The Complexity of the Commons

This passage from an interesting interview with Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom has been making the rounds. (I picked it up from Mark Thoma). Take a look:

Fran: Do you have a favorite example of where people have been able to self-organize to manage property in common?

Elinor: One that I read early on that just unglued me—because I wasn’t expecting it—was the work of Robert Netting, an anthropologist who had been studying the alpine commons for a very long time. He studied Swiss peasants and then studied in Africa too. He was quite disturbed that people were saying that Africans were primitive because they used common property so frequently and they didn’t know about the benefits of private property. The implication was we’ve got to impose private property rules on them. Netting said, “Are the Swiss peasants stupid? They use common property also.”

Let’s think about this a bit. In the valleys, they use private property, while up in the alpine areas, they use common property. So the same people know about private property and common property, but they choose to use common property for the alpine areas. Why? Well, the alpine areas are what Netting calls “spotty.” The rainfall is high in one section one year, and the snow is great, and it’s rich. But the other parts of the area are dry. Now if you put fences up for private property, then Smith’s got great grass one year—he can’t even use it all—and Brown doesn’t have any. So, Netting argued, there are places where it makes sense to have an open pasture rather than a closed one. Then he gives you a very good idea of the wide diversity of the particular rules that people have used for managing that common land.

Fran: Why were Netting’s findings so surprising to you?

Elinor: I had grown up thinking that land was something that would always move to private property. I had done my dissertation on groundwater in California, so I was familiar with the management of water as a commons. But when I read Netting, I realized that when there are “spotty” land environments, it really doesn’t make sense to put up fences and have small private plots.

Mixed messages

From Valuing Another Degree by Jonnelle Marte

These days, however, as employers continue to cut spending, expectations for such higher pay could backfire when you're competing against less educated -- and less expensive -- candidates.

For example, entry-level teachers with master's degrees often have a harder time getting hired than those with bachelor's degrees because schools typically pay more to teachers with master's degrees, says Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com.

One of the best teacher's I've known was the wife of an army officer who had to move every few years. Despite her outstanding resume and glowing references, she had a hard time getting jobs because her years of experience made her too expensive.

This is, after all, a write in haste-repent at leisure medium

[make sure to check out the comments section]

There's a common type of blog post that consists of sarcastic dismissal of a statement followed by critical statements. Though they tend to be mean, they can be fun read and, if the criticisms are valid, can add quite a bit to the conversation.

The main problem with this type of post is that has an ugly habit of devolving into just a sarcastic dismissal and those devolved posts are not so defensible (even if I'm the one writing them). This is not only mean but cowardly. By leaving out the reasons behind your sarcasm you deny your subjects the chance to defend themselves.

A couple of days ago, I made a sarcastic comment about this passage from the New York Times. Here is the quote:

The road between the two cultures — science and literature — can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University.

To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.

And here are comments to my post by Prof. Flesch.

My problems with Prof. Flesch's statement and more importantly with the NYT article are as follows.

Altruistic punishment has become a bit of a flavor of the month, one of those fashionable ideas that people like to work into conversations and op-ed pieces. Unfortunately this often leads to the ideas being applied where they don't fit or being used as labels for related ideas. This can (and, I would argue, should) prompt greater scrutiny and that scrutiny should always start with the question, is the concept being used correctly?

What are the requirements of altruistic punishment?

The punisher has to proceed knowing that not punishing the offender would produce a better outcome for the punisher. Outcome here needs to be broadly defined to include not only the material but also reproductive and reputational – the loan shark who has a defaulter killed is not engaged in altruistic punishment even though he probably would have collected more from a living customer; he is investing in a reputation that will make future defaults less likely.

To make sure not to confound the problem, researchers often focus on unrelated strangers with whom no future encounters are anticipated.

Altruistic punishment is normally discussed in the context of the evolution of large-scale cooperation. "Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent." (Fehr and Gächter) The behavior suggests that individuals are biologically programmed to want to enforce the rules that make complex societies possible.

With all that out of the way, can we reasonably say that Odysseus (or, for that matter, Hamlet or Poirot) is an altruistic punisher?

The mythic world of the Odyssey was small and greatly concerned with reputation and social standing. It was clearly in Odysseus' interest to be seen as a dangerous and vengeful opponent. Acts that enhance that reputation can't really be considered altruistic punishment even if (as with Polyphemus and his father) the acts turn out to be more costly than expected.

It is even more difficult to make the case for altruistic punishment in the killing of the suitors. Here we have a group that has threatened to take his property (material), marry his wife and kill his son (genetic) and humiliate him in the process (reputational). It is the trifecta of self-interest. There was a high potential cost to this act but that alone is not sufficient to make it altruistic punishment. (besides, the consequences were based not only on the deaths of the suitors but also on the loss to those who accompanied him to Troy. He might well have faced an angry mob if he had simply told the suitors to go home.)

I admit my knowledge of the Odyssey is weak and I may well have missed some important aspect that supports the hypothesis that Odysseus was an altruistic punisher and not simply someone who pursued great goals at great costs, but they aren't obvious to the casual reader.

As for the other examples, Don Quixote probably does qualify. Hamlet is more problematic. He is acting in the interest of his father which brings in a genetic component (I'm not sure what the evolutionary psychology implications are of his father being a ghost). There's also a self-preservation aspect (perhaps more obvious in the Amleth version). As for Poirot, both his livelihood and his reputation rely on his ability to solve crimes. There are cases (most notably Curtain) where his goal is clearly altruistic punishment, but in most of his cases there is a clear element of self-interest. You could, however, make a pretty good argument for Lord Peter Whimsey.

And there are certainly examples of altruistic punishment out there. The Count of Monte Cristo is a good fit since there is no apparent material or reproductive gain and most of the revenge is carried out anonymously. Crime fiction also provides numerous protagonists (Lew Archer, Travis McGee, Matt Scudder) who take cases from strangers then continue to pursue them after their clients had stopped paying them. In one book, Scudder went so far as to make a suicide look like a murder then frame the man who was morally responsible for the death.

We could go on (anyone care to make the case for Miss Havisham?) but I don't know what it would accomplish. Like every other imaginable human behavior, altruistic punishment occurs in literature. We can take that as a not very interesting given.

There are cases where analyzing a work in terms of evolutionary psychology can provide real and unique insights. All too often, though, when an idea like altruistic punishment becomes fashionable, juxtaposition often replaces analysis. References to trendy terms like market forces or the prisoner's dilemma are stuck into arguments where they contribute little and often don't even apply (such as trying to use the prisoner's dilemma to describe a stag hunt).

We should always welcome new ideas and cross-pollination, but when we see a headline in the New York Times that starts with the words "Next Big Thing," it's probably a time to be a bit more critical.

(and if I had an issue with an New York Times article, I suppose I should have done more than slam one quote.)

And you thought the academic job market was tough

[I have a longer and hopefully fairer follow-up here. Make sure to Flesch's comment which puts his quote in context and largely invalidates my criticism.]

This New York Times article (via Cheap Talk) shows that you can get to be an English professor without ever reading the Odyssey (or even skimming the Cliff Notes):

The road between the two cultures — science and literature — can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University.

To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.

Chait on careers in journalism

I had some posts up earlier (see here and here) on how economic changes had affected the career options for writers of fiction. Over at The New Republic, Jonathan Chait looks at old and new career paths for writers on the nonfiction side. His comments on columnists are particularly interesting:

The traditional ladder is even more problematic for columnists. Calderone notes, "a Washington column has traditionally been the reward at the end of a climb up the journalistic ladder, with stops along the way at small-town papers, medium-sized city desks and local TV newsrooms." Whereas the small town beat is merely unnecessary as a career chokepoint for national reporters, it's actually counterproductive for columnists. Writing opinion about politics and public policy is a very different skill than reporting. The almost-uniform rule of political reporters-turned-columnists is that they're awful at it. They have no idea how to construct a persuasive argument or marshal the kinds of evidence they need to make their case. Usually, their argument relies on authority -- I am asserting opinion X and you should believe me because I am a prestigious veteran reporter.

The practice of training people for one kind of work and then shifting them into something that requires a completely different set of skills is one of the more bizarre habits of the traditional journalism world. If the New York Times approached me and said that I've done a good job as a columnist and blogger for TNR, and now I should start covering the city hall beat for them, it would be nuts. I'd be horrible.

Statins in healthy individuals

This new york times article was quite worthy of thinking about. In particular, it's still not clear to me that C-reactive protein is the best possible marker of high cardiovascular risk. Nor, if the primary mechanism is inflammation, why conventional anti-inflammatory medications like aspirin are not the best therpuetic choice. Statins also lower blood pressure but they are clearly not the best anti-hypertensive medication option for healthy, low risk patients.

It is a pretty large public health experiment and I can only hope that the benefits will exceed any potential side effects of medication use.

Outsourcing English papers

Confessions of a Community College Dean has a good detailed post up the practice of off-shoring grading:

I don't buy the 'quality' argument against it, either. If radiologists in India can read images, and programmers in India can work on developing and fixing incredibly sophisticated software, then surely some smart folks in India can handle some freshman comp papers. Seriously. Other information-based industries have endured outsourcing without the quality of the work suffering. Given the inarguable indifference with which our large universities have handled undergraduate teaching for so long, to suddenly get huffy and puffy about standards is disingenuous at best.

The simple truth of the matter is that universities have engaged in a bait-and-switch with intro undergraduate classes for a long time, and have built an entire economic model on it. This may be a case in which following the model to its logical conclusion actually prompts looking more closely at the entire enterprise, which strikes me as a good idea. In the meantime, we'll keep running small classes with real faculty who actually do bond with their students, and doing it at a fraction of the cost. If folks would sneer at us a bit less, I'd be much obliged.

I got my undergraduate degrees (one in creative writing, one in math, but that's a story for another time) from a small four-year school. With a handful of exceptions, my professors were experienced, tenured teaching professionals who took undergraduate education and mentoring every bit as seriously as professors at big universities take their research.

A few years later I did stint at the state's big university, teaching undergrad courses and helping supervise the teaching assistants. I came away from that experience with the conviction that undergraduate education at most large universities is basically a scam, tricking students into buying a third-rate product with the lure of a big name and prestigious faculty members whom most of the students will never even see let alone study under.

Does this sound right?

From David Brooks (via a disbelieving Brad Delong):

Over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000 in at least one of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three.

Positive Reviews

Have you ever reviewed a paper and thought "wow, this paper is excellent". It's well written, relevant and obviously crafted with care. Well, know I have.

My question is what do you do with it? Do you find items to nitpick so you can show that you were rigorous or do you simply recommend that the paper proceed to publication?

Thoughts?

“Gives new meaning to company town.”

From the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies reported by Jeff Goodell and brought to our attention by Brad Plumer:

It was generally agreed that for CO2-sucking technologies, private investment was not a problem [n.b., assuming we have some sort of cap-and-trade system in place]. Sunlight-reduction technologies, however, are another issue. if some company (or entrepreneur) is able to develop a new way of injecting particles into the stratosphere that becomes indispensible to the survival of the human race, well, that gives that company or person a lot of leverage.

“I’m not interested in selling my soul to some company who is going to control how much sunlight hits the planet,” said Phil Rasch, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. (As one audience member quipped, “Gives new meaning to company town.”) Granger Morgan, the head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that the creation of a profit motive would inevitably lead to a geoengineering lobby: “Lobbying is the last thing we need on this.”

I know there's a Schrödinger's cat joke here somewhere

Andrew Gelman has an excellent post up on the contradictory findings of two teams of researchers on the effect child-gender has on parents' political leanings.

Tyler Cowen reports the following claim from sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher:

Using nationally-representative data from the [1994] General Social Survey, we [Conley and Rauscher] find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.

This surprised me, because less than a year ago, we reported here on a study by economists Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee with the exact opposite finding:

We [Oswald and Powdthavee] document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party. Our data, which are primarily from Great Britain, are longitudinal. We also report corroborative results for a German panel.

Understanding the results (possibly) in terms of "family values"

This is a fun problem: we have two different studies, both by reputable researchers, with opposite results! I took a look at both papers and can't immediately see a resolution, but I will offer some speculations, followed by some scattered comments.

Andrew speculates that the differences in the findings can be explained by the fact that one study looked at the U.S. while the other looked at Britain with some additional data taken from Germany. Commenter DN elaborated further:

Seems to me that this is more likely a "law and order" effect in the US. Families with daughters are more likely to be concerned about 'protecting' their daughters against violent crime. These impacts are either mitigated in Germany and the UK (because of perceptions of the parties) or swamped by other perceived advantages of left-wing parties.

This brings up one of my least favourite practices in bad statistics reporting: generalizing conclusions about attitudes drawn from a specific culture or social group. One example that stayed with me (reported by the ever credulous NYT under the headline Bicycle Helmets Put You at Risk) was that of Ian Walker, a psychiatrist at the University of Bath. Walker, an opponent of helmet laws, put a sensor on his bike and rode with and without a helmet until he had been passed 2,500 times (see the curse of large numbers). To control for potential gender effects he sometimes donned a long wig (to get the full comic effect, check out Walker's picture below).

Walker found vehicles came on average 3.35 inches closer when he was wearing a helmet (for context, the average passing clearance was over four feet).

Putting aside for the moment questions about the methodology of the study and the sweeping conclusions Walker from it, the New York Times article works under the implicit assumption that despite major differences in traffic laws, road conditions, driver etiquette and education, vehicle type and biking culture, findings from that small stretch of English road are equally applicable to American highways.

Subtle issues

This recent study in Pharmacoepidemiolgy and Drug Safety suggests that long term warfarin use leads to more aggressive cancer (as opposed to never users). However, the same authors have shown that warfarin reduces the incidence of prostate cancer in this population.

Is it not just as likely that the warfarin use is more effective versus less agressive cancers as a mildly anti-cancer agent?

I'm curious as to why this interpretation of the data was not pursued

The Long Goodbye -- the networks are taking a long damned time to die

Yesterday I posted a link to Clay Shirky's essay comparing the big media empires to societies like the Roman Empire that collapsed under the weight of their own complexity. I commented that I doubted his conclusions. Here's one of the reasons why.

Back in the early Nineties, when I was still picking up some extra money as a freelance writer, I did a long feature on the surprising vitality of broadcast television in Northwest Arkansas. The vitality was surprising because broadcast television had been under a death watch for more than a decade.

These ominous prognoses had started started sometime in the mid to late Seventies, prompted by the arrival of home video and the rise of cable and satellite-based cable stations. By the beginning of the Eighties, most observers agreed that the outlook was dire. At least one columnist predicted that one of the networks (his guess was NBC) would be gone by the end of the decade. (The columnist obviously didn't have a lot of faith in that Tartikoff kid the network had just hired.)

By 1990 there were exactly twice as many networks as the columnist had predicted and one more than anyone had expected. What happened? Entertainment executives had been trying to launch a fourth network since DuMont went dark in 1956. Why was an industry facing an explosion of new competition suddenly able to support a major new player?

What industry watchers were overlooking was that broadcast stations fell into two distinct groups: VHF and UHF. For the VHF stations, cable really was a threat to a virtual monopoly. it marginally improved their picture quality but it brought in numerous new channels. UHF stations, however, had poor picture quality and low range. As businesses, they were only viable in large, heavily populated areas (and then only marginally). With cable, though, a channel 39 could compete on an equal footing with a channel 2.

This was what made Fox and later the CW viable businesses.

But to me the most remarkable thing about this story is the way the standard narrative has changed so little over the decades. For more than thirty years, there has been a steady stream of stories about reduced schedules, mergers, and deaths of networks and with the exception of the creation of the CW, every single one of them has been incorrect. Over three decades of wrong.

Just to put this in perspective, ABC, the last of the big three, started broadcasting in 1948. That was also about that the other networks started moving past the experimental stage. If we pick that as our starting point, network television has spent more than half of its life under a prognosis of imminent death. During that time the number of networks has gone from three to four to five (and might have been six if not not for some disastrous strategic errors by the heads of WB and UPN) and CBS, the network that reacted the least to the changes in the market (sticking mainly with sitcoms and hour dramas and keeping a very small web presence) is arguably the healthiest of the bunch.

Of course, this could all change in the next year or so. There is no reason to assume the current networks are any more immortal than DuMont was. All the same, we've been told since the late Seventies that this section of the sky is just about to fall. Perhaps it's time to question Mr. Little's credibility.

All others things being equal

Regression analysis is often interpreted as being the effect of changing one variable while holding all other factors constant. Sadly, when working with complex human behaviors, like in nutritional epidemiology, factors rarely stay constant. A change in one parameter can shift other parameters making inference difficult. A very good example of this was reviewed by Travis Saunders of Obesity Panacea.

Now obviously randomized experiments allow an estimate of the average causal effect of an intervention but they are expensive to run and these types of research questions raise grave issues of equiposie and adherence in the design of these experiments!

Decline and Fall of the Media Empires?

Clay Shirky has a post up comparing the current state of the big media companies to the declining days of the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. I think he gets a lot wrong (hell, I think he gets most of it wrong), but he gets it wrong in a really interesting way.

Give it a look:

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

In spring of 2007, the web video comedy In the Motherhood made the move to TV. In the Motherhood started online as a series of short videos, with viewers contributing funny stories from their own lives and voting on their favorites. This tactic generated good ideas at low cost as well as endearing the show to its viewers; the show’s tag line was “By Moms, For Moms, About Moms.”

The move to TV was an affirmation of this technique; when ABC launched the public forum for the new TV version, they told users their input “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”

Or it might not. Once the show moved to television, the Writers Guild of America got involved. They were OK with For and About Moms, but By Moms violated Guild rules. The producers tried to negotiate, to no avail, so the idea of audience engagement was canned (as was In the Motherhood itself some months later, after failing to engage viewers as the web version had).

The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers, or their stories, or how those stories might be used. The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience involvement hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try?”