Ur may not have been the first city, but it was the first one we know of that wasn’t part of a false dawn—one whose culture and technologies did demonstrably spread to other areas. It was the flashpoint.
A contrary view — and I’m stating this deliberately rather strongly to make the point vivid:
“False dawn” is a retrospective view; which is to say an anachronistic one; which is to say a mythical one. And myths are written by the victors.
It’s true that we perceive more continuity from Ur to today’s civilization than from Xyz (some other ancient “dawn of civilization” point) to today. But why? Surely in part because the Sumerians and their Akkadian and Babylonian successors were good at scattering their enemies, killing their scribes, destroying their records, and stealing credit for their innovations. Just as each new civilization claimed that their god had created the world and invented morality, each claimed that their clever forefather had invented agriculture, writing, and tactics. If the Xyzzites had won, they would have done the same.
What’s the evidence? Just that that’s how civilizations — particularly religious empires — have generally behaved since then. The Hebrews, Catholics, and Muslims, for instance, were all at one time or another pretty big on wiping out their rivals’ history and making them out to be barbaric, demonic, subhuman assholes — when they weren’t just mass-murdering them. So our prior for the behavior of the Sumerians should be that they were unremarkable in this regard; they did the same wiping-out of rivals’ records that the conquistadors and the Taliban did.
Today we have anti-censorship memes; the idea that anyone who would burn books is a villain and an enemy of everyone. But we also have the idea that mass censorship and extirpation of history is “Orwellian” — as if it had been invented in the ’40s! This is backwards; it’s anti-censorship that is the new, weird idea. Censorship is the normal behavior of normal rulers and normal priests throughout normal history.
Damnatio memoriae, censorship, burning the libraries (of Alexandria or the Yucatán), forcible conversion & assimilation — or just mass murder — are effective ways to make the other guy’s civilization into a “false dawn”. Since civilizations prior to widespread literacy (and many after it) routinely destroyed the records and lore of their rivals; we should expect that the first X that we have records of is quite certainly not the first X that existed, especially if its lore makes a big deal of claiming that it is.
Put another way — quite a lot of history is really a species of creationism, misrepresenting a selective process as a creative one. So we should not look to “the first city” for unique founding properties of civilization, since it wasn’t the first and didn’t have any; it was just the conquering power that happened to end up on top.
However, while it would be quite possible for a victor to erase written mention of a rival, it is harder to erase beyond all archaeological recovery the signs of a major city that’s been stable and populated for a thousand years or more. For instance, if we look at Jericho, which was inhabited earlier than Ur was, we don’t see archaeological evidence of it becoming a major city until much later than Ur (see link and link).
If there was a city large enough and long lived enough, around before Ur, that passed onto Ur the bundle of things like writing and hierarchy that we known Ur passed onto others, then I’m unaware of it, and the evidence has been surprisingly thoroughly erased (which isn’t impossible, but neither is it a certainty that such a thing happened).
See also the comment about Uruk. There were a number of cities in Sumer close together that would have swapped ideas. But the things said about calories and types of grain apply to all of them.
It’s not entirely clear. Wikipedia lists four possible causes of or contributors to the Library of Alexandria’s destruction; all were connected to changes in government or religion, but only two (one connected to Christian sources, the other to Muslim) appear deliberate. Both of them seem somewhat dubious, though.
The destruction of Central American literature is a more straightforward case. Bishop Diego de Landa certainly ordered the destruction of Mayan codices where found, which only a few survived.
Wikipedia lists four possible causes of or contributors to the Library of Alexandria’s destruction; all were connected to changes in government or religion, but only two (one connected to Christian sources, the other to Muslim) appear deliberate.
The Library also wasn’t one building; and had some time to recover between one attack and the next. (As an analogy: Burning down some, or even most, of the buildings of a modern university wouldn’t necessarily lead to the institution closing up shop.)
I’d been thinking of the 391 CE one, though, which I’d thought was widely understood to be an attack against pagan sites of learning. Updating in progress.
The destruction of Central American literature is a more straightforward case.
It’s worth noting that there were people on the Spanish “team” who regretted that decision and spoke out against it, most famously Bartolomé de las Casas.
A consequentialist would ask, with an open mind, whether burning the libraries lead to good or bad consequences. A virtue ethicist would express disgust at the profanity of burning books. Your comment closely resembles the latter, whereas most discussion here on other topics tries to approximate the former.
I think it is no coincidence that this switch occurs in this context. Oh no, some dusty old tomes got destroyed! Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human “utility.” But burning books lowers the status of academics, which is why it is considered (in Haidt-ian terms) a taboo by some—including, I would suggest, most on this site.
I think it is no coincidence that this switch occurs in this context. Oh no, some dusty old tomes got destroyed! Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human “utility.” But burning books lowers the status of academics, which is why it is considered (in Haidt-ian terms) a taboo by some—including, I would suggest, most on this site.
We have good reason to think that the missing volumes of Diophantus were at Alexandria. Much of what Diophantus did was centuries before his time. If people in the 1500s and 1600s had complete access to his and other Greek mathematicians’ work, math would have likely progressed at a much faster pace, especially in number theory.
We also have reason to think that Alexandria contained the now lost Greek astronomical records, which likely contained comets and possibly also historical nova observations. While we have some nova and supernova observations from slightly later (primarily thanks to Chinese and Japanese records), the Greeks were doing astronomy well before. This sort of thing isn’t just an idle curiosity: understanding the timing of supernova connects to understanding the most basic aspects of our universe. The chemical elements necessary for life are created and spread by supernova. Understanding the exact ratios, how common supernova are, and understanding more how supernova spread out, among other issues, are all important to understanding very important questions like how common life is, which is directly relevant to the Great Filter. We do have a lot of supernova observations in the last few years but historical examples are few and far between.
Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human “utility.”
On the contrary. Kill a few people or make them suffer and it has little direct impact beyond a few years in the future. Destroying knowledge has an impact that resonates down for far longer.
But burning books lowers the status of academics, which is why it is considered (in Haidt-ian terms) a taboo by some—including, I would suggest, most on this site.
This is an interesting argument, and I find it unfortunate that you’ve been downvoted. The hypothesis is certainly interesting. But it may also be taboo for another reason: in many historical cases, book burning has been a precursor to killing people. This is a cliche, but it is a cliche that happens to have historical examples before it. Another consideration is that a high status of academics is arguably quite a good thing from a consequentialist perspective. People like Norman Borlaug, Louis Pasteur, and Alvin Roth have done more lasting good for humanity than almost anyone else. Academics are the main people who have any chance of having a substantial impact on human utility beyond their own lifespans (the only other groups are people who fund academics or people like Bill Gates who give funding to implement academic discoveries on a large scale). So even if it is purely an issue of status and taboo, there’s a decent argument that those are taboos which are advantageous to humanity.
Number theory might have progressed faster… we might better understand the “Great Filter”
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
In many historical cases, book burning has been a precursor to killing people.
Perhaps, but note that this wasn’t a precursor to killing people; people were being widely killed regardless. But the modern attention is not on the rape, murder, pillage, etc… it’s on the book-burning. Why the distorted values?
a high status of academics is arguably quite a good thing from a consequentialist perspective
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd. You’re right that Bill Gates has made a huge impact – but his lasting good was achieved by selling computer software, not through the mostly foolish experimentation done by his foundation. Sure, some academics have done some good (although you wildly overstate it) but you have to consider the opportunity cost. The high status of academics causes us to get more academic research than otherwise, but it also encourages our best and brightest to waste their lives in the study of arcana. Can anyone seriously doubt that, on the margin, we are oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with entrepreneurs and businessmen generally?
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
Well, no. In modern times number theory has been extremely relevant for cryptography for example, and pretty much all e-commerce relies on it. But other areas of math have direct, useful applications and have turned out to be quite important. For example, engineering in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance benefited a lot from things like trig and logarithms. Improved math has lead to much better understanding of economies and financial systems as well. These are but a few limited examples.
But the modern attention is not on the rape, murder, pillage, etc… it’s on the book-burning
You are missing the point in this context having the taboo against book burning is helpful because it is something one can use as a warning sign.
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd.
So I’m curious as to how you are defining “good” in any useful sense that you can reach this conclusion. Moreover, the sort of thing that Roth does is in the process of being more and more useful. His work allowing for organ donations for example not only saves lives now but will go on saving lives at least until we have cheap cloned organs.
ou’re right that Bill Gates has made a huge impact – but his lasting good was achieved by selling computer software, not through the mostly foolish experimentation done by his foundation.
This is wrong. His work with malaria saves lives. His work with selling computer software involved making mediocre products and making up for that by massive marketing along with anti-trust abuses. There’s an argument to be made that economic productivity can be used as a very rough measure of utility, but that breaks down in a market where advertising, marketing, and network effects of specific product designs matter more than quality of product.
Can anyone seriously doubt that, on the margin, we are oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with entrepreneurs and businessmen generally?
Yes, to the point where I have to wonder how drastically far off our unstated premises about the world are. If anything, it seems like we have the exact opposite problem. We have a massive oversupply of “quants” and the like who aren’t actually producing more utility or even actually working with real market inefficiencies but are instead doing things like moving servers a few feet closer to the exchange so they can shave a fraction of a second off of their transaction times. There may be an “oversupply” of how many academics there are compared to the number of paying positions but that’s simply connected to the fact that most research has results that function as externalities(technically public goods) and thus the lack of academic jobs is a market failure.
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer—no.
You are missing the point in this context having the taboo against book burning is helpful because it is something one can use as a warning sign.
No, I am not missing the point. I am perfectly willing to concede that a taboo against book-burning might be helpful for that reason. But here we have an example where people were,at the same time as burning books, doing the exact worse stuff that book burning is allegedly a warning sign of. But no-one complains about the worse stuff, only the book burning. Which makes me disbelieve that people care about the taboo for that reason.
People say that keeping your lawn tidy keep the area looking well-maintained and so prevents crime. Let’s say one guy in the area has a very messy lawn, and also goes around committing burglaries. Now suppose the Neighbourhood Watch shows no interest at all in the burglaries, but is shocked and appalled by the state of his lawn. We would have to conclude that these people don’t care about crime, what they care about is lawns, and this story about lawns having an effect on crime is just a story they tell people because they can’t justify their weird preference to others on its own terms.
Moreover, the sort of thing that Roth does is in the process of being more and more useful. His work allowing for organ donations for example not only saves lives now but will go on saving lives at least until we have cheap cloned organs.
Or, we could just allow a market for organ donations. Boom, done. Where’s my Nobel?
Now, if you specify that we have to find the best fix while ignoring the obvious free-market solutions I don’t deny that Alvin Roth has done good work. And I’m certainly not blaming Roth personally for the fact that academia exists as an adjunct to the state—although academics generally do bear the lions share of responsibility for that. But I am definitely questioning the value of this enterprise, compared to bringing cheap food, clothes, etc, to hundreds of millions of people like Sam Walton did.
This is wrong. His work with malaria saves lives. His work with selling computer software involved making mediocre products and making up for that by massive marketing along with anti-trust abuses. There’s an argument to be made that economic productivity can be used as a very rough measure of utility, but that breaks down in a market where advertising, marketing, and network effects of specific product designs matter more than quality of product.
I don’t see why “saves lives” is the metric, but I bet that Microsoft products have been involved in saving far more lives. Moreover, people are willing to pay for Microsoft products, despite your baseless claims of their inferiority. Gates’s charities specifically go around doing things that people say they want but don’t bother to do with their own money. I don’t know much about the malaria program, but I do know the educational stuff has mostly been disastrous, and whole planks have been abandoned.
Yes, to the point where I have to wonder how drastically far off our unstated premises about the world are.
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer—no.
Answer: Yes. Even today, number theory research highly relevant to efficient crypto is ongoing. A few years of difference in when that shows up would have large economic consequences. For example, as we speak, research in ongoing into practical fully homomorphic encryption which if it is implemented will allow cloud computing and deep processing of sensitive information, as well as secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information (such as medical records) from clouds. This is but one example.
But no-one complains about the worse stuff, only the book burning. Which makes me disbelieve that people care about the taboo for that reason.
Well, there is always the danger of lost-purpose. But it may help to keep in mind that the book-burnings and genocides in question both occurred a long-time ago. It is easier for something to be at the forefront of one’s mind when one can see more directly how it would have impacted one personally.
Or, we could just allow a market for organ donations. Boom, done. Where’s my Nobel?
So, I’m generally inclined to allow for organ donation markets (although there are I think legitimate concerns about them). But since that’s not going to happen any time soon, I fail to see its relevance. A lot of problems in the world need to be solved given the political constraints that exist. Roth’s solution works in that context. The fact that a politically untenable better solution exists doesn’t make his work less beneficial.
But I am definitely questioning the value of this enterprise, compared to bringing cheap food, clothes, etc, to hundreds of millions of people like Sam Walton did.
So, Derstopa already gave some reasons to doubt this. But it is also worth noting that Walton died in 1992, before much of Walmart’s expansion. Also, there’s a decent argument that Walmart’s success was due not to superior organization but rather a large first-mover advantage (one of the classic ways markets can fail): Walmart takes advantage of its size in ways that small competitors cannot do. This means that smaller chains cannot grow to compete with Walmart in any fashion, so even if a smaller competitor is running something more efficiently, it won’t matter much. (Please take care to note that this is not at all the mom-and-pop-store argument which I suspect you and I would both find extremely unconvincing.)
but I bet that Microsoft products have been involved in saving far more lives
“Involved with” is an extremely weak standard. The thing is that even if Microsoft had never existed, similar products (such as software or hardware from IBM, Apple, Linux, Tandy) would have been in those positions.
Moreover, people are willing to pay for Microsoft products, despite your baseless claims of their inferiority.
Let’s examine why people are willing to do so. It isn’t efficiency. For example, by standard benchmarks, Microsoft browsers have been some of the least efficient (although more recent versions of IE have performed very well by some metrics such as memory use ). Microsoft has had a massive marketing campaign to make people aware of their brand (classically marketing in a low information market is a recipe for market failure). And Microsoft has engaged in bundling of essentially unrelated products. Microsoft has also lobbied governments for contracts to the point where many government bids are phrased in ways that make non-Microsoft options essentially impossible. Most importantly: Microsoft gains a network effect: This occurs when the more common a product is, the more valuable it is compared to other similar products. In this context, once a single OS and set of associated products is common, people don’t want other other products since they will run into both learning-curve with the “new” product and compatibility issues when trying to get the new product to work with the old.
Gates’s charities specifically go around doing things that people say they want but don’t bother to do with their own money.
That some people make noise about wanting to help charity but don’t doesn’t make the people who actually do it as contributing less utility. Or is there some other point here I’m missing?
I don’t know much about the malaria program, but I do know the educational stuff has mostly been disastrous, and whole planks have been abandoned.
Yes, there’s no question that the education work by the Gates foundation has been profoundly unsuccessful. But the general consensus concerning malaria is that they’ve done a lot of good work. This may be something you may want to look into.
Answer: Yes. Even today, number theory research highly relevant to efficient crypto is ongoing...
Yes, but number theory only gained practical application relatively recently. Your claim was that if people in the 1500s and 1600s had had access to this number theory, we’d all be better off now. It seems you believe that we’d now have more advanced number theory because of this. But my claim is that this stuff was seen as useless back then, so they would have mostly sat on this knowledge, and number theory now would be about where it is.
A lot of problems in the world need to be solved given the political constraints that exist...
But those “political constraints” are not laws of nature, they are descriptions of current power relations which academics have helped bring about. I’m glad that the economics faculty spend much of their time thinking of ways to fix the problems caused by the sociology faculty, but it would save everyone time and money if they all went home.
Ok. Do you prefer Quality-adjusted life years ?
No. I’d be more impressed with Gates if he gave people cash to satisfy their own revealed preferences, rather than arbitrary metrics. But that wouldn’t look as caring.
“Involved with” is an extremely weak standard. The thing is that even if Microsoft had never existed, similar products (such as software or hardware from IBM, Apple, Linux, Tandy) would have been in those positions.
Yeah, maybe, although presumably it helped on the margin. But if Gates hadn’t set up his foundation, the resources involved would have gone to some use. Why are you only looking at one margin, and not the other?
Let’s examine why people are willing to do so. It isn’t efficiency...
But this notion of “efficiency” that you are using is merely a synonym for what we care about, specifically efficiency to the user. A more convenient UI, for example, is likely orders of magnitude more important than memory usage for efficiency to the user—yet convenience is subjective. Moreover, bundling, marketing, brands and network effects are not examples of market failure. In fact, marketing produces positive externalities. Of course Microsoft has a first-mover advantage over someone trying to make a new OS today, but that’s not an “unfair” advantage.
I’ll grant you that Microsoft has advantages in government contracting that they wouldn’t have in a proper free market, but you should in turn admit that they have also suffered from anti-trust laws.
Gates’s charities specifically go around doing things that people say they want but don’t bother to do with their own money.
That some people make noise about wanting to help charity but don’t doesn’t make the people who actually do it as contributing less utility. Or is there some other point here I’m missing?
I wasn’t talking about potential donors, I was talking about recipients. If you talk a lot about how much you love literature, but in fact you spend all your money on beer, then some so-called philanthropist building you a library is just a waste of everyone’s time.
Yes, but number theory only gained practical application relatively recently. Your claim was that if people in the 1500s and 1600s had had access to this number theory, we’d all be better off now.
Advances in Diophantine number theory in the Renaissance led directly to complex numbers and analytic geometry, which led to calculus and all of physics. If the Library at Alexandria had been preserved, the Industrial Revolution could have happened centuries earlier.
That’s an intriguing causal chain but its length & breadth give me pause. Are there any articles, books, or papers that nicely sum up the evidence for it (and ideally the evidence against it)?
Yes, but number theory only gained practical application relatively recently. Your claim was that if people in the 1500s and 1600s had had access to this number theory, we’d all be better off now. I
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I mentioned number theory initially as an area because it is the one where we most unambiguously lost Greek knowledge. But it seems pretty clear we lost many other areas also, hence why I mentioned trig, where we know that there were multiple treatises on the geometry of triangles and related things which are no longer extant but are referenced in extant works.
I’m not at all convinced incidentally by the argument that people would have just sat on the number theory. Since the late 1700s, the rate of mathematical progress has been rapid. So while direct focus on the areas relevant to cryptography might not have occurred, closely connected areas (which are relevant to crypto) would certainly be more advanced.
I’m glad that the economics faculty spend much of their time thinking of ways to fix the problems caused by the sociology faculty, but it would save everyone time and money if they all went home.
So what evidence do you have that the economists are fixing the problems created by the sociologists in any meaningful sense?
No. I’d be more impressed with Gates if he gave people cash to satisfy their own revealed preferences, rather than arbitrary metrics. But that wouldn’t look as caring.
So that won’t work at multiple levels. A major issue when assisting people in the developing world is coordination problems (there are things that will help a lot but if everyone has a little bit of money they don’t have an easy way to pool the money together in a useful fashion). Moreover, this assumes a degree of knowledge which people simply don’t have. A random African doesn’t know necessarily that bednets are an option, or even have any good understanding of where to get them from. And then one has things like vaccine research. You are essentially assuming that market forces will win do what is best when one is dealing with people who are lacking in basic education and institutions to effectively exercise their will even if they had the education.
Moreover, bundling, marketing, brands and network effects are not examples of market failure.
Huh? All of these can result in total utility going down compared to what might happen if one picked a different market equilibrium. How are these not market failures?
In fact, marketing produces positive externalities.
In limited circumstances, marketing can produce positive utility (people learn about products they didn’t have knowledge of, or they get more data to compare products), but I’m curious to here how marketing is at all likely to produce positive externalities.
I’ll grant you that Microsoft has advantages in government contracting that they wouldn’t have in a proper free market, but you should in turn admit that they have also suffered from anti-trust laws.
Yes, they have and that’s ok. Anti-trust laws help market stability. The prevent the problem we’ve seen in the banking and auto industries of being too big to fail, and prevent the problem of bundling to force products on new markets (which again I’m quite curious to here an explanation for how that isn’t a market failure).
So what evidence do you have that the economists are fixing the problems created by the sociologists in any meaningful sense?
I confess I don’t understand this question. Could you please clarify?
A major issue when assisting people in the developing world is coordination problems… education… institutions...
But these “institutions” are not laws of nature, they aren’t even tangible things—an “institution” is just a description of the way people co-ordinate with each other. So yes, people in developing countries often can’t co-ordinate because they have bad institutions, but it would be equally true to say that they can’t have good institutions because they don’t co-ordinate.
A random African doesn’t know necessarily that bednets are an option, or even have any good understanding of where to get them from.
Actually, I think that a “random African” likely knows a lot more about what would improve his standard of living than you or I, and my mind boggles at any other presumption. If he’d rather spend his money on beer than bednets, but you give him a bednet anyway, then I hope it makes you happy, because you’re clearly not doing it for him.
I’m curious to here how marketing is at all likely to produce positive externalities.
Apart from the reasons you already mentioned, marketing creates a brand which reduces information costs. This is of course particularly important in a low information market. Spending money to promote your brand is a pre-commitment to provide satisfactory quality products.
Huh? All of these can result in total utility going down compared to what might happen if one picked a different market equilibrium. How are these not market failures?
Firstly, no-one can “pick” a market equilibrium. Secondly, order is defined in the process of its emergence. Thirdly, proof of a possibility and a demonstration of a real-world effect are not the same thing.
Microsoft have also suffered from anti-trust laws
Yes, they have and that’s ok… The prevent the problem we’ve seen in the banking and auto industries of being too big to fail
So every time a business gains on account of departures from the free market, that’s a travesty, but every time it loses, that’s the way things are supposed to work. No wonder you think academics are the only ones who do any good. Besides, TBTF isn’t an economic problem, this is a political problem. They had too many lobbyists to be allowed to fail, that’s all.
I’m quite curious to here an explanation for how [bundling] isn’t a market failure
How is it a market failure? It’s possible for bundling to reduce consumer surplus, but that’s just a straight transfer.
So what evidence do you have that the economists are fixing the problems created by the sociologists in any meaningful sense?
I confess I don’t understand this question. Could you please clarify?
You said earlier that:
I’m glad that the economics faculty spend much of their time thinking of ways to fix the problems caused by the sociology faculty, but it would save everyone time and money if they all went home.
My confusion was over this claim in that it seems to assume that a) sociologists are creating societal problems and b) economists are solving those problems.
But these “institutions” are not laws of nature, they aren’t even tangible things—an “institution” is just a description of the way people co-ordinate with each other. So yes, people in developing countries often can’t co-ordinate because they have bad institutions, but it would be equally true to say that they can’t have good institutions because they don’t co-ordinate.
Human behavior is not path independent. Institutions help coordination because prior functioning governments and organizations help people to keep coordinating. Values also come into play: Countries with functioning governments have citizens with more respect for government so they are more likely to cooperate with it an so on.
Apart from the reasons you already mentioned, marketing creates a brand which reduces information costs. This is of course particularly important in a low information market. Spending money to promote your brand is a pre-commitment to provide satisfactory quality products.
This only makes sense in a context where markets are low information and marketing creates actual information and where negative behavior by a brand will have a substantial reduction in sales. In practice, people have strong brand loyalty based on familiarity with logos and the like,. So people will keep buying the same brands not because they are the best but that’s because what they’ve always done. Humans are cognitive misers, and a large part of marketing is hijacking that.
Huh? All of these can result in total utility going down compared to what might happen if one picked a different market equilibrium. How are these not market failures?
Firstly, no-one can “pick” a market equilibrium.
You are missing the point. The point is that there are other stable equilibria that are better off for everyone but issues like networking effects and technological lock-in prevent people from moving off the local maximum.
Secondly, order is defined in the process of its emergence. Thirdly, proof of a possibility and a demonstration of a real-world effect are not the same thing.
What do these two sentences mean?
So every time a business gains on account of departures from the free market, that’s a travesty, but every time it loses, that’s the way things are supposed to work.
I don’t know where you saw a statement that implied that, and I’m curious how you got that sort of idea from what I wrote.
Besides, TBTF isn’t an economic problem, this is a political problem. They had too many lobbyists to be allowed to fail, that’s all.
There’s an argument for that in the case of the car industry, but the economic consensus is that the economy as a whole would have gotten much worse if the banks hadn’t been bailed out.
How is it a market failure? It’s possible for bundling to reduce consumer surplus, but that’s just a straight transfer.
Technological lock-in and network effects again. For example, in the case of Internet Explorer, having it bundled with Windows meant that many people ended up using IE by default, got very used to it, and then it had an advantage compared to other browsers which stayed around (because people then wrote software that needed IE and webpages emphasized looking good in IE). In this context, if the consumers had been given a choice of browsers, it is likely that other browsers, especially Netscape (and later Firefox) would have done much better, and by most benchmarks Netscape was a better browser.
Actually, I think that a “random African” likely knows a lot more about what would improve his standard of living than you or I, and my mind boggles at any other presumption.
So why haven’t they all done so? An RA may well have more on-the-ground knowledge, but a do-gooder may well have more of the kind of knowledge that you learn in school. Since the D-G is not seeking to take over the RA’s entire life, it’s a case of two heads are better than one.
If he’d rather spend his money on beer than bednets, but you give him a bednet anyway, then I hope it makes you happy, because you’re clearly not doing it for him.
You could do with distingusihing short term gains from long term interests. People don’t pop out of the womb knowing how to maximise the latter. It takes education. And institions: why save when the banks are crooked.
But these “institutions” are not laws of nature, they aren’t even tangible things—an “institution” is just a description of the way people co-ordinate with each other. So yes, people in developing countries often can’t co-ordinate because they have bad institutions, but it would be equally true to say that they can’t have good institutions because they don’t co-ordinate.
It would be truer still to say that good institions take a long and fragile history to evolve. They didn’t evolve everywerhe and they arrived late where they did. Go back about 500 years and no one had good (democratic, accountable, fair honest) instituions.
Apart from the reasons you already mentioned, marketing creates a brand which reduces information costs. This is of course particularly important in a low information market. Spending money to promote your brand is a pre-commitment to provide satisfactory quality products.
It’s hard to know where to start with that lot. Brands aren’t information like lib raries are information, they are an attempt to get people t
to buy things by whatever means is permitted. They can be wors than no information at all, since African mothers would have presumably continued to brest fee without nestle’s intervention:
“The Nestlé boycott is a boycott launched on July 7, 1977, in the United States against the Swiss-based Nestlé corporation. It spread in the United States, and expanded into Europe in the early 1980s. It was prompted by concern about Nestle’s “aggressive marketing” of breast milk substitutes (infant formula), particularly in less economically developed countries (LEDCs), which campaigners claim contributes to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of babies, largely among the poor.[1] Among the campaigners, Professor Derek Jelliffe and his wife Patrice, who contributed to establish the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA), were particularly instrumental in helping to coordinate the boycott and giving it ample visibility worldwide.”
Actually, I think that a “random African” likely knows a lot more about what would improve his standard of living than you or I, and my mind boggles at any other presumption. If he’d rather spend his money on beer than bednets, but you give him a bednet anyway, then I hope it makes you happy, because you’re clearly not doing it for him.
Yes, because all humans are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower. But then again, why doesn’t he sell the bednet I gave him and buys beer with it?
Yes, because all humans are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower.
And I claim that where? Are you claiming that the donors are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower—and are also perfectly altruistic?
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ’s “random African” is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
But then again, why doesn’t he sell the bednet I gave him and buys beer with it?
Because you gave everyone else in the area a bednet, so now there’s a local glut. But yes, I’m sure some people do sell their bednets.
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ’s “random African” is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
It is not (language warning) entirely uncontroversial. Whether through poor education or through giving disproportionate value to present circumstances (and none or too little to future circumstances), people can and often do do things that are, in the long run, self-defeating. (And note that this ‘long run’ can be measured in weeks or months, even hours in particularly extreme cases).
At least one study suggests that the ability to reject a present reward in favour of a greater future reward is detectable at a young age and is correlated with success in life.
Of course people can do things that are self-defeating—did I ever suggest otherwise? I never said people are perfect guardians of their own self-interest, I said, and I repeat, that a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
I am getting a little frustrated with people arguing against strawmans of my positions, which has now happened several times on this thread. Am I being unclear?
None of those links suggest that people are worse guardians of their own self-interest than the outsider. In fact, quite the reverse. Take the fertilizer study. The reason that the farmers weren’t following the advice of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture was that it was bad advice. To quote:
[T]he full package recommended by the Ministry of Agriculture is highly unprofitable on average for the farmers in our sample… the official recommendations are not adapted to many farmers in the region.
So the study demonstrates that the farmers were better guardians of their own self-interest than some bureaucrat in Nairobi (no doubt advised by a western NGO). If they had been forced to follow the (no doubt well-meaning) advice, they would have been much worse off. Maybe some would have died. Now, at the same time, they don’t know every possible combination, and it turns out that if they changed their farming methodology, they could become more productive. Great! That’s how society advances—by persuading people as to what is in their self-interest, not by making someone else their guardian.
a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
Phrased in this way, I think that I agree with you, on average.
In the original context of your statement, however, I had thought that you meant that “a random charity recipient” instead of “a random person”.
Now, charity recipients are still people, of course. However, charity recipients are usually people chosen on the basis of poverty; thus, the group of people who are charity recipients tend to be poor.
Now, some people are good guardians of their own long-term self-interest, and some are not. This is correlated with wealth in an unsurprising way (as demonstrated in the marshmallow experiment linked to above); those people who are better guardians of their own long-term self-interest are, on average, more likely to be above a certain minimum level of wealth than those who are not. They are, therefore, less likely to be charity recipients. Therefore, I conclude that people who are in a position to receive benefits from a charity are, on average, worse guardians of their own long-term self-interest than people who are in a position to contribute to a charity.
So. I therefore conclude that a person, on average, will be a better guardian of his own self-interest than a random person of the category (charity recipient); since the selection of people who fall into that category biases the category to those who are poor guardians of their own self-interest. It’s not the only factor selected for in that category, but it’s significant enough to have a noticeable effect.
I said, and I repeat, that a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
But likely not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than a nonrandom do-gooder who’s researched the specific problems the person is dealing with and developed expertise in solving them with resources that the person is has had no opportunity to learn to make use of.
Certainly—tautologically—he’s not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than some who is in fact a better one. But inventing a fictional character who is in fact a better one does not advance any argument.
One might as well invent a nonrandom do-gooder who thinks they have properly researched what they think are the specific problems the person is dealing with and thinks they have developed expertise in solving them with resources that they think the person has had no opportunity to learn to make use of, but who is nonetheless wrong. As with, apparently, and non-fictionally, the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture.
Of course, less qualified guardians of an individual’s self interest who believe themselves to be more qualified are a legitimate risk, but that doesn’t mean that the optimal solution is to have individuals act exclusively as guardians of their own self interest.
If the Kenyan Ministry of agriculture follows the prescriptions of the researchers in the article cited above, they will thereby become better guardians of those farmers’ interests than the farmers have thus far been, within that domain.
Of course, less qualified guardians of an individual’s self interest who believe themselves to be more qualified are a legitimate risk, but that doesn’t mean that the optimal solution is to have individuals act exclusively as guardians of their own self interest.
The optimal solution isn’t necessarily to have someone else act as the “guardian” of their self-interest, however well informed. BTW, I don’t know if this is true of American English, but in British English, one meaning of “guardian” is what an orphan has in place of parents. Doing things for adults without consulting them is usually a bad idea.
If the Kenyan Ministry of agriculture follows the prescriptions of the researchers in the article cited above, they will thereby become better guardians of those farmers’ interests than the farmers have thus far been, within that domain.
Not if they try to do so by simply coming in and telling the farmers what to do, nor by deciding the farmers’ economic calculations are wrong and manipulating subsidies to get them to do differently. (I’ve only glanced at the article; I don’t know if this is what they did.) Even when they’re right about what the farmers should be doing, they will go wrong if they use the wrong means to get that to happen. Providing information might be a better way to go. The presumption that if only you know enough, you can direct other people’s lives for them is pretty much always wrong.
Doing things for adults without consulting them is usually a bad idea.
But none of the examples given are of one person taking over another’s life. Most of this debate revolves around
the fallact that someone either runs their own life, or has it run for them. In fact, there are many degress of advice/help/co-operation.
I don’t know if this is true of American English, but in British English, one meaning of “guardian” is what an orphan has in place of parents.
Yes, this meaning is in American English as well. A typical parental permission form for a child to go on a field trip or what-have-you will ask for the signature of “a parent or legal guardian”.
a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
That isn’t obvious. D-G’s are likely to be qualified to help people, the people they are helping are
likely to have a hsitory of not helping themselves sucessfully.
So the study demonstrates that the farmers were better guardians of their own self-interest
Would they have had access to fertilizer at all w/out the govt? Two heads are better than one, again.
Are you claiming that the donors are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower—and are also perfectly altruistic?
I’m not.
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ’s “random African” is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
I might agree about myself or “a random do-gooder” (dunno about Gates), but these people do look like they’ve done their homework.
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ’s “random African” is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
People like Bill Gates aren’t “random do-gooders”. I’d not it find it strange that in the counterfactual that Bill Gates had the time to guard my own welfare (let alone some random African’s), he might do a better job at it than I would myself. Certainly he might provide useful tips about how to invest my money for example, might know ways that I’ve not even heard of.
People like Bill Gates aren’t “random do-gooders”.
Bill Gates was a software executive who got into malaria prevention and education reform and poverty reduction and God knows what else, not because of his deep knowledge and expertise in those subjects, but a generalised wish to become a philanthropist. He’s the very archetype of a random do-gooder.
I’d not it find it strange that in the counterfactual that Bill Gates had the time to guard my own welfare (let alone some random African’s), he might do a better job at it than I would myself.
But the whole point is that he doesn’t have the time (or knowledge, or inclination, or incentives, or …) to guard your welfare—or that of a “random African”. Sure, if Bill Gates was my father he might be a better guardian of my welfare than I am. But he ain’t.
My point is that the qualification “random” is rather silly when applied to one of the most wealthy people in the world. That he achieved that wealth (most of which he did not inherit) implies some skills and intelligence most likely beyond that of a randomly selected do-gooder.
An actually randomly-selected do-gooder would probably be more like a middle-class individual who walks to a soup-kitchen and offers to volunteer, or who donates money to UNICEF.
So every time a business gains on account of departures from the free market, that’s a travesty, but every time it loses, that’s the way things are supposed to work. No wonder you think academics are the only ones who do any good. Besides, TBTF isn’t an economic problem, this is a political problem. They had too many lobbyists to be allowed to fail, that’s all.
If you talk a lot about how much you love literature, but in fact you spend all your money on beer, then some so-called philanthropist building you a library is just a waste of everyone’s time.
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer—no.
My answer is “probably yes”. Mathematics directly enables entire areas of science and engineering. Cathedrals and bridges are much easier to build if you know trigonometry. Electricity is a lot easier to harness if you know trigonometry and calculus, and easier still if you are aware of complex numbers. Optics—and therefore cameras and telescopes, among many other things—is a lot easier with linear algebra, and so are many other engineering applications. And, of course, modern electronics are practically impossible without some pretty advanced math and science, which in turn requires all these other things.
If we assume that technology is generally beneficial, then it’s best to develop the disciplines which enable it—i.e., science and mathematics—as early as possible.
He was talking about number theory specifically, not mathematics in general—in the first sentence you quoted he admitted it can be useful. (I doubt advanced number theory would have been that practically useful before the mid-20th century.)
Follow up reply in a separate comment since I didn’t notice this part of the remark the first time through (and it is substantial enough that it should probably not just be included as an edit):
… we might better understand the “Great Filter”
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
If this falls into that category then the archetypes of knowledge that doesn’t contribute to human welfare is massively out of whack. Figuring out how much of the Great Filter is in front of us or behind us is extremely important. If most of it is behind us, we have a lot less worry. If most of the Great Filter is in front of us, then existential risk is a severe danger to humanity as a whole. Moreover, if it is in front of us, then it most likely some form of technology and caused by some sort of technological change (since natural disasters aren’t common enough to wipe out every civilization that gets off the ground). Since we’re just beginning to travel into space, it is likely that if there is heavy Filtration in front of us, it isn’t very far ahead but is in the next few centuries.
If there is heavy Filtration in front of us, then it is vitally important that we figure out what that Filter is and what we can do to avert it, if anything. This could be the difference between the destruction of humanity and humanity spreading to the stars. If there are any contributions that contribute to the welfare of humanity, those which involve our existence as a whole should be high up on the list.
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I’m not about to investigate the economics of their entire supply chain (I already don’t shop at Walmart simply due to location, so it doesn’t even stand to influence my buying decisions,) but I wouldn’t be surprised if Walmart is actually wealth-negative in the grand scheme. They produce very large profits, but particularly considering that their margins are so small and their model depends on dealing in such large bulk, I think there’s a fair likelihood that the negative externalities of their business are in excess of their profit margin.
It’s impossible for a business to be GDP negative, but very possible for one to be negative in terms of real overall wealth produced when all externalities are accounted for, which I suspect leads some to greatly overestimate the positive impact of business.
Why focus on the negative externalities rather than the positive? And why neglect all the partner surpluses—consumer surplus, worker surplus, etc? I’d guess that Walmart produces wealth at least an order of magnitude greater than its profits.
Why focus on the negative externalities rather than the positive?
Because corporations make a deliberate effort to privatize gains while socializing expenses.
GDP is a pretty worthless indicator of wealth production, let alone utility production; the economists who developed the measure in the first place protested that it should by no means be taken as a measure of wealth production. There are other measures of economic growth which paint a less optimistic picture of the last few decades in industrialized nations, although they have problems of their own with making value judgments about what to measure against industrial activity, but the idea that every economic transaction must represent an increase in well-being is trivially false both in principle and practice.
Only if there are any gains to socialize. Consider honestly the societal gain from the marginal published paper, particularly given that it gets 0 cites from other papers not by the same author.
Consider honestly the societal gain from the marginal published paper, particularly given that it gets 0 cites from other papers not by the same author.
So, I’d be curious what evidence you have that the average paper gets 0 citations from papers not by the same author across a wide variety of fields. But, in any event, the marginal return rate per a paper isn’t nearly as important as the marginal return rate per a paper divided by the cost of a paper. For many fields (like math), the average cost per a paper is tiny.
Consider honestly the societal gain from the marginal published paper, particularly given that it gets 0 cites from other papers not by the same author.
So, I’d be curious what evidence you have that the average paper gets 0 citations from papers not by the same author across a wide variety of fields.
Either I cannot write clearly or others cannot read clearly, because again and again in this thread people are responding to statements that are not what I wrote. The common factor is me, which makes me think it is my failure to write clearly, but then I look at the above. I referred to “the marginal published paper”, and even italicised the word marginal. JoshuaZ replies by asking whether I have evidence for my statement about “the average paper.” I don’t know what else to say at this point.
However, yes, I have plenty of evidence that the marginal paper across a wide variety of fields gets 0 citations, see e.g. Albarran et al. Note incidentally that there are some fields where the average paper gets no citations!
the marginal paper across a wide variety of fields gets 0 citations
I don’t think a marginal paper is a thing (marginal cost isn’t a type of cost, but represents a derivative of total cost). Do you mean that d(total citations)/d(number of papers) = 0?
Note incidentally that there are some fields where the average paper gets no citations!
This seems impossible, unless all papers get no citations, ie. no-one cites anyone but themselves. That actually happens?
Of course the marginal paper is a thing. If there were marginally less research funding, the research program cancelled wouldn’t be chosen at random, it would be the least promising one. We can’t be sure ex ante that that would be the least successful paper, but given that most fields have 20% or more of papers getting no citations at all, and other studies show that papers with very low citation counts are usually being cited by the same author, that’s good evidence.
Note that I did not say that papers, on average, get no citations. I said that the average (I.e. median) paper gets no citations.
f there were marginally less research funding, the research program cancelled wouldn’t be chosen at random, it would be the least promising one.
Weren’t you just a few posts ago talking about the problems of politics getting involved in funding decisions? But now you are convinced that in event of a budget cut it will be likely to go cut the least promising research? This seems slightly contradictory.
If there were marginally less research funding, the research program cancelled wouldn’t be chosen at random, it would be the least promising one.
Ah, right, we’re on the same page now. Your argument, however, assumes that a) fruitfulness of research is quite highly predictable in advance, and b) available funds are rationally allocated based on these predictions so as to maximise fruitful research (or the proxy, citations). Insofar as the reality diverges from these assumptions, the expected number of citations of the “marginal” paper is going to approach the average number.
Note that I did not say that papers, on average, get no citations. I said that the average (I.e. median) paper gets no citations.
Oh, by “average” I assumed you meant the arithmetic mean, since that is the usual statistic.
Sorry, in this context, I switched talking about the marginal to talking about the average. You shouldn’t take my own poor thinking as a sign of anything, although in this context, it is possible that I was without thinking trying to steel man your argument, since when one is talking about completely eliminating academic funding, the average rate matters much more than the marginal rate. But the citation you’ve given is convincing that the marginal rate is generally quite low across a variety of fields.
[I]t is possible that I was without thinking trying to steel man your argument, since when one is talking about completely eliminating academic funding...
Who exactly is arguing for completely eliminating academic funding? If you mean me, I hope you can provide a supporting quote.
Who exactly is arguing for completely eliminating academic funding?
Well, various statements you’ve made seemed to imply that, such as your claim that burning down the Library of Alexandria had the advantage that:
Academics now forced to get useful job and contribute to society
and you then stated
The point is that some academics are useful and some are not; there is no market process that forces them to be so. It may be that some of the academics are able to continue doing exactly what they were doing, just for a private employer.
If you prefer, to be explicit, you seem to be arguing that all goverment funding of academics should be cut. Is that an accurate assessment? In that context, given that that’s the vast majority of academic research, the relevant difference is still the average not the marginal rate of return.
The majority of people, other than psychopaths, are not as ruthless in the quest to externalize their costs. A substantial portion of academics sacrifice renown and glory to do research they believe has intrinsic value. This is in large part the reason they can be paid so much less than people of equivalent ability in the private sector.
I agree with your general point about business men and entrepreneurship being undervalued however.
As zslatsman already said, this is not true to nearly as great an extent of most people as it is of corporations. Corporations have an obligation to maximize profits, whereas humans are rarely profit maximizers.
Some people are more willing to externalize costs than others. For instance, some people, given the opportunity to file expense reports under which they can cover luxuries, will take the opportunity to live it up as much as possible on someone else’s dollar. Other people, myself included, would feel guilty, and try to be as frugal as possible.
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd.
Apples and oranges. Business is there to make money. Money is instrumental, it is there to be spent on terminal values, things of intrinsic worth. People spend their excess on entertainement, art, hobbies, family life, and, yes knowledge. All these things are terminal values.
I don’t need to carry out expected utility calculations explicitly to guess that burning down a library is way more likely to be bad than good. My “What?” was because I can’t see any obvious reason to suspect that actually carrying it out would yield a substantially different answer than my guess, and wondered whether you had such a reason in mind.
I don’t need to carry out expected utility calculations explicitly to guess that burning down a library is way more likely to be bad than good.
But note that we aren’t talking about a library being burned down by an arsonist. Most of the various stories have it being burned down by the government of the day, as a public policy measure. It appears that you don’t even consider their reasons before condemning them – highly suspicious.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the library was destroyed by Amr ibn al-Aas as I was taught (although wiki is not so sure). Reasons why his burning down a library might be bad:
Risk of fire spreading (but does not appear to have been the case)
Loss of private property by the owners of the building or books (but does not apply here)
Loss of useful knowledge (does not appear to apply here, but disputed by JoshuaZ)
Reasons why his burning down a library might be good:
Academics now forced to get useful job and contribute to society (important)
Destruction of contentious material likely to cause civil unrest (important)
Owner of building now able to build something more useful in its place (minor)
It is an empirical question as to which effects are stronger – and the record shows that Egypt was richer, more peaceful and more stable under the Umayyids than it had been under the Byzantines. Personally I regard it as similar to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
Reasons why his burning down a library might be bad:
Risk of fire spreading (but does not appear to have been the case)
Loss of private property by the owners of the building or books (but does not apply here)
Loss of useful knowledge (does not appear to apply here, but disputed by JoshuaZ)
Seems you’re missing a key one. Probably the most important one. At the very least, this is to me the primary advantage of even building libraries at all:
Loss of a major means of spreading, disseminating and finding knowledge, whether the knowledge itself is lost or not.
Imagine trying to find information regarding a specific species of bird (a standard “Encyclopedia” will only have an entry on birds, not on each known species), with no internet and no libraries. You’re going to run around for a while until you finally find someone who knows someone who’s heard of someone who owns a book that might contain the information you want on that particular bird.
Libraries are, first and foremost, a convenient place to store a lot of books, which implies a convenient place to find any book in particular you’re looking for with much higher success rates than asking a random friend.
Not at all. The point is that some academics are useful and some are not; there is no market process that forces them to be so. It may be that some of the academics are able to continue doing exactly what they were doing, just for a private employer. But I would not bet on that outcome for most.
The point is that some academics are useful and some are not; there is no market process that forces them to be so.
???
Academics need funding. The ability to get funding is well correlated with usefulness in most fields (to be fair, other things are in play, like institutional inertia, fashion, etc. etc.) Useful research also results in spin off companies, and fame. There are all sorts of incentives to be useful in academia.
There is also the issue of hedging, and diversification of intellectual effort—you want people doing long term payoff and long shot research as well. Modern business culture is generally much worse at this than academic culture is at being useful. Google, a company started by two ex graduate students, is one of the few notable exceptions.
I could look at output over the last 50 years, comparing useful stuff out of academia vs long term research done by corporate research labs, scaled by funding. Or I could look at incentives high level corporate decision makers have, which heavily favor the short term and empire building. Or I could look at anecdotal evidence based on testimonies of my corporate vs academic acquaintances. Or I could look at universities today that produce useful applied research (basically any major research university) vs companies today that have labs working on fundamental research (Google, Microsoft, possibly some oil companies (?), maybe Honda, maybe some big pharmas and that’s about it).
The vast majority of big companies (the only ones who could afford fundamental research) do not engage in fundamental research. The vast majority of research universities do very useful applied work.
Private individuals could not incorporate until fairly late (after Bombelli) but states started establishing commercial entities that play the role modern corporations play in our society fairly early. I edited a little to clarify, though, thanks.
I don’t know anything about interventionist causality, and Objectivism seems like a waste of time. The rest all seem to have produced worthwhile results.
But this is costless analysis! Of course if you buy lots of lottery tickets, and look only at the winners, then buying lottery tickets looks worthwhile. You have to consider the opportunity costs, not just of these research projects, but also of every other similarly situated research project. And you also have to do time-discounting. Bombelli discovering complex numbers in 1572 looks like a waste, when they weren’t useful for 200 years or more.
Moreover, I don’t know why “corporations” is the comparison. The comparison is the private sector generally. Huge amounts of scientific work are done, and continue to be done, by enthusiastic amateurs, and the charitable sector. I am not making the claim that in an ideal world all government academics should be fired (although I do think that would be a big improvement on the current situation). I merely claimed that, on the margin, we are hugely oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with businessmen.
Ok. So, helpful fundamental research, as it is currently produced: (a) imposes a heavy opportunity cost, (b) has a low success rate, (c) is generally discovered “too early,” leading to waste. What is your proposal for doing better? Can you give me some examples of things like complex numbers discovered in the private sector, by charities, or ‘enthusiastic amateurs’?
Incidentally, the success rate of fundamental research for a given finite time horizon k is an untestable quantity. Thus, (b) is a weak complaint. (a) is hard to argue also, because you need to construct counterfactual scenarios that people will believe.
Can you give me some examples of things like complex numbers discovered in the private sector, by charities, or ‘enthusiastic amateurs’?
Examples that fit Salemicus’s narrative in this context aren’t non-existent. For example, Fermat was a lawyer by profession and did math as a hobby in his free time. There are many similar examples prior to the 19th century or so. And some major charities have helped fund successful research- one sees a lot of this with a variety of diseases.
Amateurs: Evolutionary Theory (Darwin, 1830s-50s), Photoelectric effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity, Matter-Energy (Einstein, 1905), Linear B (Ventris, 1951),
Incidentally, the success rate of fundamental research for a given finite time horizon k is an untestable quantity. Thus, (b) is a weak complaint. (a) is hard to argue also, because you need to construct counterfactual scenarios that people will believe.
Actually, if the success rate of this spending is as unknowable and untestable as you say it is, that’s an excellent argument to stop forcing unwilling people to pay for it. But note that although I’m happy to fight you on your strongest ground (pure scientific research), surely you must then concede that the rest of the battlefield is mine, and that all government spending on academia that can’t be justified in these terms (e.g. arts, humanities, medicine, space exploration, etc) should be eliminated. I’m not doctrinaire—I’d settle for that compromise.
EDIT: I’d truly be fascinated to know why was this voted down.
I don’t know precisely why your comment was voted down, but one obvious guess is factual issues:
Amateurs: Evolutionary Theory (Darwin, 1830s-50s)
Darwin got most of his ideas from his time working the survey/exploration ship the HMS Beagle. As you may gather from the “HMS” in front, this was a ship in the British navy which had specific funding to hire and provide support to a naturalist.
But note that although I’m happy to fight you on your strongest ground (pure scientific research), surely you must then concede that the rest of the battlefield is mine, and that all government spending on academia that can’t be justified in these terms (e.g. arts, humanities, medicine, space exploration, etc) should be eliminated. I’m not doctrinaire—I’d settle for that compromise.
This is why I suspect you are getting downvoted. First, it shows a confused notion of what is “pure scientific research”- a large part of space exploration and medical research counts as pure research for purposes of the arguments being made by IlyaShpitser and others in this context. Moreover, you seem to be wanting a “compromise” as if the truth must be somehow negotiable. The key of discussion is to understand what is likely to be actually true. Settling for a compromise isn’t how one reaches truth (and no, Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply here).
I will not argue with your post as although I disagree with some things you stated, I requested comments on why downvoted. However, I think the following correction is necessary:
I don’t know precisely why your comment was voted down, but one obvious guess is factual issues:
Amateurs: Evolutionary Theory (Darwin, 1830s-50s)
Darwin got most of his ideas from his time working the survey/exploration ship the HMS Beagle. As you may gather from the “HMS” in front, this was a ship in the British navy which had specific funding to hire and provide support to a naturalist.
Darwin was a “gentleman naturalist,” held no official post on the Beagle, received no salary, and in fact had to pay to go on the journey. The ship was going for surveying purposes, and would have gone on its journey regardless of his presence. He held no academic position in the years afterwards when he was working on his theory. I think it’s quite reasonable to classify this as amateur.
So from reading this Wikipedia summary it looks like the situation was actually more complicated than either of us realized (although definitely closer to your summary):
FitzRoy had found a need for expert advice on geology during the first voyage, and had resolved that if on a similar expedition, he would “endeavour to carry out a person qualified to examine the land; while the officers, and myself, would attend to hydrography… he asked his friend and superior, Captain Francis Beaufort, to seek a gentleman naturalist as a self-financing passenger who would give him company during the voyage. A sequence of inquiries led to Charles Darwin, a young gentleman on his way to becoming a rural clergyman, joining the voyage
So yes, he was self-financed. But the primary issue is that he was given support by the crew and the entire existence of an exploration ship (which if anything seems pretty similar to the space program you’ve criticized). Would you call someone who does work without pay now using data from NASA an amateur? If so, then the term “amateur” isn’t very relevant to capturing the most important detail- where the resources for their work comes from.
Incidentally, the success rate of fundamental research for a given finite time horizon k is an untestable quantity.
How exactly do you measure “success” in this case ? As for me, I find myself hard-pressed to think of any examples of fundamental research that weren’t ultimately beneficial—except perhaps for instances of outright fraud or gross incompetence.
Even if a scientist spent five years and a million dollars trying to discover, say, the link between gene X and phenotype Y, and found no such link, then the work was still not in vain. Firstly, we can now be more certain that gene X does not cause Y; secondly, we can most likely gain a lot of collateral benefits from the work, leading to an increased rate of discovery in the future.
This might equally lead to the conclusion that the kind of “fundamental research” you’re talking about just isn’t very worthwhile.
No. Just… no. What differentiates basic research and applied research is how many years there are until commercial application. For applied research, the number of low- five years is stretching it, and hopefully it’ll be less than one. For basic research, the is number is larger- it was around three decades from Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect to the commercialization of cameras based on it.
The point that some here considering burning of books a taboo, and that that disagrees with consequentialism, is an interesting and valid point. The point that public goods can be provided without government intervention is an interesting and valid point as well, but you’re not arguing it well.
For basic research, the is number is larger- it was around three decades from Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect to the commercialization of cameras based on it.
Another problem with fundamental research—from a commercial corporation’s point of view—is that its results may not be applicable at all to products in your target market. For example, you might start by researching the formation of clouds in the atmosphere, and end up with major breakthroughs in atomic theory. Those are interesting, to be sure, but how are you going to sell that ?
This is but one of the reasons why large corporations tend to stay away from fundamental research, unless they can write it off their taxes or something.
So by that notion, anything that is an externality but can’t be captured by market forces is by definition not useful? Does that capture your intuition for the word useful?
I said is willing to pay for—not necessarily that they can pay for it. Any one-sentence definition of a word as complex as useful is going to necessarily be incomplete, but I certainly mean to include externalities in it. If, for example, people value “a sense of belonging to a community” and are willing to give up something meaningful for it, but co-ordination problems or whatever else means it can’t be captured by market forces, then I would absolutely view someone who creates “a sense of belonging to a community” as useful—provided that the cost of their doing so is less than the price that the community members would be hypothetically willing to pay.
Would you grant that many things are valuable which are nevertheless not useful in that sense?
EDIT:
I don’t mean anything fancy here. Eating a hot dog, for example, is valuable (I’m willing to pay to do it) but not in any sense useful (no one is willing to pay me to do it).
I see. And does the fact that much academic research produces positive externalities/public goods, which thus aren’t easily funded by private employers says what in this context?
I’m confused by this remark, given the context is about academic jobs, not government intervention in the market. Can you expand/clarify what you mean?
Yes, but that’s a tiny fraction of the issues you list above. Unless I’m misreading you. By for example deadweight cost of taxation, you mean the deadweight loss of the portion of taxes that go to fund academic research?
Taking that sort of interpretation throughout, I’m still not sure what your point is. Can you be more explicit and maybe use full sentences?
You stated that academics aren’t easily funded by the private sector because of an externality argument. I agreed that it is possible to argue that “basic research” or some such is underprovided by the market, because the private sector may not be able to capture all externalities, and that this is in some sense a market failure. However, I am saying that:
No-one can say how by much the private sector is underproviding. Therefore even if the intervention were done by angels, it is as likely to make things worse as better.
Government intervention will cost money, resulting in deadweight losses through tax.
The creation of a powerful body of rent-seeking will cause academic research to be massively oversupplied
Moreover “research” is not a fungible good; the money and resources will not necessarily go to the most useful areas, but to the most politically convenient ones
The rent-seeking will also have deadweight costs (e.g. academics spending lots of time writing grant proposals, taxpayers having to organise to prevent themselves getting robbed blind)
This will also incentivise rent-seeking elsewhere (if the academics are successful in asking for a subsidy, it encourages the farmers)
The adoption of the subsidy discourages market participants from finding new ways to capture the externality.
So, even though there may be a textbook “market failure,” there is no reason for any intervention. Dissolve the modern-day monasteries, and let academics prove their use, if they can. And indeed, I’m sure Alvin Roth would be just fine if we did.
No-one can say how by much the private sector is underproviding. Therefore even if the intervention were done by angels, it is as likely to make things worse as better
No. We can make such estimates by looking at how helpful basic research was in the past.
Government intervention will cost money, resulting in deadweight losses through tax.
Sure. How much?
The creation of a powerful body of rent-seeking will cause academic research to be massively oversupplied
That’s a danger certainly, but what evidence do you have that that’s happening?
Moreover “research” is not a fungible good; the money and resources will not necessarily go to the most useful areas, but to the most politically convenient ones
The areas where politics has heavy aspects are actually the areas with the least government funding. For example, physics has a lot of government funding, whereas most of the humanities and social sciences have comparatively little. Thus, the politics comes into play primarily through the interaction with outside donors with agendas. That’s how you get virulently anti-Israel attitudes in Middle-Eastern studies due to funds from rich Saudis and you get Israel studies as a subject which is about as ridiculously biased in the other direction for the same reason. Political problems in the sciences are rare.
The adoption of the subsidy discourages market participants from finding new ways to capture the externality.
We have theorems and a lot of empirical of how externalities interact with markets. If you think there’s something wrong with that vast body of literature, feel free to point it out.
This will also incentivise rent-seeking elsewhere (if the academics are successful in asking for a subsidy, it encourages the farmers)
Is this a serious argument?
The rent-seeking will also have deadweight costs (e.g. academics spending lots of time writing grant proposals, taxpayers having to organise to prevent themselves getting robbed blind)
Yes, grant proposal writing is annoying and often a waste of time. Question: What fraction of taxpayer money is going to academic research?
No. We can make such estimates by looking at how helpful basic research was in the past.
At this point I think I have to cite Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek, 1945 link.
Sure. How much?
Where I live, we spend approx $4bn per year (0.64% of GDP) on state-funded research (note that this figure is conservative because it doesn’t include the way that higher education funds get siphoned off into research). Conservatively then, let’s say $1bn in deadweight loss annually, just in this country—and our state-funded research is low compared to most OECD countries. If we extrapolate this figure to the world economy, we get a deadweight loss of approx $127bn annually, just due to government research spending. That’s a lot of bednets.
The areas where politics has heavy aspects are actually the areas with the least government funding… political problems in the sciences are rare.
I am not talking about partisan clashes. I am talking about money being spent on worthless projects because they seem cool or win votes. NASA has a budget of almost $18bn!
Is this a serious argument?
Of course it’s a serious argument—subsidizing one group of rent-seekers encourages others. I am of course being a little facetious in the sense that both the academics and the farmers already have their snouts deep in the trough.
At this point I think I have to cite Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek, 194
Sorry, I’m not following. You are citing Hayek to argue what here?
Sure. How much?
Where I live, we spend approx $4bn per year (0.64% of GDP) on state-funded research (note that this figure is conservative because it doesn’t include the way that higher education funds get siphoned off into research). Conservatively then, let’s say $1bn in deadweight loss annually, just in this country—and our state-funded research is low compared to most OECD countries. If we extrapolate this figure to the world economy, we get a deadweight loss of approx $127bn annually, just due to government research spending. That’s a lot of bednets.
Ok. So we have less than 1% of GDP going to state-funded research. And where is that going to go?
I am talking about money being spent on worthless projects because they seem cool or win votes. NASA has a budget of almost $18bn!
Projects seeming “cool” is a very different claim than political rent-seeking. In this case though, looking at the overall NASA budget isn’t very helpful: First, much of that budget is not going to what would be considered academic research. Second, you are talking about the space program of one of the world’s largest economies, so the total cost is a misleading metric. Third, technologies developed by the US space program (especially GPS, communication satellites and weather satellites) have had large-scale world-changing impact.
Of course it’s a serious argument—subsidizing one group of rent-seekers encourages others.
It often doesn’t, and the case you’ve picked is a really good one. In the US, many of the people getting farm subsidies are people who are rural and if anything anti-ivory tower. A large fraction would probably be turned off of the idea of government subsidies if it was compared to what those East Coast intellectuals were doing. (I’m engaging in some broad brush strokes here obviously but some people like this do exist.) This sort of thing is connected to why many groups (including farmers) have tried to get their money through tax breaks rather than direct subsidies. Of course, from an economic perspective, tax expenditures are identical to subsidies. But people don’t like to think of themselves as getting handouts so they prefer tax breaks (at least in the US).
By the way, my point earlier about only a small fraction of tax money going to academic research was (to be clear) about the claim that academic research would necessitate tax policy watchdog groups.
Sorry, I’m not following. You are citing Hayek to argue what here?
That no central planner can know how much “ought” to be spent on research.
Ok. So we have less than 1% of GDP going to state-funded research. And where is that going to go?
I don’t know what people would spend their own money on. That’s the whole point.
Projects seeming “cool” is a very different claim than political rent-seeking.
Yes, which is why I made distinct points. One is the problem of rent-seeking, but the point you are responding to there is about misallocation.
my point earlier about only a small fraction of tax money going to academic research was (to be clear) about the claim that academic research would necessitate tax policy watchdog groups.
Oh every group of rent-seekers bleeding the polity dry claim that they’ve only made a small nick, so there’s no need to worry. Meanwhile we die of a thousand cuts. Are academia worse rent-seekers than (say) teachers? Obviously not. But the opportunity cost is probably higher, because they are far more likely to be able to do something productive.
That no central planner can know how much “ought” to be spent on research.
Since no one is arguing for complete central planning, I don’t see how this is relevant.
I don’t know what people would spend their own money on. That’s the whole point.
You are missing my point, maybe I should be more explicit: You have a tiny portion of GDP going to research, and most of those resources go back into the economy.
Oh every group of rent-seekers bleeding the polity dry claim that they’ve only made a small nick
Missing the point. You claimed that academics getting tax money for research necessitated the creation of tax payer watchdog groups. The point is that since there are much larger interest groups getting much more money who are much more effectively organized, the watchdog groups will be necessary no matter what.
Loss of useful knowledge (does not appear to apply here, but disputed by JoshuaZ)
Since we don’t have a full list which books were in the library, let alone a list of which ones the library had the only copy of, how can you have any certainty that none of the lost books contained any useful knowledge?
In absence of substantial evidence either way, my prior probability assignment that none of the knowledge stored a major library is useful is very small.
But we can look for evidence. Are there any technologies that go missing after the destruction of the library (similar to the loss of Greek fire that happened 600 years later)? Or perhaps an industrial regress that might inidicate missing knowledge? And if there is no evidence of any such, how should we update?
Are there any technologies that go missing after the destruction of the library (similar to the loss of Greek fire that happened 600 years later)?
Well, it is hard to say, since direct technologies leave as more of an archaeological record as say math texts which are essentially technologies. But one can’t help but notice that the Antikythera mechanism predated the library, and we didn’t have anything like it again until the 1400s. However, this is imperfect in that it looks like a lot of wars and problems occurred between the height of the Greeks and the burning of Alexandria so pinning this sort of thing on it is tough.
Yes, I’m surprised so many people are trying to argue that the lost knowledge would have been useful. This may be true, but is it really relevant? Well, apparently it is to Salemicus.
Although it’s worth noting here that going by the other threads Salemicus is using an unusual notion of “useful”. In fact it’s specific enough that it allows us to answer the question
Are artists useful? Musicians? Enterainers?
with “yes”, “yes”, and “yes”. This is sufficiently different from the ordinary notion of “useful” that I suspect a different word should be used for clarity. Maybe “valuable”? (I mean, I’d say that the knowledge is valuable in the ordinary sense regardless of whether it’s valuable in the sense I’ve proposed—because, you know, terminal values—but from here on out I’m talking about the sense I’ve proposed, not the ordinary sense.)
Which raises the point—we’d certainly consider that valuable now. I.e., I think you could get people to pay quite a lot to recover whatever lost knowledge was burnt, even if it’s not very useful in the ordinary sense. Should this be counted? I.e., if we’re going to measure the value of something by how much people are willing to pay for it, as Salemicus does, should we count that only in its own time, or cross-temporally? The former is the usual way of doing things, but Salemicus hasn’t specified, and I have to wonder if there’s something to the latter way of thinking, even if it’s impossible to compute...
Surely a consequentialist could come to a conclusion about book-burning being bad and then write an outraged comment about it—the potential negatives in the long-term of the burning of such a library are debatable but the potential positives in the long-term are AFAICT non-existent. Such a catastrophic failure of cost-benefit analysis would be something a consequentialist could in fact be quite outraged about.
Incidentally,
Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human “utility.”
...it seems self-evident to me that this is not in any way an interesting or meaningful comparison to ask people to make (ETA: in light of the above, anyway). It’s “good” rhetoric but seems to be abysmal rationality; it’s a “there are starving children in Africa, eat your peas” argument.
A consequentialist would ask, with an open mind, whether burning the libraries lead to good or bad consequences. A virtue ethicist would express disgust at the profanity of burning books.
Despite being a consequentialist (*), I believe that the act of burning libraries possesses such a massive disutility that it is almost always the wrong thing to do. I can elaborate on my reasoning if you’re interested, but my main point is that consequentialism and virtue ethicism can sometimes come to the same conclusion; this does not invalidate either philosophy.
(*) Or as close to being one as I can accomplish given my biases.
This doesn’t seem that relevant. If you look above you’ll see that Salemicus primary argument concerning the library wasn’t that it was necessarily a good thing to do but that it wasn’t severe compared to much worse things that happened in the same time period. His other argument about the role of academics was a subthread of that.
How do you quantify the worth of knowledge when you don’t know what it is?
With difficulty. If you read the rest of this thread, specific examples based on what is suspected to have been at Alexandria have been discussed. One can make reasoned guesses based on was known and what was referenced elsewhere as being studied topics. See the earlier discussion about Diophantus (in the same subthread) for example.
Since civilizations prior to widespread literacy (and many after it) routinely destroyed the records and lore of their rivals; we should expect that the first X that we have records of is quite certainly not the first X that existed, especially if its lore makes a big deal of claiming that it is.
This would work if conquerers were also effective at destroying archeological evidence. But they seem not to have been, and a complete archeological record would just settle the question of which city was really first, given some appropriate and agreed upon standard. And that city would be the true dawn.
A contrary view — and I’m stating this deliberately rather strongly to make the point vivid:
“False dawn” is a retrospective view; which is to say an anachronistic one; which is to say a mythical one. And myths are written by the victors.
It’s true that we perceive more continuity from Ur to today’s civilization than from Xyz (some other ancient “dawn of civilization” point) to today. But why? Surely in part because the Sumerians and their Akkadian and Babylonian successors were good at scattering their enemies, killing their scribes, destroying their records, and stealing credit for their innovations. Just as each new civilization claimed that their god had created the world and invented morality, each claimed that their clever forefather had invented agriculture, writing, and tactics. If the Xyzzites had won, they would have done the same.
What’s the evidence? Just that that’s how civilizations — particularly religious empires — have generally behaved since then. The Hebrews, Catholics, and Muslims, for instance, were all at one time or another pretty big on wiping out their rivals’ history and making them out to be barbaric, demonic, subhuman assholes — when they weren’t just mass-murdering them. So our prior for the behavior of the Sumerians should be that they were unremarkable in this regard; they did the same wiping-out of rivals’ records that the conquistadors and the Taliban did.
Today we have anti-censorship memes; the idea that anyone who would burn books is a villain and an enemy of everyone. But we also have the idea that mass censorship and extirpation of history is “Orwellian” — as if it had been invented in the ’40s! This is backwards; it’s anti-censorship that is the new, weird idea. Censorship is the normal behavior of normal rulers and normal priests throughout normal history.
Damnatio memoriae, censorship, burning the libraries (of Alexandria or the Yucatán), forcible conversion & assimilation — or just mass murder — are effective ways to make the other guy’s civilization into a “false dawn”. Since civilizations prior to widespread literacy (and many after it) routinely destroyed the records and lore of their rivals; we should expect that the first X that we have records of is quite certainly not the first X that existed, especially if its lore makes a big deal of claiming that it is.
Put another way — quite a lot of history is really a species of creationism, misrepresenting a selective process as a creative one. So we should not look to “the first city” for unique founding properties of civilization, since it wasn’t the first and didn’t have any; it was just the conquering power that happened to end up on top.
Thus my caveat “we know of”.
However, while it would be quite possible for a victor to erase written mention of a rival, it is harder to erase beyond all archaeological recovery the signs of a major city that’s been stable and populated for a thousand years or more. For instance, if we look at Jericho, which was inhabited earlier than Ur was, we don’t see archaeological evidence of it becoming a major city until much later than Ur (see link and link).
If there was a city large enough and long lived enough, around before Ur, that passed onto Ur the bundle of things like writing and hierarchy that we known Ur passed onto others, then I’m unaware of it, and the evidence has been surprisingly thoroughly erased (which isn’t impossible, but neither is it a certainty that such a thing happened).
See also the comment about Uruk. There were a number of cities in Sumer close together that would have swapped ideas. But the things said about calories and types of grain apply to all of them.
Whaaat? Did people do that on purpose? What the hell is wrong with my species?
It’s not entirely clear. Wikipedia lists four possible causes of or contributors to the Library of Alexandria’s destruction; all were connected to changes in government or religion, but only two (one connected to Christian sources, the other to Muslim) appear deliberate. Both of them seem somewhat dubious, though.
The destruction of Central American literature is a more straightforward case. Bishop Diego de Landa certainly ordered the destruction of Mayan codices where found, which only a few survived.
The Library also wasn’t one building; and had some time to recover between one attack and the next. (As an analogy: Burning down some, or even most, of the buildings of a modern university wouldn’t necessarily lead to the institution closing up shop.)
I’d been thinking of the 391 CE one, though, which I’d thought was widely understood to be an attack against pagan sites of learning. Updating in progress.
It’s worth noting that there were people on the Spanish “team” who regretted that decision and spoke out against it, most famously Bartolomé de las Casas.
It’s all consequentialism around here… until someone does something to lower the social standing of academia.
What?
A consequentialist would ask, with an open mind, whether burning the libraries lead to good or bad consequences. A virtue ethicist would express disgust at the profanity of burning books. Your comment closely resembles the latter, whereas most discussion here on other topics tries to approximate the former.
I think it is no coincidence that this switch occurs in this context. Oh no, some dusty old tomes got destroyed! Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human “utility.” But burning books lowers the status of academics, which is why it is considered (in Haidt-ian terms) a taboo by some—including, I would suggest, most on this site.
We have good reason to think that the missing volumes of Diophantus were at Alexandria. Much of what Diophantus did was centuries before his time. If people in the 1500s and 1600s had complete access to his and other Greek mathematicians’ work, math would have likely progressed at a much faster pace, especially in number theory.
We also have reason to think that Alexandria contained the now lost Greek astronomical records, which likely contained comets and possibly also historical nova observations. While we have some nova and supernova observations from slightly later (primarily thanks to Chinese and Japanese records), the Greeks were doing astronomy well before. This sort of thing isn’t just an idle curiosity: understanding the timing of supernova connects to understanding the most basic aspects of our universe. The chemical elements necessary for life are created and spread by supernova. Understanding the exact ratios, how common supernova are, and understanding more how supernova spread out, among other issues, are all important to understanding very important questions like how common life is, which is directly relevant to the Great Filter. We do have a lot of supernova observations in the last few years but historical examples are few and far between.
On the contrary. Kill a few people or make them suffer and it has little direct impact beyond a few years in the future. Destroying knowledge has an impact that resonates down for far longer.
This is an interesting argument, and I find it unfortunate that you’ve been downvoted. The hypothesis is certainly interesting. But it may also be taboo for another reason: in many historical cases, book burning has been a precursor to killing people. This is a cliche, but it is a cliche that happens to have historical examples before it. Another consideration is that a high status of academics is arguably quite a good thing from a consequentialist perspective. People like Norman Borlaug, Louis Pasteur, and Alvin Roth have done more lasting good for humanity than almost anyone else. Academics are the main people who have any chance of having a substantial impact on human utility beyond their own lifespans (the only other groups are people who fund academics or people like Bill Gates who give funding to implement academic discoveries on a large scale). So even if it is purely an issue of status and taboo, there’s a decent argument that those are taboos which are advantageous to humanity.
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
Perhaps, but note that this wasn’t a precursor to killing people; people were being widely killed regardless. But the modern attention is not on the rape, murder, pillage, etc… it’s on the book-burning. Why the distorted values?
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd. You’re right that Bill Gates has made a huge impact – but his lasting good was achieved by selling computer software, not through the mostly foolish experimentation done by his foundation. Sure, some academics have done some good (although you wildly overstate it) but you have to consider the opportunity cost. The high status of academics causes us to get more academic research than otherwise, but it also encourages our best and brightest to waste their lives in the study of arcana. Can anyone seriously doubt that, on the margin, we are oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with entrepreneurs and businessmen generally?
Well, no. In modern times number theory has been extremely relevant for cryptography for example, and pretty much all e-commerce relies on it. But other areas of math have direct, useful applications and have turned out to be quite important. For example, engineering in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance benefited a lot from things like trig and logarithms. Improved math has lead to much better understanding of economies and financial systems as well. These are but a few limited examples.
You are missing the point in this context having the taboo against book burning is helpful because it is something one can use as a warning sign.
So I’m curious as to how you are defining “good” in any useful sense that you can reach this conclusion. Moreover, the sort of thing that Roth does is in the process of being more and more useful. His work allowing for organ donations for example not only saves lives now but will go on saving lives at least until we have cheap cloned organs.
This is wrong. His work with malaria saves lives. His work with selling computer software involved making mediocre products and making up for that by massive marketing along with anti-trust abuses. There’s an argument to be made that economic productivity can be used as a very rough measure of utility, but that breaks down in a market where advertising, marketing, and network effects of specific product designs matter more than quality of product.
Yes, to the point where I have to wonder how drastically far off our unstated premises about the world are. If anything, it seems like we have the exact opposite problem. We have a massive oversupply of “quants” and the like who aren’t actually producing more utility or even actually working with real market inefficiencies but are instead doing things like moving servers a few feet closer to the exchange so they can shave a fraction of a second off of their transaction times. There may be an “oversupply” of how many academics there are compared to the number of paying positions but that’s simply connected to the fact that most research has results that function as externalities(technically public goods) and thus the lack of academic jobs is a market failure.
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer—no.
No, I am not missing the point. I am perfectly willing to concede that a taboo against book-burning might be helpful for that reason. But here we have an example where people were,at the same time as burning books, doing the exact worse stuff that book burning is allegedly a warning sign of. But no-one complains about the worse stuff, only the book burning. Which makes me disbelieve that people care about the taboo for that reason.
People say that keeping your lawn tidy keep the area looking well-maintained and so prevents crime. Let’s say one guy in the area has a very messy lawn, and also goes around committing burglaries. Now suppose the Neighbourhood Watch shows no interest at all in the burglaries, but is shocked and appalled by the state of his lawn. We would have to conclude that these people don’t care about crime, what they care about is lawns, and this story about lawns having an effect on crime is just a story they tell people because they can’t justify their weird preference to others on its own terms.
Or, we could just allow a market for organ donations. Boom, done. Where’s my Nobel?
Now, if you specify that we have to find the best fix while ignoring the obvious free-market solutions I don’t deny that Alvin Roth has done good work. And I’m certainly not blaming Roth personally for the fact that academia exists as an adjunct to the state—although academics generally do bear the lions share of responsibility for that. But I am definitely questioning the value of this enterprise, compared to bringing cheap food, clothes, etc, to hundreds of millions of people like Sam Walton did.
I don’t see why “saves lives” is the metric, but I bet that Microsoft products have been involved in saving far more lives. Moreover, people are willing to pay for Microsoft products, despite your baseless claims of their inferiority. Gates’s charities specifically go around doing things that people say they want but don’t bother to do with their own money. I don’t know much about the malaria program, but I do know the educational stuff has mostly been disastrous, and whole planks have been abandoned.
Obviously very far indeed.
Answer: Yes. Even today, number theory research highly relevant to efficient crypto is ongoing. A few years of difference in when that shows up would have large economic consequences. For example, as we speak, research in ongoing into practical fully homomorphic encryption which if it is implemented will allow cloud computing and deep processing of sensitive information, as well as secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information (such as medical records) from clouds. This is but one example.
Well, there is always the danger of lost-purpose. But it may help to keep in mind that the book-burnings and genocides in question both occurred a long-time ago. It is easier for something to be at the forefront of one’s mind when one can see more directly how it would have impacted one personally.
So, I’m generally inclined to allow for organ donation markets (although there are I think legitimate concerns about them). But since that’s not going to happen any time soon, I fail to see its relevance. A lot of problems in the world need to be solved given the political constraints that exist. Roth’s solution works in that context. The fact that a politically untenable better solution exists doesn’t make his work less beneficial.
So, Derstopa already gave some reasons to doubt this. But it is also worth noting that Walton died in 1992, before much of Walmart’s expansion. Also, there’s a decent argument that Walmart’s success was due not to superior organization but rather a large first-mover advantage (one of the classic ways markets can fail): Walmart takes advantage of its size in ways that small competitors cannot do. This means that smaller chains cannot grow to compete with Walmart in any fashion, so even if a smaller competitor is running something more efficiently, it won’t matter much. (Please take care to note that this is not at all the mom-and-pop-store argument which I suspect you and I would both find extremely unconvincing.)
Ok. Do you prefer Quality-adjusted life years ? Bill is doing pretty well by that metric.
“Involved with” is an extremely weak standard. The thing is that even if Microsoft had never existed, similar products (such as software or hardware from IBM, Apple, Linux, Tandy) would have been in those positions.
Let’s examine why people are willing to do so. It isn’t efficiency. For example, by standard benchmarks, Microsoft browsers have been some of the least efficient (although more recent versions of IE have performed very well by some metrics such as memory use ). Microsoft has had a massive marketing campaign to make people aware of their brand (classically marketing in a low information market is a recipe for market failure). And Microsoft has engaged in bundling of essentially unrelated products. Microsoft has also lobbied governments for contracts to the point where many government bids are phrased in ways that make non-Microsoft options essentially impossible. Most importantly: Microsoft gains a network effect: This occurs when the more common a product is, the more valuable it is compared to other similar products. In this context, once a single OS and set of associated products is common, people don’t want other other products since they will run into both learning-curve with the “new” product and compatibility issues when trying to get the new product to work with the old.
That some people make noise about wanting to help charity but don’t doesn’t make the people who actually do it as contributing less utility. Or is there some other point here I’m missing?
Yes, there’s no question that the education work by the Gates foundation has been profoundly unsuccessful. But the general consensus concerning malaria is that they’ve done a lot of good work. This may be something you may want to look into.
Yes, but number theory only gained practical application relatively recently. Your claim was that if people in the 1500s and 1600s had had access to this number theory, we’d all be better off now. It seems you believe that we’d now have more advanced number theory because of this. But my claim is that this stuff was seen as useless back then, so they would have mostly sat on this knowledge, and number theory now would be about where it is.
But those “political constraints” are not laws of nature, they are descriptions of current power relations which academics have helped bring about. I’m glad that the economics faculty spend much of their time thinking of ways to fix the problems caused by the sociology faculty, but it would save everyone time and money if they all went home.
No. I’d be more impressed with Gates if he gave people cash to satisfy their own revealed preferences, rather than arbitrary metrics. But that wouldn’t look as caring.
Yeah, maybe, although presumably it helped on the margin. But if Gates hadn’t set up his foundation, the resources involved would have gone to some use. Why are you only looking at one margin, and not the other?
But this notion of “efficiency” that you are using is merely a synonym for what we care about, specifically efficiency to the user. A more convenient UI, for example, is likely orders of magnitude more important than memory usage for efficiency to the user—yet convenience is subjective. Moreover, bundling, marketing, brands and network effects are not examples of market failure. In fact, marketing produces positive externalities. Of course Microsoft has a first-mover advantage over someone trying to make a new OS today, but that’s not an “unfair” advantage.
I’ll grant you that Microsoft has advantages in government contracting that they wouldn’t have in a proper free market, but you should in turn admit that they have also suffered from anti-trust laws.
I wasn’t talking about potential donors, I was talking about recipients. If you talk a lot about how much you love literature, but in fact you spend all your money on beer, then some so-called philanthropist building you a library is just a waste of everyone’s time.
Advances in Diophantine number theory in the Renaissance led directly to complex numbers and analytic geometry, which led to calculus and all of physics. If the Library at Alexandria had been preserved, the Industrial Revolution could have happened centuries earlier.
That’s an intriguing causal chain but its length & breadth give me pause. Are there any articles, books, or papers that nicely sum up the evidence for it (and ideally the evidence against it)?
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I mentioned number theory initially as an area because it is the one where we most unambiguously lost Greek knowledge. But it seems pretty clear we lost many other areas also, hence why I mentioned trig, where we know that there were multiple treatises on the geometry of triangles and related things which are no longer extant but are referenced in extant works.
I’m not at all convinced incidentally by the argument that people would have just sat on the number theory. Since the late 1700s, the rate of mathematical progress has been rapid. So while direct focus on the areas relevant to cryptography might not have occurred, closely connected areas (which are relevant to crypto) would certainly be more advanced.
So what evidence do you have that the economists are fixing the problems created by the sociologists in any meaningful sense?
So that won’t work at multiple levels. A major issue when assisting people in the developing world is coordination problems (there are things that will help a lot but if everyone has a little bit of money they don’t have an easy way to pool the money together in a useful fashion). Moreover, this assumes a degree of knowledge which people simply don’t have. A random African doesn’t know necessarily that bednets are an option, or even have any good understanding of where to get them from. And then one has things like vaccine research. You are essentially assuming that market forces will win do what is best when one is dealing with people who are lacking in basic education and institutions to effectively exercise their will even if they had the education.
Huh? All of these can result in total utility going down compared to what might happen if one picked a different market equilibrium. How are these not market failures?
In limited circumstances, marketing can produce positive utility (people learn about products they didn’t have knowledge of, or they get more data to compare products), but I’m curious to here how marketing is at all likely to produce positive externalities.
Yes, they have and that’s ok. Anti-trust laws help market stability. The prevent the problem we’ve seen in the banking and auto industries of being too big to fail, and prevent the problem of bundling to force products on new markets (which again I’m quite curious to here an explanation for how that isn’t a market failure).
I confess I don’t understand this question. Could you please clarify?
But these “institutions” are not laws of nature, they aren’t even tangible things—an “institution” is just a description of the way people co-ordinate with each other. So yes, people in developing countries often can’t co-ordinate because they have bad institutions, but it would be equally true to say that they can’t have good institutions because they don’t co-ordinate.
Actually, I think that a “random African” likely knows a lot more about what would improve his standard of living than you or I, and my mind boggles at any other presumption. If he’d rather spend his money on beer than bednets, but you give him a bednet anyway, then I hope it makes you happy, because you’re clearly not doing it for him.
Apart from the reasons you already mentioned, marketing creates a brand which reduces information costs. This is of course particularly important in a low information market. Spending money to promote your brand is a pre-commitment to provide satisfactory quality products.
Firstly, no-one can “pick” a market equilibrium. Secondly, order is defined in the process of its emergence. Thirdly, proof of a possibility and a demonstration of a real-world effect are not the same thing.
So every time a business gains on account of departures from the free market, that’s a travesty, but every time it loses, that’s the way things are supposed to work. No wonder you think academics are the only ones who do any good. Besides, TBTF isn’t an economic problem, this is a political problem. They had too many lobbyists to be allowed to fail, that’s all.
How is it a market failure? It’s possible for bundling to reduce consumer surplus, but that’s just a straight transfer.
You said earlier that:
My confusion was over this claim in that it seems to assume that a) sociologists are creating societal problems and b) economists are solving those problems.
Human behavior is not path independent. Institutions help coordination because prior functioning governments and organizations help people to keep coordinating. Values also come into play: Countries with functioning governments have citizens with more respect for government so they are more likely to cooperate with it an so on.
This only makes sense in a context where markets are low information and marketing creates actual information and where negative behavior by a brand will have a substantial reduction in sales. In practice, people have strong brand loyalty based on familiarity with logos and the like,. So people will keep buying the same brands not because they are the best but that’s because what they’ve always done. Humans are cognitive misers, and a large part of marketing is hijacking that.
You are missing the point. The point is that there are other stable equilibria that are better off for everyone but issues like networking effects and technological lock-in prevent people from moving off the local maximum.
What do these two sentences mean?
I don’t know where you saw a statement that implied that, and I’m curious how you got that sort of idea from what I wrote.
There’s an argument for that in the case of the car industry, but the economic consensus is that the economy as a whole would have gotten much worse if the banks hadn’t been bailed out.
Technological lock-in and network effects again. For example, in the case of Internet Explorer, having it bundled with Windows meant that many people ended up using IE by default, got very used to it, and then it had an advantage compared to other browsers which stayed around (because people then wrote software that needed IE and webpages emphasized looking good in IE). In this context, if the consumers had been given a choice of browsers, it is likely that other browsers, especially Netscape (and later Firefox) would have done much better, and by most benchmarks Netscape was a better browser.
So why haven’t they all done so? An RA may well have more on-the-ground knowledge, but a do-gooder may well have more of the kind of knowledge that you learn in school. Since the D-G is not seeking to take over the RA’s entire life, it’s a case of two heads are better than one.
You could do with distingusihing short term gains from long term interests. People don’t pop out of the womb knowing how to maximise the latter. It takes education. And institions: why save when the banks are crooked.
It would be truer still to say that good institions take a long and fragile history to evolve. They didn’t evolve everywerhe and they arrived late where they did. Go back about 500 years and no one had good (democratic, accountable, fair honest) instituions.
It’s hard to know where to start with that lot. Brands aren’t information like lib raries are information, they are an attempt to get people t to buy things by whatever means is permitted. They can be wors than no information at all, since African mothers would have presumably continued to brest fee without nestle’s intervention:
“The Nestlé boycott is a boycott launched on July 7, 1977, in the United States against the Swiss-based Nestlé corporation. It spread in the United States, and expanded into Europe in the early 1980s. It was prompted by concern about Nestle’s “aggressive marketing” of breast milk substitutes (infant formula), particularly in less economically developed countries (LEDCs), which campaigners claim contributes to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of babies, largely among the poor.[1] Among the campaigners, Professor Derek Jelliffe and his wife Patrice, who contributed to establish the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA), were particularly instrumental in helping to coordinate the boycott and giving it ample visibility worldwide.”
Yes, because all humans are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower. But then again, why doesn’t he sell the bednet I gave him and buys beer with it?
And I claim that where? Are you claiming that the donors are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower—and are also perfectly altruistic?
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ’s “random African” is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
Because you gave everyone else in the area a bednet, so now there’s a local glut. But yes, I’m sure some people do sell their bednets.
It is not (language warning) entirely uncontroversial. Whether through poor education or through giving disproportionate value to present circumstances (and none or too little to future circumstances), people can and often do do things that are, in the long run, self-defeating. (And note that this ‘long run’ can be measured in weeks or months, even hours in particularly extreme cases).
At least one study suggests that the ability to reject a present reward in favour of a greater future reward is detectable at a young age and is correlated with success in life.
Of course people can do things that are self-defeating—did I ever suggest otherwise? I never said people are perfect guardians of their own self-interest, I said, and I repeat, that a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
I am getting a little frustrated with people arguing against strawmans of my positions, which has now happened several times on this thread. Am I being unclear?
None of those links suggest that people are worse guardians of their own self-interest than the outsider. In fact, quite the reverse. Take the fertilizer study. The reason that the farmers weren’t following the advice of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture was that it was bad advice. To quote:
So the study demonstrates that the farmers were better guardians of their own self-interest than some bureaucrat in Nairobi (no doubt advised by a western NGO). If they had been forced to follow the (no doubt well-meaning) advice, they would have been much worse off. Maybe some would have died. Now, at the same time, they don’t know every possible combination, and it turns out that if they changed their farming methodology, they could become more productive. Great! That’s how society advances—by persuading people as to what is in their self-interest, not by making someone else their guardian.
Phrased in this way, I think that I agree with you, on average.
In the original context of your statement, however, I had thought that you meant that “a random charity recipient” instead of “a random person”.
Now, charity recipients are still people, of course. However, charity recipients are usually people chosen on the basis of poverty; thus, the group of people who are charity recipients tend to be poor.
Now, some people are good guardians of their own long-term self-interest, and some are not. This is correlated with wealth in an unsurprising way (as demonstrated in the marshmallow experiment linked to above); those people who are better guardians of their own long-term self-interest are, on average, more likely to be above a certain minimum level of wealth than those who are not. They are, therefore, less likely to be charity recipients. Therefore, I conclude that people who are in a position to receive benefits from a charity are, on average, worse guardians of their own long-term self-interest than people who are in a position to contribute to a charity.
So. I therefore conclude that a person, on average, will be a better guardian of his own self-interest than a random person of the category (charity recipient); since the selection of people who fall into that category biases the category to those who are poor guardians of their own self-interest. It’s not the only factor selected for in that category, but it’s significant enough to have a noticeable effect.
But likely not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than a nonrandom do-gooder who’s researched the specific problems the person is dealing with and developed expertise in solving them with resources that the person is has had no opportunity to learn to make use of.
Certainly—tautologically—he’s not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than some who is in fact a better one. But inventing a fictional character who is in fact a better one does not advance any argument.
One might as well invent a nonrandom do-gooder who thinks they have properly researched what they think are the specific problems the person is dealing with and thinks they have developed expertise in solving them with resources that they think the person has had no opportunity to learn to make use of, but who is nonetheless wrong. As with, apparently, and non-fictionally, the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture.
Of course, less qualified guardians of an individual’s self interest who believe themselves to be more qualified are a legitimate risk, but that doesn’t mean that the optimal solution is to have individuals act exclusively as guardians of their own self interest.
If the Kenyan Ministry of agriculture follows the prescriptions of the researchers in the article cited above, they will thereby become better guardians of those farmers’ interests than the farmers have thus far been, within that domain.
The optimal solution isn’t necessarily to have someone else act as the “guardian” of their self-interest, however well informed. BTW, I don’t know if this is true of American English, but in British English, one meaning of “guardian” is what an orphan has in place of parents. Doing things for adults without consulting them is usually a bad idea.
Not if they try to do so by simply coming in and telling the farmers what to do, nor by deciding the farmers’ economic calculations are wrong and manipulating subsidies to get them to do differently. (I’ve only glanced at the article; I don’t know if this is what they did.) Even when they’re right about what the farmers should be doing, they will go wrong if they use the wrong means to get that to happen. Providing information might be a better way to go. The presumption that if only you know enough, you can direct other people’s lives for them is pretty much always wrong.
But none of the examples given are of one person taking over another’s life. Most of this debate revolves around the fallact that someone either runs their own life, or has it run for them. In fact, there are many degress of advice/help/co-operation.
Yes, this meaning is in American English as well. A typical parental permission form for a child to go on a field trip or what-have-you will ask for the signature of “a parent or legal guardian”.
That isn’t obvious. D-G’s are likely to be qualified to help people, the people they are helping are likely to have a hsitory of not helping themselves sucessfully.
Would they have had access to fertilizer at all w/out the govt? Two heads are better than one, again.
I’m not.
I might agree about myself or “a random do-gooder” (dunno about Gates), but these people do look like they’ve done their homework.
People like Bill Gates aren’t “random do-gooders”. I’d not it find it strange that in the counterfactual that Bill Gates had the time to guard my own welfare (let alone some random African’s), he might do a better job at it than I would myself. Certainly he might provide useful tips about how to invest my money for example, might know ways that I’ve not even heard of.
Bill Gates was a software executive who got into malaria prevention and education reform and poverty reduction and God knows what else, not because of his deep knowledge and expertise in those subjects, but a generalised wish to become a philanthropist. He’s the very archetype of a random do-gooder.
But the whole point is that he doesn’t have the time (or knowledge, or inclination, or incentives, or …) to guard your welfare—or that of a “random African”. Sure, if Bill Gates was my father he might be a better guardian of my welfare than I am. But he ain’t.
My point is that the qualification “random” is rather silly when applied to one of the most wealthy people in the world. That he achieved that wealth (most of which he did not inherit) implies some skills and intelligence most likely beyond that of a randomly selected do-gooder.
An actually randomly-selected do-gooder would probably be more like a middle-class individual who walks to a soup-kitchen and offers to volunteer, or who donates money to UNICEF.
He didn’t say that. You’re being a troll.
I disagree. See this post by Yvain.
My answer is “probably yes”. Mathematics directly enables entire areas of science and engineering. Cathedrals and bridges are much easier to build if you know trigonometry. Electricity is a lot easier to harness if you know trigonometry and calculus, and easier still if you are aware of complex numbers. Optics—and therefore cameras and telescopes, among many other things—is a lot easier with linear algebra, and so are many other engineering applications. And, of course, modern electronics are practically impossible without some pretty advanced math and science, which in turn requires all these other things.
If we assume that technology is generally beneficial, then it’s best to develop the disciplines which enable it—i.e., science and mathematics—as early as possible.
He was talking about number theory specifically, not mathematics in general—in the first sentence you quoted he admitted it can be useful. (I doubt advanced number theory would have been that practically useful before the mid-20th century.)
Follow up reply in a separate comment since I didn’t notice this part of the remark the first time through (and it is substantial enough that it should probably not just be included as an edit):
If this falls into that category then the archetypes of knowledge that doesn’t contribute to human welfare is massively out of whack. Figuring out how much of the Great Filter is in front of us or behind us is extremely important. If most of it is behind us, we have a lot less worry. If most of the Great Filter is in front of us, then existential risk is a severe danger to humanity as a whole. Moreover, if it is in front of us, then it most likely some form of technology and caused by some sort of technological change (since natural disasters aren’t common enough to wipe out every civilization that gets off the ground). Since we’re just beginning to travel into space, it is likely that if there is heavy Filtration in front of us, it isn’t very far ahead but is in the next few centuries.
If there is heavy Filtration in front of us, then it is vitally important that we figure out what that Filter is and what we can do to avert it, if anything. This could be the difference between the destruction of humanity and humanity spreading to the stars. If there are any contributions that contribute to the welfare of humanity, those which involve our existence as a whole should be high up on the list.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I’m not about to investigate the economics of their entire supply chain (I already don’t shop at Walmart simply due to location, so it doesn’t even stand to influence my buying decisions,) but I wouldn’t be surprised if Walmart is actually wealth-negative in the grand scheme. They produce very large profits, but particularly considering that their margins are so small and their model depends on dealing in such large bulk, I think there’s a fair likelihood that the negative externalities of their business are in excess of their profit margin.
It’s impossible for a business to be GDP negative, but very possible for one to be negative in terms of real overall wealth produced when all externalities are accounted for, which I suspect leads some to greatly overestimate the positive impact of business.
Why focus on the negative externalities rather than the positive? And why neglect all the partner surpluses—consumer surplus, worker surplus, etc? I’d guess that Walmart produces wealth at least an order of magnitude greater than its profits.
Because corporations make a deliberate effort to privatize gains while socializing expenses.
GDP is a pretty worthless indicator of wealth production, let alone utility production; the economists who developed the measure in the first place protested that it should by no means be taken as a measure of wealth production. There are other measures of economic growth which paint a less optimistic picture of the last few decades in industrialized nations, although they have problems of their own with making value judgments about what to measure against industrial activity, but the idea that every economic transaction must represent an increase in well-being is trivially false both in principle and practice.
This is true of everyone, not just corporations. I’m very suspicious that you take this scepticism only against corporations, but not academics.
Someone who is doing research that is published and doesn’t lead to direct patents is socializing gains whether or not they want to.
Only if there are any gains to socialize. Consider honestly the societal gain from the marginal published paper, particularly given that it gets 0 cites from other papers not by the same author.
So, I’d be curious what evidence you have that the average paper gets 0 citations from papers not by the same author across a wide variety of fields. But, in any event, the marginal return rate per a paper isn’t nearly as important as the marginal return rate per a paper divided by the cost of a paper. For many fields (like math), the average cost per a paper is tiny.
Either I cannot write clearly or others cannot read clearly, because again and again in this thread people are responding to statements that are not what I wrote. The common factor is me, which makes me think it is my failure to write clearly, but then I look at the above. I referred to “the marginal published paper”, and even italicised the word marginal. JoshuaZ replies by asking whether I have evidence for my statement about “the average paper.” I don’t know what else to say at this point.
However, yes, I have plenty of evidence that the marginal paper across a wide variety of fields gets 0 citations, see e.g. Albarran et al. Note incidentally that there are some fields where the average paper gets no citations!
I don’t think a marginal paper is a thing (marginal cost isn’t a type of cost, but represents a derivative of total cost). Do you mean that
d(total citations)/d(number of papers) = 0?This seems impossible, unless all papers get no citations, ie. no-one cites anyone but themselves. That actually happens?
Of course the marginal paper is a thing. If there were marginally less research funding, the research program cancelled wouldn’t be chosen at random, it would be the least promising one. We can’t be sure ex ante that that would be the least successful paper, but given that most fields have 20% or more of papers getting no citations at all, and other studies show that papers with very low citation counts are usually being cited by the same author, that’s good evidence.
Note that I did not say that papers, on average, get no citations. I said that the average (I.e. median) paper gets no citations.
Weren’t you just a few posts ago talking about the problems of politics getting involved in funding decisions? But now you are convinced that in event of a budget cut it will be likely to go cut the least promising research? This seems slightly contradictory.
Would it? I fear it would be the one whose participants are worst at ‘politics’.
Ah, right, we’re on the same page now. Your argument, however, assumes that a) fruitfulness of research is quite highly predictable in advance, and b) available funds are rationally allocated based on these predictions so as to maximise fruitful research (or the proxy, citations). Insofar as the reality diverges from these assumptions, the expected number of citations of the “marginal” paper is going to approach the average number.
Oh, by “average” I assumed you meant the arithmetic mean, since that is the usual statistic.
Sorry, in this context, I switched talking about the marginal to talking about the average. You shouldn’t take my own poor thinking as a sign of anything, although in this context, it is possible that I was without thinking trying to steel man your argument, since when one is talking about completely eliminating academic funding, the average rate matters much more than the marginal rate. But the citation you’ve given is convincing that the marginal rate is generally quite low across a variety of fields.
Who exactly is arguing for completely eliminating academic funding? If you mean me, I hope you can provide a supporting quote.
Well, various statements you’ve made seemed to imply that, such as your claim that burning down the Library of Alexandria had the advantage that:
and you then stated
If you prefer, to be explicit, you seem to be arguing that all goverment funding of academics should be cut. Is that an accurate assessment? In that context, given that that’s the vast majority of academic research, the relevant difference is still the average not the marginal rate of return.
That being a large portion of academia, this presents at least a partial argument for the present state of affairs wrt academia being publicly funded.
The majority of people, other than psychopaths, are not as ruthless in the quest to externalize their costs. A substantial portion of academics sacrifice renown and glory to do research they believe has intrinsic value. This is in large part the reason they can be paid so much less than people of equivalent ability in the private sector.
I agree with your general point about business men and entrepreneurship being undervalued however.
Uh huh. Is it true of charities?
As zslatsman already said, this is not true to nearly as great an extent of most people as it is of corporations. Corporations have an obligation to maximize profits, whereas humans are rarely profit maximizers.
Some people are more willing to externalize costs than others. For instance, some people, given the opportunity to file expense reports under which they can cover luxuries, will take the opportunity to live it up as much as possible on someone else’s dollar. Other people, myself included, would feel guilty, and try to be as frugal as possible.
Try not to overgeneralize your own mentality.
I don’t think you’ll find many here to agree that math doesn’t help with human welfare.
Apples and oranges. Business is there to make money. Money is instrumental, it is there to be spent on terminal values, things of intrinsic worth. People spend their excess on entertainement, art, hobbies, family life, and, yes knowledge. All these things are terminal values.
I don’t need to carry out expected utility calculations explicitly to guess that burning down a library is way more likely to be bad than good. My “What?” was because I can’t see any obvious reason to suspect that actually carrying it out would yield a substantially different answer than my guess, and wondered whether you had such a reason in mind.
But note that we aren’t talking about a library being burned down by an arsonist. Most of the various stories have it being burned down by the government of the day, as a public policy measure. It appears that you don’t even consider their reasons before condemning them – highly suspicious.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the library was destroyed by Amr ibn al-Aas as I was taught (although wiki is not so sure). Reasons why his burning down a library might be bad:
Risk of fire spreading (but does not appear to have been the case)
Loss of private property by the owners of the building or books (but does not apply here)
Loss of useful knowledge (does not appear to apply here, but disputed by JoshuaZ)
Reasons why his burning down a library might be good:
Academics now forced to get useful job and contribute to society (important)
Destruction of contentious material likely to cause civil unrest (important)
Owner of building now able to build something more useful in its place (minor)
It is an empirical question as to which effects are stronger – and the record shows that Egypt was richer, more peaceful and more stable under the Umayyids than it had been under the Byzantines. Personally I regard it as similar to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
Seems you’re missing a key one. Probably the most important one. At the very least, this is to me the primary advantage of even building libraries at all:
Loss of a major means of spreading, disseminating and finding knowledge, whether the knowledge itself is lost or not.
Imagine trying to find information regarding a specific species of bird (a standard “Encyclopedia” will only have an entry on birds, not on each known species), with no internet and no libraries. You’re going to run around for a while until you finally find someone who knows someone who’s heard of someone who owns a book that might contain the information you want on that particular bird.
Libraries are, first and foremost, a convenient place to store a lot of books, which implies a convenient place to find any book in particular you’re looking for with much higher success rates than asking a random friend.
There appears to be a massive implied premise here that academics aren’t useful.
Not at all. The point is that some academics are useful and some are not; there is no market process that forces them to be so. It may be that some of the academics are able to continue doing exactly what they were doing, just for a private employer. But I would not bet on that outcome for most.
???
Academics need funding. The ability to get funding is well correlated with usefulness in most fields (to be fair, other things are in play, like institutional inertia, fashion, etc. etc.) Useful research also results in spin off companies, and fame. There are all sorts of incentives to be useful in academia.
There is also the issue of hedging, and diversification of intellectual effort—you want people doing long term payoff and long shot research as well. Modern business culture is generally much worse at this than academic culture is at being useful. Google, a company started by two ex graduate students, is one of the few notable exceptions.
How would you tell?
I could look at output over the last 50 years, comparing useful stuff out of academia vs long term research done by corporate research labs, scaled by funding. Or I could look at incentives high level corporate decision makers have, which heavily favor the short term and empire building. Or I could look at anecdotal evidence based on testimonies of my corporate vs academic acquaintances. Or I could look at universities today that produce useful applied research (basically any major research university) vs companies today that have labs working on fundamental research (Google, Microsoft, possibly some oil companies (?), maybe Honda, maybe some big pharmas and that’s about it).
The vast majority of big companies (the only ones who could afford fundamental research) do not engage in fundamental research. The vast majority of research universities do very useful applied work.
This might equally lead to the conclusion that the kind of “fundamental research” you’re talking about just isn’t very worthwhile.
Ok. Which of the following do you think is a worthwhile research question:
Non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, 1826).
Galois theory (Galois, 1830).
Complex numbers (Bombelli, 1572).
The periodic table (Mendeleev, 1869).
Interventionist causality (Wright, Neyman, Rubin, Pearl, Robins, etc. 1920-today).
Objectivism (Rand, ~1950s).
None of these were developed by corporations (or similar entities) or corporation sponsored individuals, to my knowledge.
Bombelli predates corporations on any large scale, so including his work seems strange in this context.
Private individuals could not incorporate until fairly late (after Bombelli) but states started establishing commercial entities that play the role modern corporations play in our society fairly early. I edited a little to clarify, though, thanks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_corporations
I don’t know anything about interventionist causality, and Objectivism seems like a waste of time. The rest all seem to have produced worthwhile results.
But this is costless analysis! Of course if you buy lots of lottery tickets, and look only at the winners, then buying lottery tickets looks worthwhile. You have to consider the opportunity costs, not just of these research projects, but also of every other similarly situated research project. And you also have to do time-discounting. Bombelli discovering complex numbers in 1572 looks like a waste, when they weren’t useful for 200 years or more.
Moreover, I don’t know why “corporations” is the comparison. The comparison is the private sector generally. Huge amounts of scientific work are done, and continue to be done, by enthusiastic amateurs, and the charitable sector. I am not making the claim that in an ideal world all government academics should be fired (although I do think that would be a big improvement on the current situation). I merely claimed that, on the margin, we are hugely oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with businessmen.
Ok. So, helpful fundamental research, as it is currently produced: (a) imposes a heavy opportunity cost, (b) has a low success rate, (c) is generally discovered “too early,” leading to waste. What is your proposal for doing better? Can you give me some examples of things like complex numbers discovered in the private sector, by charities, or ‘enthusiastic amateurs’?
Incidentally, the success rate of fundamental research for a given finite time horizon k is an untestable quantity. Thus, (b) is a weak complaint. (a) is hard to argue also, because you need to construct counterfactual scenarios that people will believe.
Examples that fit Salemicus’s narrative in this context aren’t non-existent. For example, Fermat was a lawyer by profession and did math as a hobby in his free time. There are many similar examples prior to the 19th century or so. And some major charities have helped fund successful research- one sees a lot of this with a variety of diseases.
Sure. For a start, complex numbers themselves—Bombelli was in the private sector himself. Some others, taken at random:
For-profit: Lightbulb (Edison, 1881), Propranolol and Cimetedine (Black, 1960s), Fractals (Mandelbrot, 1975)
Amateurs: Evolutionary Theory (Darwin, 1830s-50s), Photoelectric effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity, Matter-Energy (Einstein, 1905), Linear B (Ventris, 1951),
Actually, if the success rate of this spending is as unknowable and untestable as you say it is, that’s an excellent argument to stop forcing unwilling people to pay for it. But note that although I’m happy to fight you on your strongest ground (pure scientific research), surely you must then concede that the rest of the battlefield is mine, and that all government spending on academia that can’t be justified in these terms (e.g. arts, humanities, medicine, space exploration, etc) should be eliminated. I’m not doctrinaire—I’d settle for that compromise.
EDIT: I’d truly be fascinated to know why was this voted down.
I don’t know precisely why your comment was voted down, but one obvious guess is factual issues:
Darwin got most of his ideas from his time working the survey/exploration ship the HMS Beagle. As you may gather from the “HMS” in front, this was a ship in the British navy which had specific funding to hire and provide support to a naturalist.
This is why I suspect you are getting downvoted. First, it shows a confused notion of what is “pure scientific research”- a large part of space exploration and medical research counts as pure research for purposes of the arguments being made by IlyaShpitser and others in this context. Moreover, you seem to be wanting a “compromise” as if the truth must be somehow negotiable. The key of discussion is to understand what is likely to be actually true. Settling for a compromise isn’t how one reaches truth (and no, Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply here).
I will not argue with your post as although I disagree with some things you stated, I requested comments on why downvoted. However, I think the following correction is necessary:
Darwin was a “gentleman naturalist,” held no official post on the Beagle, received no salary, and in fact had to pay to go on the journey. The ship was going for surveying purposes, and would have gone on its journey regardless of his presence. He held no academic position in the years afterwards when he was working on his theory. I think it’s quite reasonable to classify this as amateur.
So from reading this Wikipedia summary it looks like the situation was actually more complicated than either of us realized (although definitely closer to your summary):
So yes, he was self-financed. But the primary issue is that he was given support by the crew and the entire existence of an exploration ship (which if anything seems pretty similar to the space program you’ve criticized). Would you call someone who does work without pay now using data from NASA an amateur? If so, then the term “amateur” isn’t very relevant to capturing the most important detail- where the resources for their work comes from.
How exactly do you measure “success” in this case ? As for me, I find myself hard-pressed to think of any examples of fundamental research that weren’t ultimately beneficial—except perhaps for instances of outright fraud or gross incompetence.
Even if a scientist spent five years and a million dollars trying to discover, say, the link between gene X and phenotype Y, and found no such link, then the work was still not in vain. Firstly, we can now be more certain that gene X does not cause Y; secondly, we can most likely gain a lot of collateral benefits from the work, leading to an increased rate of discovery in the future.
No. Just… no. What differentiates basic research and applied research is how many years there are until commercial application. For applied research, the number of low- five years is stretching it, and hopefully it’ll be less than one. For basic research, the is number is larger- it was around three decades from Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect to the commercialization of cameras based on it.
The point that some here considering burning of books a taboo, and that that disagrees with consequentialism, is an interesting and valid point. The point that public goods can be provided without government intervention is an interesting and valid point as well, but you’re not arguing it well.
Another problem with fundamental research—from a commercial corporation’s point of view—is that its results may not be applicable at all to products in your target market. For example, you might start by researching the formation of clouds in the atmosphere, and end up with major breakthroughs in atomic theory. Those are interesting, to be sure, but how are you going to sell that ?
This is but one of the reasons why large corporations tend to stay away from fundamental research, unless they can write it off their taxes or something.
Can you briefly taboo ‘useful’ for me? What do you mean by that?
In this context, I mean providing a service that someone else is willing to pay for.
By that definition, heroin is useful.
So by that notion, anything that is an externality but can’t be captured by market forces is by definition not useful? Does that capture your intuition for the word useful?
I said is willing to pay for—not necessarily that they can pay for it. Any one-sentence definition of a word as complex as useful is going to necessarily be incomplete, but I certainly mean to include externalities in it. If, for example, people value “a sense of belonging to a community” and are willing to give up something meaningful for it, but co-ordination problems or whatever else means it can’t be captured by market forces, then I would absolutely view someone who creates “a sense of belonging to a community” as useful—provided that the cost of their doing so is less than the price that the community members would be hypothetically willing to pay.
Fair enough. How do you determine then what people are counterfactually willing to pay?
I don’t think anyone has a good way of doing that.
Would you grant that many things are valuable which are nevertheless not useful in that sense?
EDIT: I don’t mean anything fancy here. Eating a hot dog, for example, is valuable (I’m willing to pay to do it) but not in any sense useful (no one is willing to pay me to do it).
Yes, sure. But I was talking about useful as a quality of a person, not as a quality of an object.
However, as my comments in this thread are getting voted down, I assume it’s not really worthwhile to continue this conversation.
I see. And does the fact that much academic research produces positive externalities/public goods, which thus aren’t easily funded by private employers says what in this context?
Deadweight cost of taxation + deadweight costs of political rent-seeking + resource misallocation due to political decision-making + opportunity costs
versus
costs from possibility that private sector is unable to capture all externalities
Markets fail. Use markets.
I’m confused by this remark, given the context is about academic jobs, not government intervention in the market. Can you expand/clarify what you mean?
Government creation of academic jobs is intervention in the market for academic jobs.
Yes, but that’s a tiny fraction of the issues you list above. Unless I’m misreading you. By for example deadweight cost of taxation, you mean the deadweight loss of the portion of taxes that go to fund academic research?
Taking that sort of interpretation throughout, I’m still not sure what your point is. Can you be more explicit and maybe use full sentences?
You stated that academics aren’t easily funded by the private sector because of an externality argument. I agreed that it is possible to argue that “basic research” or some such is underprovided by the market, because the private sector may not be able to capture all externalities, and that this is in some sense a market failure. However, I am saying that:
No-one can say how by much the private sector is underproviding. Therefore even if the intervention were done by angels, it is as likely to make things worse as better.
Government intervention will cost money, resulting in deadweight losses through tax.
The creation of a powerful body of rent-seeking will cause academic research to be massively oversupplied
Moreover “research” is not a fungible good; the money and resources will not necessarily go to the most useful areas, but to the most politically convenient ones
The rent-seeking will also have deadweight costs (e.g. academics spending lots of time writing grant proposals, taxpayers having to organise to prevent themselves getting robbed blind)
This will also incentivise rent-seeking elsewhere (if the academics are successful in asking for a subsidy, it encourages the farmers)
The adoption of the subsidy discourages market participants from finding new ways to capture the externality.
So, even though there may be a textbook “market failure,” there is no reason for any intervention. Dissolve the modern-day monasteries, and let academics prove their use, if they can. And indeed, I’m sure Alvin Roth would be just fine if we did.
No. We can make such estimates by looking at how helpful basic research was in the past.
Sure. How much?
That’s a danger certainly, but what evidence do you have that that’s happening?
The areas where politics has heavy aspects are actually the areas with the least government funding. For example, physics has a lot of government funding, whereas most of the humanities and social sciences have comparatively little. Thus, the politics comes into play primarily through the interaction with outside donors with agendas. That’s how you get virulently anti-Israel attitudes in Middle-Eastern studies due to funds from rich Saudis and you get Israel studies as a subject which is about as ridiculously biased in the other direction for the same reason. Political problems in the sciences are rare.
We have theorems and a lot of empirical of how externalities interact with markets. If you think there’s something wrong with that vast body of literature, feel free to point it out.
Is this a serious argument?
Yes, grant proposal writing is annoying and often a waste of time. Question: What fraction of taxpayer money is going to academic research?
At this point I think I have to cite Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek, 1945 link.
Where I live, we spend approx $4bn per year (0.64% of GDP) on state-funded research (note that this figure is conservative because it doesn’t include the way that higher education funds get siphoned off into research). Conservatively then, let’s say $1bn in deadweight loss annually, just in this country—and our state-funded research is low compared to most OECD countries. If we extrapolate this figure to the world economy, we get a deadweight loss of approx $127bn annually, just due to government research spending. That’s a lot of bednets.
I am not talking about partisan clashes. I am talking about money being spent on worthless projects because they seem cool or win votes. NASA has a budget of almost $18bn!
Of course it’s a serious argument—subsidizing one group of rent-seekers encourages others. I am of course being a little facetious in the sense that both the academics and the farmers already have their snouts deep in the trough.
Sorry, I’m not following. You are citing Hayek to argue what here?
Ok. So we have less than 1% of GDP going to state-funded research. And where is that going to go?
Projects seeming “cool” is a very different claim than political rent-seeking. In this case though, looking at the overall NASA budget isn’t very helpful: First, much of that budget is not going to what would be considered academic research. Second, you are talking about the space program of one of the world’s largest economies, so the total cost is a misleading metric. Third, technologies developed by the US space program (especially GPS, communication satellites and weather satellites) have had large-scale world-changing impact.
It often doesn’t, and the case you’ve picked is a really good one. In the US, many of the people getting farm subsidies are people who are rural and if anything anti-ivory tower. A large fraction would probably be turned off of the idea of government subsidies if it was compared to what those East Coast intellectuals were doing. (I’m engaging in some broad brush strokes here obviously but some people like this do exist.) This sort of thing is connected to why many groups (including farmers) have tried to get their money through tax breaks rather than direct subsidies. Of course, from an economic perspective, tax expenditures are identical to subsidies. But people don’t like to think of themselves as getting handouts so they prefer tax breaks (at least in the US).
By the way, my point earlier about only a small fraction of tax money going to academic research was (to be clear) about the claim that academic research would necessitate tax policy watchdog groups.
That no central planner can know how much “ought” to be spent on research.
I don’t know what people would spend their own money on. That’s the whole point.
Yes, which is why I made distinct points. One is the problem of rent-seeking, but the point you are responding to there is about misallocation.
Oh every group of rent-seekers bleeding the polity dry claim that they’ve only made a small nick, so there’s no need to worry. Meanwhile we die of a thousand cuts. Are academia worse rent-seekers than (say) teachers? Obviously not. But the opportunity cost is probably higher, because they are far more likely to be able to do something productive.
Since no one is arguing for complete central planning, I don’t see how this is relevant.
You are missing my point, maybe I should be more explicit: You have a tiny portion of GDP going to research, and most of those resources go back into the economy.
Missing the point. You claimed that academics getting tax money for research necessitated the creation of tax payer watchdog groups. The point is that since there are much larger interest groups getting much more money who are much more effectively organized, the watchdog groups will be necessary no matter what.
Since we don’t have a full list which books were in the library, let alone a list of which ones the library had the only copy of, how can you have any certainty that none of the lost books contained any useful knowledge?
To be fair, he didn’t say “does not apply here” with certainty; he said “does not appear to apply here”, implying some degree of uncertainty.
In absence of substantial evidence either way, my prior probability assignment that none of the knowledge stored a major library is useful is very small.
As Bugmaster says, I don’t claim certainty.
But we can look for evidence. Are there any technologies that go missing after the destruction of the library (similar to the loss of Greek fire that happened 600 years later)? Or perhaps an industrial regress that might inidicate missing knowledge? And if there is no evidence of any such, how should we update?
Well, it is hard to say, since direct technologies leave as more of an archaeological record as say math texts which are essentially technologies. But one can’t help but notice that the Antikythera mechanism predated the library, and we didn’t have anything like it again until the 1400s. However, this is imperfect in that it looks like a lot of wars and problems occurred between the height of the Greeks and the burning of Alexandria so pinning this sort of thing on it is tough.
Loss of intrisically valubale knowledge.
Money is instumental.
Are artists useful? Musicians? Enterainers?
Inresting definition of “good”. There is a much better solution, which is a live-and-let-live culture.
But, presubaly, dumber. Pig Happy might be OK for you, but count me out.
Yes, I’m surprised so many people are trying to argue that the lost knowledge would have been useful. This may be true, but is it really relevant? Well, apparently it is to Salemicus.
Although it’s worth noting here that going by the other threads Salemicus is using an unusual notion of “useful”. In fact it’s specific enough that it allows us to answer the question
with “yes”, “yes”, and “yes”. This is sufficiently different from the ordinary notion of “useful” that I suspect a different word should be used for clarity. Maybe “valuable”? (I mean, I’d say that the knowledge is valuable in the ordinary sense regardless of whether it’s valuable in the sense I’ve proposed—because, you know, terminal values—but from here on out I’m talking about the sense I’ve proposed, not the ordinary sense.)
Which raises the point—we’d certainly consider that valuable now. I.e., I think you could get people to pay quite a lot to recover whatever lost knowledge was burnt, even if it’s not very useful in the ordinary sense. Should this be counted? I.e., if we’re going to measure the value of something by how much people are willing to pay for it, as Salemicus does, should we count that only in its own time, or cross-temporally? The former is the usual way of doing things, but Salemicus hasn’t specified, and I have to wonder if there’s something to the latter way of thinking, even if it’s impossible to compute...
Surely a consequentialist could come to a conclusion about book-burning being bad and then write an outraged comment about it—the potential negatives in the long-term of the burning of such a library are debatable but the potential positives in the long-term are AFAICT non-existent. Such a catastrophic failure of cost-benefit analysis would be something a consequentialist could in fact be quite outraged about.
Incidentally,
...it seems self-evident to me that this is not in any way an interesting or meaningful comparison to ask people to make (ETA: in light of the above, anyway). It’s “good” rhetoric but seems to be abysmal rationality; it’s a “there are starving children in Africa, eat your peas” argument.
Despite being a consequentialist (*), I believe that the act of burning libraries possesses such a massive disutility that it is almost always the wrong thing to do. I can elaborate on my reasoning if you’re interested, but my main point is that consequentialism and virtue ethicism can sometimes come to the same conclusion; this does not invalidate either philosophy.
(*) Or as close to being one as I can accomplish given my biases.
Since there is no gain whatsoever, it is still negative consequentially.
This doesn’t seem that relevant. If you look above you’ll see that Salemicus primary argument concerning the library wasn’t that it was necessarily a good thing to do but that it wasn’t severe compared to much worse things that happened in the same time period. His other argument about the role of academics was a subthread of that.
How do you quantify the worth of knowledge when you don’t know what it is?
With difficulty. If you read the rest of this thread, specific examples based on what is suspected to have been at Alexandria have been discussed. One can make reasoned guesses based on was known and what was referenced elsewhere as being studied topics. See the earlier discussion about Diophantus (in the same subthread) for example.
Ok. The comment wasn’t directed at you. It’s just another of the many problems of trying to evaluate eveything by monetary worth.
That one was probably an accident. Caesar had to burn his own ships so the enemy couldn’t keep him from using them, and the fire got out of control.
This would work if conquerers were also effective at destroying archeological evidence. But they seem not to have been, and a complete archeological record would just settle the question of which city was really first, given some appropriate and agreed upon standard. And that city would be the true dawn.