the top.  He suggests that our most important differences are simply those of "style," as though he might like frilly hats and I might carry a purse.

4. I see "overcoming laziness" or "overcoming fear" or even "overcoming inadequate love of Sichuan chili peppers" as often a more important problem than "overcoming bias."  Bias is one fault of many, and I believe Robin's dislike of bias is indeed biased, more aesthetic than pragmatic.  Robin seems to admit this (above), but he is mentally downgrading this as a mere difference in tastes.  In reality the difference reflects our very distinct analytical engines; mine is more pluralistic.

5. Robin wrote: "If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100."  [In fairness to Robin he only seems to assign this sentence a truth probability of 5/14, under one reading of his presentation.]  I assign this a "p" of under one in ten thousand, basically for the reasons that a stupid person would give.

6. Robin thinks we could privatize all law; I don't.  I believe some public goods require government provision and I think libertarian anarchy would devolve into either chaos or oppressive mafias.

7. Robin believes in the "many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics."  I don't reject the possibility but I'll accept the estimate of the professional community of the relevant experts and not raise my "p" or betting odds any higher than that.

Robin frequently and correctly asks disagreeing others to boil down disagreements to their fundamentals.  I would describe this difference as possible:

"Robin is very fond on powerful theories which invoke a very small number of basic elements and give those elements great force.  He likes to focus on one very central mechanism in seeking an explanation or developing policy advice.  Modern physics and Darwin hold too strong a sway in his underlying mental models.  He is also very fond of hypotheses involving the idea of a great transformation sometime in the future, and these transformations are often driven by the mechanism he has in mind.  I tend to see good social science explanations or proposals as intrinsically messy and complex and involving many different perspectives, not all of which can be reduced to a single common framework.  I know that many of my claims sound vague to Robin's logical atomism, but I believe that, given our current state of knowledge, Robin is seeking a false precision and he is sometimes missing out on an important multiplicity of perspectives.  Many of his views should be more cautious."

8. I believe Robin does not agree that is the main difference between us.

Addendum: Here is Robin's response.

Gratitude tips

These are from the new and noteworthy Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, by Robert Emmons:

1. Keep a Gratitude Journal

2. Remember the Bad

3. Ask Yourself Three Questions (What have I received from...?, What have I given to...?, and What troubles and difficulty have I caused ...?

4. Learn prayers of gratitude

5. Come to your senses

6. Use visual reminders

7. Make a vow to practice gratitude

8. Watch your language

9. Go through the motions [of showing gratitude, thanking, smiling, etc.]

10. Think outside the box [TC: this one should have been left out]

I didn't learn anything from this book, but in terms of both truth and importance it is one of the most significant books you can find.  Ever.  Provided you live enough above subsistence, gratitude is the single most important key to personal happiness.  And how commercial society affects gratitude is one of the great underexplored questions of economic science and sociology.

Article about me

How else can one title such a post?  Here it is, from New York magazine.  Excerpt:

Among this new crowd of economists, Cowen, a 45-year-old professor at George Mason University just outside D.C., is a cult hero, insofar as he co-runs an influential blog called marginalrevolution.com. You don’t need to be an economist to enjoy it. There are only a handful of posts a day, but the range of ideas is awe-inspiring. Cowen weighs in on everything from “wage compression”—when bosses give raises at a rate below productivity gains—to household pets, arguing that “if you must support the life of either a cat or a dog, choose the undervalued cat.” (Dogs’ friendly disposition increases the odds of their being well-cared for by other people, while the natural diffidence of cats makes them more susceptible to neglect).

Here is their selection from the series "My Favorite Things"...

Is it bad to become like your parents?

A loyal reader (and buyer) asks:

I love my mother to death. But the prospect of me ultimately turning into her also scares me to death. Frankly, I do not think she would like it either. What should I do? Please don't say "do nothing" because, I have thought that one through, and the model of my mother is so vivid that if I do nothing, I will ultimately turn into her. Please also do not recommend "try to die soon so you will never catch up with her." That would be a social welfare negative solution because neither she nor I would like it. What should I do, assuming I cannot really change her? Thank you very much in advance.

An answer as brutal as mine can only go beneath the fold...

Ask your mother what she did to avoid turning into her mother!

Who, after all, has faced a more similar problem?  Of course do exactly what she says.

Alternatively, probably you are already like your mother.  Almost certainly you are very much like some time-slice version of your mother. 

How would the younger version of your mother have felt about how she turned out, if that younger version could look ahead in time and see her 2007 self?  Your words suggest "not so happy," when you write "the prospect of me ultimately turning into her also scares me to death. Frankly, I do not think she would like it either."

So deviate from her, and deviate from how she would have felt at your age.

In other words, embrace turning into your mother.

Seriously.

Taxation and fairness

1. What Greg Mankiw said

2. What Lew Frankfort said: "I don’t think it is unreasonable...for the C.E.O. of a company to realize 3 to 5 percent of the wealth accumulation that shareholders realize.”

Background: "Mr. Frankfort, the 61-year-old Coach chief, took home $44.4 million last year. His net worth is in the high nine figures. Yet his pay and net worth, he notes, are small compared with the gain to shareholders since Coach went public six years ago, with Mr. Frankfort at the helm. The market capitalization, the value of all the shares, is nearly $18 billion, up from an initial $700 million."

3. What Matt Yglesias said: "The economy grew at a perfectly rapid clip in a broad-based manner in the 1950s and 60s."

4. What L. Ron Hubbard said: "...one of the greatest single moves which could be made to advance and vitalize a culture such as America would be to free, completely, the artist from all taxes and similar oppressions."

5. What Tyler said: "If you believe in the integrity of personal identity over time, the greatest unfairness is when people die young.  Let's start by taxing the lucky old.  If you believe in the time-slice view of identity, the very old have a rough time of it.  Let's start by taxing hipsters."   

Why?

****ing libertarians. I swear to God, you guys act the same every single time. EVERY time I post something about a societal trade off, you instantly, passionately and irrevocably identify yourself with one and only one side. Why? WHY? WHY do you do that? I thought this one might be harder for you. I mean, two picturesque resource extractors. I thought the salmon fishers might get some love from you. Two years they lost their entire livelihood and way of life! But no. Instead you write with a fanatic dedication to the potential costs to the farmers! Why?! What did you choose on? Seriously, it was "rippling back muscles of the fisher as he winches his nets out of the sea, man on his boat against the elements" versus "his thigh muscles flexing, the grower squats to take a handful of soil, surveying the new growth on his alfalfa before whistling for his dog". How the hell did you choose?

That is from Megan Very-Non-McArdle, and there are some related posts at the blog; commentary is here.  The asterisks are from me.

These days, if a TV show is going to draw me in as a viewer, it has to be really, really good.

What it is like to be a baby

I found these claims intriguing, but memory did not provide a test:

Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults.  Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of what they attend to than of what they disregard...

Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults' and have a general neurochemistry similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention.  Babies learn more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention.  Gopnik suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic -- baby-like -- while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.

So what is it like to be a baby?  According to Gopnik, it's something like attending to everything at once:  There's much less of the reflexive and ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert.  She suggests that the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very different cultures, where everything is new.

In my view, some people have a better sense (a much better sense) of what it is like to be a baby than others...

Claims that intelligent left-wing bloggers couldn't possibly agree with

We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life.  We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck.  Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation.  But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited.  The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary.  Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history.  We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can.

That's me, quoting me; I pulled the material from the inner guts of Typepad software.

Richard Rorty dies

Here is one account, not many obits are up yet.  Rorty was important for economists for a few reasons...

1. He emphasized that there is no unique way to translate the results of a model into an interpretation of the real world.  This is trivial for those who know it, but not everyone does. 

That means when DSquared writes: "[The case for free trade] can't be derived in an economy with a positive rate of profit; Ian Steedman proved this one in a series of papers discussed on Rob Vienneau's blog" the correct response is one never thought it could be derived in the first place.

See Rorty's readable Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; to some this is warmed-over Quine mixed with Continental gobbledy-gook but you can think that and still value the book.  This book (only $200!) has a wonderful essay on the importance of Rorty for economists and economic method.

2. Rorty stressed the importance of knowing fiction and the humanities for the social sciences or policy assessment.

3. Rorty wanted to erect "avoidance of cruelty" as a starting point for thinking about the liberal order.  I don't think this quite works but it does represent a major and important challenge to the economic way of thinking and indeed to the entire classical liberal tradition. 

Unlike many modern liberals I take "the inevitability of death, probably painful" to be one of the starting points for political thought.  That being the case, cruelties are looming all the time and we need to pick and choose our noble actions.  I have mixed feelings about the "letting happen/causing" distinction and I place greater weight on ensuring the peaks of human existence.  Rorty's view, consistently applied, would turn the entire planet over to the (other) animals.  I am not comfortable when I hear the phrase "optimal amount of cruelty" but I don't wish to ignore those issues either.

Check out these comments.

The bottom line: Rorty is easy to criticize, but he remains one of more important contemporary thinkers to read.

Near Death Experiences and State-Space Consistency

Tyler (and Ryan) ask, Should near death experiences change your life?  The answer is no.  The reason, however, may surprise you.  It's not because NDEs are unimportant it's because they are very important.

Recall that a rational choice-plan is time-consistent, you should not plan today to make choices for tomorrow when you know today that you will renege upon those choices tomorrow.  Eating cake today because you will diet tomorrow is not a rational choice if you will not in fact diet tomorrow.  Time-consistency does not require that you always follow through on today's plans - new information arrives which may cause you to rationally change your plans - but it does require that you expect to follow through on today's plans which means that if no new information arrives then you should follow through.

The same idea explains why if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE.  NDEs are not new information.  You know that you are mortal, right?  You know that you could die today.  You know that experiences like Ryan's are not uncommon.  Thus, if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE.

Do I advise, therefore, that Ryan get on with his life as before?  No, not at all.  My advice is not for Ryan, it's for everyone else; Choosing rationally requires that you choose today so that if you have an NDE you will not change your life. 

The fact that many people who have an NDE do change their lives is evidence that most people do not choose rationally.  Thus the ways in which people who have had NDEs change their lives is important information for the rest of us who want to choose rationally.

Do you recall the secret to happiness offered by Gilbert, the one you almost certainly will not accept?  It is to accept that your own anticipations of what you will do and feel if certain things occur is not as good a guide to what you will actually do and feel as are the actions and feelings of other people who actually have experienced those events.  Thus, if near death experiences tend to make people more giving, caring and less fearful of change then this is how you should act today.

Long-time readers will know that I take the idea of reflective equilibrium quite seriously.

Should near death experiences change your life?

Ryan, a loyal MR reader, asks for good reason:

Three days ago I rolled my car three times on a back country road at least 40 minutes away from the nearest ambulance.  The car was crushed to a considerable degree except for the part I occupied, but I walked away without a scratch.  My question is, what implications should this have for my life?  People around me expect me to act differently, and I do feel more reflective.  But aside from needing a new car, and knowing to drive more carefully on gravel roads in the future, nothing else has actually changed.  Is it reasonable for me to begin introspection, or should I hold to my previous plans and priorities absent new information?

I have no real data and only a few intuitions.  I say use the experience to rationalize a change you wanted to make anyway.  Most people have less than perfect courage or willpower, but a near-death experience can provide a pro-change focal point in a multiple-selves game.  Alternatively the trauma of the tragedy can disrupt the previous mindset and thus weaken the hold of status quo bias.  Or the vividness of a shorter time horizon moves the multiple selves to a "trembling hand" solution concept, in which life pursuits are more robust to the probability of an early death.

This account, based on interviews with survivors, suggests that near-death experiences are "beautiful" and make people unafraid of death and more giving and more caring.  Don't forget the tunnel and the bright white light, etc. 

In part these people are responding to social expectations; would hunter-gatherers offer the same reports?  In part these people may have been fooled by the endorphins which accompany many near-death experiences.   

I suspect a very small minority of people use near-death experiences to become more selfish, backed of course by self-deception.  (Can we measure charitable contributions before and after?)  In these cases the talk about the beautiful white light is in reality a claim that the victim is beautiful (by affiliation?) and thus deserves to be treated better.  The reported change seems hard for others to criticize or deflect ("life is beautiful and hey, I almost DIED!"), but the actual demand is for more of the social surplus.  The victim need only report that the new selfish changes are part of one large intertwined bundle of life reevaluation...

The bottom line?: In predictive terms, I would expect that near-death experiences make good people better and bad people worse.

Addendum: See Ryan's remarks in the comments.

How to improve your attitude about money

Here is an excerpted Q&A with British celebrity Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but the moral lesson comes from reading the entire dialogue...

Do you have any credit cards?

I don’t have a debit card because my accountants worry too much about the amount of money I would withdraw, but I do have a Royal Bank of Scotland Mastercard. I’ve had only one credit card for the past 10 years, mainly to keep track of my spending.

I got my fingers really burnt once with an Amex black card. I was about 24, and for some reason I stopped taking taxis and just used helicopters whenever I could. I paid for such things using the Amex, but I didn’t realise that you had to pay off the balance every month. I was incurring huge amounts of interest – I had bills of about £47,000 for a couple of months.

It wasn’t my fault, though. I was told I could use the card to buy anything, from a window to an elephant, so I did. I wasn’t in very good shape at that age. I got into a lot of debt and eventually ended up in rehab aged about 27...

Are you a saver or a spender?

Spender definitely – I’m Spenderella. I’ll buy almost anything. I love art, especially contemporary art. I recently bought a Federico Herrera, which cost about £10,000. I also bought a baby grand piano about a year or so ago, which I play for a couple of hours every day. It cost just over £10,000. It was a nightmare getting it into the house – we eventually found a 100ft crane to do it. I remember people saying they could see a Steinway in the air.

To run my house also costs a bomb. I have about seven people working for me today – decorators, gardeners and cleaners – and about 15 staff in total. When I was in the Fame Academy house earlier this year, I spent a good £35,000 redecorating and repairing my own home...

Do you invest in shares?

I have lots but I don’t have a clue about them. My accountants and Kleinwort Benson, my investment bank, deal with my money but I’m not sure who does what. I think most of my investments are in safe funds though. I can’t say exactly how much I’ve invested but it’s probably a few million.

Do you have a pension or other retirement plan?

I’ve got no idea, but I don’t worry about it really – I’m told it’s all been mapped out.

Do you believe pensions are a good thing?

I hate the word pension. It just annoys me because my philosophy is to live fast and die young...

What aspect of our taxation system would you change?

I don’t like paying 40%. I’d get rid of that. I’d also get rid of parking and congestion charges – in fact, I’d get rid of Ken Livingstone altogether. I’d put him in a lovely health farm somewhere...

What is your financial priority?

To maintain my lifestyle and my health. I want an easy life so my lifestyle expenditure is huge. It includes a concierge service which keeps my life going smoothly. I also have someone come in to reorganise my wardrobe every two months – that costs £600.

I want things to run well and without any stress – a typical capricorn. I deeply believe in a certain order in the universe. I have a moon map and my dad bought me a telescope for my last birthday.

Do you have a money weakness?

Clothes, handbags and shoes. I have hundreds of them. My favourite handbag is a new limited edition Union Jack Chanel handbag, which cost £16,000. The other designer I’m fond of is Azzedine Alaia, who is good for elegant simple clothes. I always buy a few pieces of the collection when they come out. Six pieces could easily cost about £15,000. The clothes last a lifetime, though.

Now here is the clincher:

What is the most important lesson you have learnt about money?

Losing my money was perhaps the best thing that happened to me. It taught me to respect it. Just as Santa Claus isn’t real, I always thought money grew on trees – it doesn’t.

What Danny Glover and I have in common

In a kind of a weird back-door way, I also support Hugo Chavez. Or put another way, and going a little Hegelian, as Tyler likes to say, I think Chavez is an historical necessity, and a richly deserved one at that.

Venezuela has relatively high levels of income inequality (a gini coefficient in 2000 of around .44 compared to .36 for the US according to the UN) from a relatively low base and was run by a corrupt elite class who swallowed up oil wealth while the economic standing of the country plummeted. In 1957, Venezuela's GDP per capita was 51% of the US, in 2003 it stood at 18.5% of the US.  Existing institutions had no credibility with a very large portion of the population and simply could not continue to exist as they had.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm NOT endorsing Hugo. Do I think that Chavez and his policies are going to serve the long term economic interests of Venezuela? NO. Do I think Chavez is a charming guy? NO. Would I be sad if Chavez lost power? NO. If George Bush and Chavez were in a burning building and I could only save one would it be Chavez? NO.

I am just saying that Venezuela was run into the ground by its ruling class and Chavez is the (I hope only temporary) result of their short sighted, poor governance.

A similar analysis applies to Evo Morales. Bolivia has even higher income inequality (year 2000 gini of .60) from an even lower base, and has fallen even more precipitously in economic standing relative to the US, From 25% of US per-capita GDP in 1951 to 8.7% in 2003. That is just a disaster. The ruling elite of Bolivia had Evo Morales coming and I hope he gives it to them but good.

I am not sure whether this type of path is inevitable in Latin America. Lula was a populist firebrand but has gover