Frequently evidence for the corrupting influence is overstated by the supporters of campaign finance reform. For example assuming that the correlation between campaign expenditures and victory represents a causal relationship like this blog post over at change-congress.org does. Indeed, one would expect that generally the more appealing candidate would garner more donations as would the front runner¹. Still, only an idiot would believe that money spent on lobbyists and campaign contributions doesn’t buy any influence. After all why would companies spend this money if it didn’t increase the chances of regulations favorable to their interests? This extra influence purchased by corporations and the wealthy surely helps create inefficient policies and bad laws. Thus it’s not surprising that so many people, from internet trolls to very smart men like Lawrence Lessig, believe that effective campaign finance reform will radically improve the quality of government. However, I would argue that this apparent legislative paradise is merely a mirage. Trying to eliminate the problem of unequal access is necessarily a game of whack-a-mole. The more stringently we regulate one type of political pandering (such as for campaign contributions) the worse we make another type of political pandering.

This isn’t to say that none of Lessig’s (unoriginal) ideas are worthwhile. I think public funding of elections might be a good way to reduce the incumbent advantage, combat mistrust in the system and encourage a more diverse set of candidates to run². Of course the public is never likely to support the relatively large (though still small compared to the federal budget) sums required for public financing to drown out the effects of wealthy candidates or third party ads run without coordination with the campaign³. However, the belief that even a perfectly implemented public financing system would eliminate the problems of undue influence is misguided. All it would do is change the currency.

If both candidates are given the same amount of funds then aspiring office holders will simply scramble for some other kind of advantage. Likely free channels to distribute their message or celebrities to draw extra attention. If both candidates can but equivalent amounts of airtime maybe they will scramble to get the most respected celebrities to appear in advertisements to make them more effective. Maybe instead they will scramble to kiss ass to the party elite to purchase political endorsements or to union leaders to mobilize campaign workers and distribute their message. Or maybe it will be elite society so more doors are opened for them. In any case it’s simply not plausible to assume that there won’t be some group of people who are far more able to benefit the campaign than others. These people will be courted for the slight advantage they can provide. Ultimately only one person can win the election and equalizing the candidates along one dimension will simply make them compete all the more fiercly for advantage along some other dimension. At least monetary contributions have the advantage of being openly published and being available to anyone with money. That’s a lot better than many ways influence could be distributed.

Even if you imagined a world where candidates felt no need to court any power brokers to be elected it’s hard to imagine that we still wouldn’t see all the harms associated with lobbyists. Legislators often need to be informed about issues and it’s effect on industry so it would be disastrous (and likely unconstitutional) to simply ban them from interacting with industry insiders. Unfortunately there is often no other group organized enough to realize that legislation was upcoming and provide their own knowledgeable polished expert to present their case to lawmakers. Transparency and neutral government experts can help but they can’t solve the problem. Banning lobbyists or lobbying couldn’t stop companies from purchasing influence. It could only drive it underground.

Legislators have to seek advice and information somewhere and money will always enable one to make sure that it’s easier and more convenient to learn about their side of the argument. Nothing can stop corporations from establishing branches in DC and ensuring that the executives employed therein are persuasive advocates for their cause who travel in the same social circle as legislators. You can’t bar the friends and relatives of legislators from working nor from sharing their views with the legislator over Christmas dinner or at the bar. All a ban on lobbyists would accomplish is to transform a transparent, widely accessible and regulated means of purchasing influence into a complex, totally opaque system of purchasing influence that also favors established companies and interests over new players. At least now a upstart like google can hire their own lobbyists on day 1 and compete with the entrenched interests rather than suffering from unfavorable regulation for years while they learned the unwritten rules and hired the friends and families of politicians slowly enough not to draw attention to what they were doing.

In short, the open influence of money in politics may be bad but it’s not at all clear the alternatives are any better. At the very least the existence of lobbyists and campaign contributions prevents the creation of an entrenched political elite who perpetuate their power and influence by making sure they know the right people and attend the right parties. I’d much rather have a system where anyone of any background who makes it big or builds an organization of like-minded donors can purchase access than one in which unwritten rules and social status reserve influence to the established elite.

At first the Barack victory filled me with hope and excitement. Aside from the symbolic accomplishment of accepting a president of African ancestory Obama seems to be the rarest sort of politician: a man of first class intellect honorably committed to the ideal of improving society but pragmatic enough to deliberately mislead the public. I couldn’t prove that, if I could it wouldn’t be true, but the way Barack accepted Christ (and the particular flavor he lead people to believe he endorsed at that time) was remarkably convenient. Not only is this great man now our president but he providentially bestrides the political landscape at a time of crisis handing him the opportunity to recast the American social contract. Universal health care, improved race relations, universal access to education what isn’t now within our grasp?

Sadly, nothing that really matters. Sure society might improve slightly, we might grow slightly strong social ties, we might erase a little pain with improved health care but nothing fundamentally is going to change. Decades of social science research tell us that our capacity for happiness is handicapped by evolution and their is no perfect social structure that can prevail over basic biological constraints. Even if Barack could spread his hands and bring forth plenty to every man, woman and child in the country he wouldn’t change our human nature. Someone is going to have more money, more power, faster cars, hotter sexual partners and (ultimately) more social status and others will crave it. A well ordered society can eliminate some small genuine efficiencies but ultimately decades of data indicate that further major improvement in overall societal happiness are denied to us by our biology. Sure, the industrial revolution made people happier but a country hits a certain minimum level of prosperity (which the western world has enjoyed for at least half a century) and everyone has indoor plumbing and gets morphine while dying of painful cancer overall societal happiness hits a brick wall.

To put the case more vivedly who would you prefer to be: a roman emperor¹ or a poor resident in an inner city slum? I know I’d prefer the former even though objectively the worst off Americans get a better education, receive better medical care and have better (non-human) toys than the most pampered Roman emperor. The worst school in the poorest slum throws knowledge at children about beyond the wildest dreams of the most educated philosophers of the classical age. No need to stab in the dark about earth, air, fire and water the book tells you about chemical elements right there, no need to wonder if moving lights in the sky are gods, your daily dose of TV makes sure you know they are other stars and planets. For all of Emperor Claudius’s imperial majesty he couldn’t command the quality of medical treatment that we provide to penniless vagrants who wander into our hospitals. Having objectively better conditions simply doesn’t keep making us more happy after some point and there’s a limit to how much fairer distribution can improve the situation.

If this was simply destiny then fine, we do the best that we can but biology need not be destiny. If evolution limits our capacity for joy, wonder and pleasure then we must remove those limits. Perhaps you think this isn’t possible, perhaps the flawed logic of Brave New World² makes you think this dream is only an illusion. However, there is solid research baking up the commonsense fact that some people have innately higher happiness fixed points than others. We all experience the ups and downs of life but some of us tend to return to a state of vague glumness while others drift back to innate happiness. Discovering a treatment, or offering genetic modification, to lift us all up to this higher set point would do an order of magnitude more for social welfare than any single payer health care scheme or universal college access could in the wet dreams of progressives. Even better we need not worry that this pleasure would undermine our social and economic systems: research indicates that hypomanic people are actually more productive and better employees than those of us more given to depression³.

Making us all as resilient and happily inclined as the most good natured of us is only what we know for sure could be achieved. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t take average happiness to unimaginable levels. Every day could be as good as the best day of your life and there is no reason to believe some kind of drugged out stupor or uniform monotonous joy would be necessary to achieve this. Bad things would still sadden us and good ones life our moods, it’s just a question of where we want to put the baseline. Of course more radical change would have to be carried out with extreme caution but when the benefits are so unimaginably huge we have a moral duty to explore our options.

In light of all this I find myself seeing the activists on both sides of this election as tragic figures. The crusading Obama supporter thinks of themselves as fighting the good fight for a better world but in reality their only fighting over the tiniest crumbs of possible social welfare. It’s as if we are all standing out in the rain zealously debating whether to trade our umbrellas for raincoats to stay dry but failing to even ask if we might want to step inside. Then again maybe Obama is an even better man than I give him credit for, maybe he’ll start a secret government research program into biochemically improving people’s average happiness. It’s a long shot but maybe I’ll write him a note and try to convince him.

So for the most part I try to avoid the generic partisan controversies like this Ayers business. For the most part both sides in the debate (even when one side is totally correct) tend to generate more heat than light and there is rarely anything useful of substance to be said. However, the more I hear the McCain campaign and it’s supporters harping about Obama’s relationship to Ayers the angrier I get. Not that I care that much about the McCain campaign exaggerating the facts to serve their political ends. Every candidate for a major office has to do this and I try and avoid falling into the trap of being outraged at the other guy’s misrepresentations while thinking those of my own canidate are no big deal.

What bothers me about this Ayers business is that even if Obama and Ayers got together for dinner once a week we shouldn’t be criticizing Obama for treating someone with a checkered past like a human being. For all the Christian rhetoric one hears the Republican party use you might think it would occur to them that forgiving sinners is a virtue. No one is suggesting Ayers has done anything but virtuous scholarship and charity work for the past 20 years so why shouldn’t Obama overlook his prior bad acts and make the Christian gesture of giving Ayers a second chance?

I suspect the people pushing this attack on Obama would agree that forgiving sinners is a virtue but would try to differentiate this case based on the lack of an (sufficient?) apology from Ayers about his behavior in the 60s. But does anyone really believe that the right way to treat someone who acted badly in their youth is to alienate them until they accept your judgments about their culpability? Is that really a better way to behave than making it clear you don’t approve of their past behavior but overlooking it and treating them like a (imperfect) human being? Do the pro-lifers who buy into this Ayers criticism really think it’s wrong to be friends with anyone who had an abortion as a teenager until they admit to having done murder?

Besides, if we didn’t look past people’s idiotic moral beliefs on a daily basis we wouldn’t get anywhere. Surely we don’t think Obama is obligated to give the loony philosophy prof who, despite being a total pacifist himself, thinks the members of the weather underground may have been morally justified in their actions. So how could it be that when the loony prof and the former radical are the same person it suddenly becomes immoral to associate with them?

Alright, so those making the Ayers critique might grant that as a private citizen it’s appropriate to overlook Ayers past but that as a candidate for public office Obama needs to hew to a higher standard. But this argument only works if you think it’s merely acceptable, though undesirable, to overlook someone’s past bad acts. If you believe that it’s actually a virtue to be kind and friendly even to those who have behaved poorly then as a candidate for public office Obama should set a good example and, if anything, be more willing to interact with Ayers. Christ, I understand the McCain campaign is desperate for material to use against Obama but do they really have to suggest that it’s unacceptable to forgive others and interact with them despite their (major) imperfections?

If you watched so much as one event during this summer’s Olympics you probably heard about the extensive efforts to catch athletes using performance enhancing drugs. Now certainly using steroids, HGH or any other pharmaceutical training aids is cheating and the athletes who use them ought to be stripped of their awards. However, just because something is against the rules doesn’t mean if should be against the rules. So while we ought to chastise cheating athletes who surreptitiously take performance enhancing substances to give them an advantage over their rule abiding competitors does it make sense to have rules against doping in the first place? I think serious consideration reveals the answer is no. Regulations on the type of doping, bans on acute intoxication during competition and other reasonable restrictions make sense but the blanket rule against doping harms both sports and medicine.

In NASCAR (auto racing) the rules often impose a fair number of restrictions on the sort of car that can be driven in a race. When better car designs began pushing races to faster speeds restrictor plates and other design features were mandated to keep the sport (relatively) safe. Thus the rules act to prevent excessive risks to drivers but absent particular reasons to ban or require a practice they allow the teams to modify their cars as they see fit. The net result of this not only maintains the excitement of competitive racing it also encourages engineering advances that bring benefits to society at large. My vision would be something similar for medical enhancement. The rules would ban particularly risky/harmful medications while putting the substantial enthusiasm and advertising money available in sports to generate medical advances. Thus to justify the outright ban on doping one must be able to cite some harm the policy causes that outweighs this benefit as well as the entertainment value of seeing athletes perform even more incredible feets.

The standard objection to allowing doping is that it would make new records and achievements meaningless since modern athletes would be competing with the assistance of chemical compounds while the past greats had no such help (or maybe they weren’t caught). However, most of the emotional force of these arguments is really based on a misconception about how doping works. Somehow people imagine that they could just pop some steroids and go compete in olympic weightlifting next summer but this is simply not true. Sure doping can help athletes become stronger faster, recover from injury quicker and so forth but it doesn’t substitute for the insane dedication and time spent practicing. Moreover, since all the serious competitors will be doping it will still come down to the same factors it always has: luck, dedication, talent etc..

So putting aside the idea that somehow the striving and hunger to win that we love about sports would become irrelevant how much sense does this objection make? Not much really. The idea that somehow modern athletes and those of days past had comparable tools is pure fantasy. Take someone with the same amount of ‘natural’ talent and let them train using techniques from the 50s and modern techniques and their isn’t much of a question about who will win the event. Just the fact that modern athletes grew up with all the benefits of modern medicine and nutritional knowledge is enough to give them a huge leg up over the competitors of a generation ago. As if this wasn’t enough advances in equipment design certainly contribute to world records. The new seamless Speedo swimsuits supposedly shaved a significant amount off race times but that didn’t make watching Phelps compete any less exciting. Maybe you could avoid things like the new speedo swimsuits but even changes like using deeper pools can change race times.

Another common argument is that sports are somehow supposed to push the limits of human performance and that if doping was allowed we would no longer be seeing what the ‘natural’ human body could achieve. However, modern athletes already don’t reflect what a ‘natural’ human could achieve. These athletes were given antibiotics to recover from sickness as children, broken bones were set and they were generally kept in better physical shape than the people of just several generations ago. Moreover, there is simply no principled line that can be drawn between doping and the scientific analysis used to select appropriate vitamins and nutrients for athletes. Trying to insist on a no doping rule for athletes will become even more ridiculous as we develop compounds for the general public that make them more fit and healthy without the need for unpleasant time in the gym.

The final and last objection is that somehow doping would pose too great a risk to the athletes or they would no longer provide good role models for children. Given that we allow sports like NASCAR and let girls start training for gymnastics at super young ages this extreme concern about athlete health seems a bit disingenuous. Moreover, as I pointed out above these risks can be reduced and often these doping compounds can be used to speed recovery from injury. Given the potential medical benefits to society at large shouldn’t we try and only retreat to a total ban when we find that it’s impossible to retain a reasonable degree of safety. Moreover, by reducing the risks from surreptitious doping it may also make many athletes safer. The role model argument is outright circular. The only reason to think kids ought to believe that the managed use of medications under a doctor’s supervision for athletic training is wrong is because we’ve decided that’s it’s wrong. Sure we don’t want high school kids to use steroids so they don’t feel like a dweeb but that’s no more of an argument against the professional managed use of enhancing medications than the fact that we don’t want kids to speed is an argument that NASCAR should impose a 60mph speed limit.

So one mantra that keeps being repeated during this financial crisis is that executives in the financial industry shouldn’t be rewarded, e.g., with golden parachutes, for their bad judgment. Now obviously the government should insure these executives don’t come out of this any better than they would if the government didn’t intervene. For instance if an executive would have received a much smaller pay out if the company went into bancruptcy and the government steps in to prevent this the executive shouldn’t profit from the government’s action. However, far from being a matter of commonsense fairness forcing these executives to give up the contractually required and legally guaranteed compensation they are do is the height of unfair government seizure to satisfy rabid populist motives.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that executives aren’t paid too much¹ and I certainly believe that the way executive pay is set ought to be reformed, probably via government regulation. However, the fact that executives pay is too high doesn’t justify taking it away after the fact. There are a ton of people who are overpaid relative to what their job performance is worth. Maybe it’s postal workers, or perhaps skycaps, certain real estate agents or maybe the clerk at the local video store² who spends his day watching movies. But regardless of which wage earners you think have overpaid jobs would you think it was fair for the government to step in and confiscate their pension after the fact because ‘they didn’t deserve it for the work they did?’ Of course not. Just like overpaid wage earners these financial executives had other jobs they could have taken but they choose the jobs they did partially because of the compensation the contracts and the law guaranteed them even if things turned out poorly. The legislature may want to change the laws to prohibit these kinds of contracts in the future but those executives who choose to work in the financial sector based on the legal framework at the time shouldn’t be blackmailed out of the compensation due them so the legislature can cover it’s ass for not having these laws already on the books.

I’m also skeptical that these executives truly demonstrated bad judgment. Certainly they demonstrated poor judgment as far as preserving the long term worth of the companies they ran. However, even the best of us, whatever our intentions, are influenced by human level incentives. Even if we deny executives golden parachutes when their corporations fail we can’t take back the high salaries paid out during the upside of the bubble. Moreover, there isn’t much we can do to change this. People, even executives, want to know their compensation is in their hands not wait on it for many years as we would have to do to eliminate the incentives to participate in the upside of a bubble. But even more important than the economic incentives are the social incentives.

We are wired to want to be on top of the heap and executives are no different. Making record profits gets you on the cover of Fortune, the admiration of colleagues and all the other benefits of being the man of the hour. Playing it safe and conservatively managing your company brings only the questionable pleasure of schadenfreude when the bubble finally bursts. Worse, a system of (purportedly) merit promotion virtually guarantees corporate executives are unduly risk prone. By rewarding those who seem to have made the best deciscions in the past we are effectively selecting for those individuals who took risks and got lucky[^lotto]. If you reward the people who made the most money last year your virtually certain to get someone who bought a whole lot of lotto tickets.

The upshot of all of this is that old money may not be such a bad thing. If you are the CEO because the corporation has been in the family for generations your at least not selected for being a gambler. Additionally your incentives are much better aligned with the long term interests of the corporation (and the economy at large). As a Ford, Dow or what not the lure of immediate fame is reduced while the social pressure not to squander your family wealth is increased. I’m not sure if this has any real world significance but it’s something interesting to think about.

Like everyone else I’ve been following the crisis on wall street and the proposed government bailout. Just like the rest of the American populace (excepting a few experts) I lack the ability to really evaluate the need for or the sufficiency of the proposed bailout and I worry about jumping to give a broad grant of authority to a few members of the executive branch in the midst of a panic. However, just because a proposal has risks doesn’t mean it isn’t the best option. During times of war the executive branch, and military generals in particular, are given the awesome power to choose who lives and who dies but despite the risks and temptations this creates we don’t believe a congressional committee ought to second guess those choices. True, this is not a war but the same observation applies: just because concentrated power poses risks doesn’t mean it’s not the best overall bet.

I would like to believe in this case oversight by some board of experts, e.g., the federal reserve board, would be possible and beneficial but this might not be practical. However, the idea floating around that congress should provide direct oversight scares me. Obviously, congress should follow the actions taken during the bailout and intervene legislatively if it discovers any abuses but, even if constitutional¹, giving a congressional committee the power to review bailout decisions would be a bad idea. Not only do the congressmen involved lack the expertise to make truly informed decisions but they’ve already demonstrated their willingness to put the rhetoric of getting even above the interests of the country. Senator McCain has even done this in the name of putting America First, though Obama and the democrats in the senate aren’t any better.

Rather than focusing on fixing the financial meltdown from the news I’ve seen congressmen are getting caught up in making sure that CEOs are denied their golden parachutes or demanding that we bail out homeowners as well as the ‘fat cats’ on wall street. Now one might think this rescue package is unjustified or unnecessary but the only reason to pursue the bailout is to prevent the economic instability from spreading to the larger economy. The worry is that without government intervention confidence in financial instruments will collapse thus denying individuals and businesses the credit they need to drive the economy. If you don’t think the problems in the financial sector threaten the general economy then you shouldn’t supporting any bailout at all. Unlike the collapse of the financial sector there is no reason I’ve heard to believe that not bailing out homeowners would cause a general economic collapse. Maybe as a matter of policy the government ought to be helping these troubled homeowners more but that’s a different issue and should be carefully considered not allowed to interfere with an emergency bailout.

The obsession with golden parachutes is even worse. One can argue all day about whether it is just for CEOs to receive gigantic compensation packages but the truth is that the cost of CEO compensation at financial institutions is a minuscule percentage of the 700 billion dollars proposed bailout. Rather than focusing on this insignificant cost our representatives could be doing more to save us money by focusing on the details of the actual bailout. Moreover, I worry that some kind of golden parachute poison pill in this bailout would create an incentive for CEOs to avoid taking part even if it is in their companies best interest. Besides, I don’t see why the fact that these CEOs miscalculated means they shouldn’t be compensated at the rate they negotiated. We don’t think basketball players who don’t perform as well as expected or get injured making a stupid play ought to return the money from their contracts why is it any different for CEOs? This isn’t to say there aren’t general reforms that should be taken about CEO pay in general, e.g., giving stockholders greater control over it, but it is to say that congress should be more concerned with saving the US economy rather than making sure everyone suffers.

Sigh, once again the political world seems to be in one of those situations again where we are supposed to pretend something isn’t true because we would rather it weren’t. Previously, we were supposed to pretend (despite Ferraro’s express statement to the contrary) that Geraldine Ferraro’s gender wasn’t a substantial causal factor in her getting the VP nod nor was Barack’s race a cause of his political success¹. Similarly when it comes to gender we are supposed to ignore certain observations when they are inconvenient. Ironically this applies even to ‘inequities’ in child rearing which are considered important to trumpet in other situations with the ‘right’ consequences.

Specficially what I’m talking about is the hubub caused by some criticism of Sarah Palin suggesting that as a mother to 5 (one of whom has special needs and another is pregnant) she might find it difficult to manage the responsibilities of the president’s office if it came to that. Many people have shot back that this is unfair since no one is asking Obama about how much time his family will occupy. Maybe it is unfair maybe it isn’t. I don’t find fairness a very useful (or meaningful) concept in situations like this. However, absent further evidence it is a worry that is more reasonable to have about Palin than about Obama.

For starters Palin has a larger family with younger children and most importantly has a special needs child (downs syndrome). Right away this makes comparisons to Obama invalid. Still, one might point out that even if Obama was in this position the same questions wouldn’t be asked of him because he is a man. That’s completely correct. However, this isn’t some groundless double standard. As many feminists have been complaining about for years it really is still true that women do more of the child rearing than men. It really doesn’t matter whether you think that is the result of a chauvinistic society, an intrinsically greater maternal instinct or space rays affecting our brains. Given that women are much more likely to be the ones on call for their offspring’s minor emergencies and problems it’s a valid question to ask whether such an eventful family life will interfere with Palin’s ability to function as president if McCain passes away (if she can govern Alaska she can handle being VP). Like it or not our culture (either innately or historically) is one in which women tend to put a greater priority on childcare relative to their work than do men. Given all the social pressure evaluating women based on their maternal success rather than their professional success it would be quite surprising if this wasn’t the case even disregarding the impact of breast feeding, giving birth and the evolutionary psychology reasons to expect this outcome.

Of course Palin’s husband might be the primary caregiver for their children (many men are) and Palin might neglect her family for the sake of her career to the same extent the average male VP candidate does. In fact I am quite confident that Palin’s family wouldn’t substantially interfere with her being president. Which is really too bad because given what i know about her views I’d be much more comfortable taking my chance on whatever adviser might run things in her place. Partially my convinction stems from the fact that I’m not convinced that the long nights and extra hours pay off that well for a president but more so from the fact that Palin has managed to make it to this point with her family. However, none of this changes the fact that it perfectly reasonable to believe that a woman with a large family with special needs would be more likely to have difficulty giving the crazy dedication to the job than a man in a similar circumstance. I don’t believe this is enough of a difference to justify trumping policy/judgment considerations with this relatively minor worry but this whole `experience’ debate is no less trivial.

In short I find it annoying when people go to great trouble to assert something (women work harder than men because they must do more childcare when they get home) and then turn around and try and deny the obvious consequences when they support (even if weakly) a conclusion they dislike². Ultimately what puzzles me about this whole thing is why people feel inclined to go down this path at all. If people would just say a more understandable version of something like this I would be happy, “Yes, women might be slightly more likely to invest time at home but anyone at this level must have heroic dedication to their work and any minor difference in probabilities is outweighed by the potential for overestimation of this effect due to reliance on stereotypes .”

Another debate swirling around Palin is the acceptability of pulling her teenage daughter’s out of wedlock pregnancy into the campaign. Before I say anything more about this point I want to express how sorry I feel for her daughter. It’s bad enough that she isn’t going to get an abortion³ and worse that she is going to be pressed into marriage at 18 but she has to deal with normal teenage embarrassment plus the shame of being knocked up all on national TV. However, no matter how emotionally salient this particular girl’s suffering may be to us she is just one person while the choice of our next president will dictate policies affecting teen pregnancies in the thousands at the very least not to mention deciding matters of life and death for millions and setting the fates of nations. Thus my conclusion is that if this girl’s plight can bring home the consequences of abstinence only education and abortion restrictions enough to really affect policy then we would be remiss to let hundreds or thousands of other girls end up in much worse positions just to shield this one girl from the spotlight. That having been said we should minimize the intrusion that the political campaign has into this girl’s life, e.g., the policy of avoiding her first name seems appropriate, and avoid anything but the most indirect of references lest one trigger a backlash.

As I’ve said before the existence of any innate statistical difference between men and women in mathematical/scientific ability is of no real practical importance. As far as public policy goes we should be looking at what would be most effective in increasing the number of capable graduates in math and science related fields. However, I blog about what irks me not what matters and articles like this one on arstechnica and this summary at science NOW that falsely suggest some study provides a clear cut answer to the nature/nurture debate really annoy me.

For starters I think it’s fairly irresponsible for a publication of the AAAS to offer a statement like this as unqualified commentary

The results “essentially confirm” earlier studies–and they should finally put to rest the idea that girls aren’t going into technical fields because they can’t do the math, says Ann Gallagher, a psychologist who studies testing at the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

The casual reader will certainly understand this claim as saying that women are not innately disadvantaged relative to men in technical fields. Yet this research doesn’t even come close to proving this claim and in light of broader trends in male/female school performance that came up previously this result is perfectly compatible with girls being innately statistically worse at doing mathematics. Given that girls tend to outperform boys generally in academics before college we must either conclude that girls have greater innate intellectual talent or that some other factor, such as a greater willingness to study or pay attention to the teacher, accounts for this general academic superiority and must be accounted for to accurately compare innate ability. While the former hypothesis shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand the later one seems more likely¹ meaning that this study is essentially useless in comparing the innate abilities of boys and girls in math/science. While the authors of the research article might have reasonably expected their audience to be aware of the generally higher performance of girls in pre-college schooling leaving these considerations out of interpretive articles for the lay reader is at best unacceptable sloppiness.

True, the sentence I quoted is technically true. Girls have the literal capability to do technical fields but the obvious implication is that they have statistically equal innate ability which simply isn’t demonstrated by this piece of research. Unfortunately the article on ars is no better.

Thus, the gender gap in math performance seems to be insignificant in grade school, which is good news. Unfortunately, that does not help explain why the gender gap widens later in life. It is possible that pressure from society eventually catches up to women and makes it difficult to stay in certain fields, as the problem certainly doesn’t seem to be innate intellectual capability.

Once again this is a technically correct claim that is nevertheless extremely misleading. For starters, just like the piece in Science NOW this remark plays to the false idea that there is a sharp well-defined distinction between nature and nurture while also implying that whatever social effects cause the gender bias in the sciences must be negative. It’s equally possible that women are relatively more likely to be drawn away from math/science by other interests (child rearing, law, other non-technical pursuits). Even discouraging social pressures aren’t necessarily bad. If women leave technical subjects because they find math/science nerds less hot or simply don’t like hanging out with them that’s not a harm against women². Moreover, there are a vast number of explanations that don’t fall clearly on either the socialization nor innate differences side, e.g., suppose women are innately less rebellious and more eager to please authority figures and thus our educational system is more likely to snuff out their interest and ability to think critically. Fallaciously suggesting that social effects must be harmful barriers to women is almost as bad as what the sexist individuals on the nature side of the debate do when they conflate evidence of innate differences with female incapacity.

As if this wasn’t enough the arstechnica article casually dismisses the results from the article about greater male variation in performance and the Science NOW article ignores them entirely. Interestingly the study found that different races favored different genders at the high end of the tests, e.g., more Asian girls than Asian boys scored at the very high end while more white boys than white girls scored at the top. Still, while both ars and the original journal article dismiss the effects found as small in a discipline requiring mathematical ability at the 99th percentile these data suggest we should find 67% women and only 33% men. Pointing out that some engineering fields have only 15% women as the journal article does only tells us there are other factors at work but it doesn’t downplay the significance of this one. In fact given that math and physics Ph.D.s are probably almost exclusively chosen from the top half percent in mathematical ability this effect on it’s own might account for much of the observed gender gap. Moreover, in combination with the normal tendency of people to clump with others of the same gender and the role of friends/acquaintances in determining classes and majors it’s certainly plausible that even relatively minor differences in gender ratio could be magnified into something larger even if everyone acted in a fair and reasonable fashion.

Ultimately, however, any conclusions you might have been tempted to draw from the results in this article are undone by the fact that none of the questions asked in the standardized tests required serious thought. I stand with the researchers in bemoaning the sorry state of standardized testing in pre-college education but unfortunately for them this undermines any conclusions they might wish to draw about gender and innate ability. Quite simply how well you can memorize the quadratic formula and plug in numbers is totally irrelevant to your ability to do higher mathematics. I’m about to get my Ph.D. in mathematics despite being almost held back a grade because I wasn’t fast enough at my multiplication tables and regularly losing a fair number of points on math tests in high school because I didn’t memorize their stupid rules.

Of course there is nothing here to suggest that the gender differences we see in technical fields are the result of any innate differences but this research certainly doesn’t show otherwise so it shouldn’t be presented as doing so. Frankly I’m quite disturbed at the persistent bias in lay scientific articles about this subject. While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of disabusing the public about their simpleminded stereotypes about gender differences and strongly support efforts to root out remaining discriminatory treatment covering up the complexities of the issue as these articles do feels too close to being propaganda for the desired answer for my taste.

So I often find myself trying to make the case that people are especially irrational when it comes to voting and other activities where the emotional content is large but individuals have little influence over the outcome or aren’t very affected by it but I’m stymied by a lack of a good example. I can point them at “The Myth of the Rational Voter” for good theoretical and empirical arguments but a good example is worth a lot. I ran across a good one today listening to the KQED discussion about the proposed golden gate suicide barrier. Now I think a suicide barrier is almost certainly unjustified at the cited cost for reasons I give below but what’s interesting/scary isn’t that people disagree with me. If you think there are substantial third party benefits from a suicide barrier or even just make different plausibility judgments from me in a way that consistently favors the barrier you could reasonably think it is a good idea. What’s both scary and interesting is the sorts of motivations people have for thinking a barrier is obviously a good idea and their failure to even indulge in the sort of cost/benefit analysis that would be appropriate for this kind of question.

During the debate the mental health professional opposing the barrier offered rational responses and citations pointing out the faulty reasoning used in arguments for the efficacy of the barrier those who wanted the barrier would call in to say something like, “you admit a barrier might save some people so how many lives is enough?” or, “If you just say we will always have suicides your saying we will always have poverty and…” and those callers at least were making cogent arguments. Many others simply related their personal knowledge of people who had tried to commit suicide and otherwise used emotional ploys (likely unconsciously) to frame the question as whether you were for or against suicide. One caller even went so far as to explicitly express her outraged amazement that someone in the mental health profession would be so cold and unfeeling as to not want to stop suicides.

What is notable about these remarks is that the guest opposing the barrier was arguing that it simply wouldn’t be effective and that we should put our resources into mental health services rather than barriers. The only role these arguments, or the anecdotes offered in the SF gate series promoting the barrier could have in the argument is to make people feel bad for not supporting the barrier. Indeed, despite the fact that at some point we must trade off cost against lives saved (a billion dollars would not be a cost effective price to pay to save one person) some of these arguments derive their force only by pushing the opponent to bite the bullet and admit that these lives aren’t worth X dollars.

To be fair, the callers opposing the barrier were no better. Their arguments seemed to be little more than thinly glossed resentment at being forced to accomodate suicidal individuals. Also the lady supporting the barrier did make reasonable points by citing several studies that on their face would seem to suggest a barrier would be effective. These studies were pretty much the same ones mentioned in this article and fairly easily rebutted. For instance, showing that survivors of one attempt have good prospects for survival is almost totally useless and may even work argue against the barrier. Not only do the survivors constitute a biased sample containing few of those most intent on killing themselves but this statistic, if valid, argues for ensuring that people first attempt suicide in a fashion that is likely to be prevented. Yet, unless you believe a large portion of people who jump off the golden gate bridge do so on impulse while crossing the bridge for unrelated reasons, you would expect that putting up a suicide barrier on the golden gate that is known to be nearly foolproof would drive people contemplating suicide to focus on another location that may not be so easily monitored. Moreover, making it impossible to jump off a particular bridge seems much more akin to taking a single gun off the street or blocking access to one type of barbiturate while leaving others on the market than the wholesale elimination of one convenient method of killing yourself, e.g., putting your head in a coal-gas stove. Not to mention the fact that a single historical data point about gas stoves is highly suspect, likely involves plenty of confounding factors and the rise in suicides 15 years hence is inconsistent with the supposed claim.

Still, even if you generously believe that the barrier will prevent a number of deaths approximately equal to the 34 confirmed suicides that occur some years this simply doesn’t get you to the conclusion that a suicide barrier is justified. For instance economic studies suggest that we implicitly trade off a single life for about 1.5 million dollars. Importantly even if our individual choices in terms of risks and rewards would place a higher dollar value on a statistical life it’s the choices implicit in government decisions that are really relevant since if we could use the 50 million that it will likely cost to build the barrier to save more lives some other way surely that would be preferable. Thus not even counting the loss of utility that might occur from a degradation of the bridge aesthetics nor the fact that the life of a suicidal person is likely to be less enjoyable and thus contribute less utility than an average member of society (suicidal people really do feel more unhappy than most of us) the barrier is a close call. With these factors considered it seems to me that the costs outweigh the benefits.

If you disagree that’s fine but it’s disturbing that people support these projects merely to avoid thinking of themselves as cold because they weigh the cost against the value of the lives lost. That doesn’t make you warm and caring, it makes you a moral monster. Deciding that someone’s life isn’t worth the amount of money it costs to save may seem cold but it’s not as horrific as letting people die because you wanted to feel warm and fuzzy so you couldn’t be bothered to balance the lives this money could save if used to improve road safety with those that might be saved via a suicide barrier.

So a couple days ago there was a hysterical story on slashdot saying we were running out of rare earth elements. Apparently this whole thing was started by Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg, whose predictions of mineral extinction dates inspired an article by Robert Silverberg in Asimov’s science fiction magazine and reported in a new scientist story that was in turn picked up by one of the Wall Street Journal blogs. Already we should be pretty skeptical. We have a panicked warning driven by multiple commentaries on a single scientists remarks and, going by the failure of any of these stories to cite a journal article for Reller’s remarks, they may not even beer peer reviewed¹.

There is certainly a kernel of truth in these stories as in most of the misleading articles New Scientist publishes. However, these articles make it sound as if we are going to run out of various rare earth metals the way you might run out of toilet paper at home, i.e., we used it all up and have to make do without it. Indeed the article in the Asimov magazine explicitly analogizes this ‘crisis’ to a science fiction scenario of a world without usable iron. True, the prices of many rare earth metals and even Zinc are rising rapidly and for many of them we are currently using them faster than they are being mined. But does that mean we will ‘run out’ or even have to give up our flat screen TVs with Indium based transparent transistors or fancy new Intel CPUs with Hafnium based high-k dielectric? Certainly not. Moreover, we most certainly won’t ‘run out’ of these metals the way these stories suggest.

The idea that the Indium on Earth is just going to be used up in 2017, Terbium in 2012 and Zinc in 2037 is just absurd from both a geological and economic point of view. As an economic matter the market won’t simply let us keep increasing our consumption until we suddenly run out. Rather, when demand increases relative to supply the price rises and decreases consumption. If companies really believed zinc was going to simply run out in 2037 do you think they would be selling it cheaply enough to make it cost effective to make pennies with it or use it in many other trivial ways? There isn’t any great crisis ahead, merely a rise in price for these metals that will cause other metals to be substituted where possible and wasteful uses to be eliminated (eliminate the damn penny!) while essential uses (LCD displays, CPUs) continue. If you don’t believe me put your money where your mouth is. If you think we will simply run out of Terbium in 4 years buy up some Terbium or Terbium futures and you’ll make a fortune.

It’s an even more absurd proposal from a geological perspective. Neither Indium or Gallium occurs naturally in high concentrations in any mineral. Rather small quantities of both these minerals are isolated from Zinc deposits (Sphalerite) and in the case of Gallium Bauxite and coal as well. Already then something seems fishy about the suggestion we would run out of Indium in 9 years but wouldn’t run out of Zinc for another 20 years after that. Surely companies aren’t going pull all of the worlds Zinc deposits out of the ground so they can isolate the 50ppm of of Gallium and then pay to store the Zinc for another 20 years. Moreover, some simple math shows how absurd the suggestion is that we will simply run out of Zinc.

Zinc makes up .0004% of the Earth’s crust and the continental crust in turn accounts for .374% of the earth total mass. Wikipedia tells us the Earth has a mass of 5.97 * 10²⁴ kilograms and doing the math gives us 8.910¹³ metric tons of Zinc in the continental crust. Given a current consumption rate of about 7.110⁶ metric tons a year we could continue at this rate for 10 million years before we depleted the Zinc in the crust.

Of course we can’t efficiently extract anywhere near all the Zinc in the crust and it’s the notion of efficient extraction that’s central to this issue. Unlike the toilet paper you keep in your bathroom mineral deposits aren’t all equally easy to extract until you suddenly run. If we were willing to pay more for minerals like Zinc companies would start mining locations that were formerly unprofitable. Conversely if the amount of Zinc we have sitting around in storage shrinks the price of Zinc will rise and consumption will decrease. Likely the numbers quoted in the New Scientist article describe the point at which current rates of usage will deplete the proven reserves of these various minerals in the ground. In other words they tell us how long these metals would last if mining companies didn’t bother to go look for more, didn’t start extracting ore from regions currently unprofitable when prices increased and people kept using them at the same rate despite increased scarcity. We might as well assume the Martians are stealing our metal with ray guns to predict future catastrophic shortages. Now I’m just guessing at what these numbers are supposed to actually mean (the articles couldn’t be bothered to tell us that) but there is no doubt that none of these articles gives cause to be anxious.