Clay Shirky’s TED Talk on how cognitive surplus will change the world.
July 31, 2010, 2:35pm
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Deterrence Doesn’t Work
“Day-care is day-care the world over; working parents with children under school age need someone to watch their children during the day. Sometimes day-care is set up as a public service, other times as a business, but in either case, the parents and the day-care workers have a potential daily clash of interests: pick-up time. The workers have the outside lives, so they want all the kids safely reunited with their parents by a set time. The parents, on the other hand, busy at work or running errands and never entirely in control of their travel time, want some slack to pick up their children later than the appointed hour.
The study’s ten day-care centers in Haifa ran until four P.M., though no penalty for picking up children late was specified. Gneezy and Rustichini observed closing time in the centers to see how often parents were late; in a normal week, there were seven or eight late pickups at each center. Then they instituted a penalty six of the centers: henceforth, they announced, parents would be fined for picking their children umpire than ten minutes late, a fine that would be automatically added to their bill. (The other four centers, the control group, operated unchanged to ensure that any observed effects in the six selected schools were the result of the fine.)
The new rule was imposed at the six centers the following week, and its effect on the parents’ behavior was immediate: their lateness increased. In the first week, the average number of late pickups rose to eleven; to fourteen in the week after that; and to seventeen the week after that. The episodes of lateness finally topped out a month into the experiment at around twenty a week―nearly triple the pre-fine number. Thereafter, for as long as the fine was in place, the number fluctuated, but it never fell below fourteen and remained closer to twenty most weeks. Meanwhile, the number of late pickups in the four control centers didn’t change.
From the point of view of deterrence theory, this result was perverse. The fine was small, just ten shekels (about three dollars), but it should still have had some deterring effect; however bad a late pickup was before the fine was instituted, it should have been ten shekels worse after. And even if it was too small to have a deterring effect, it shouldn’t have increased the frequency of lateness. And yet that’s just what it did.
The pre-fine bargain between parents and teachers was what Gneezy and Rustichini labeled an “incomplete contract”―a set of relations that took place partly in the market but left considerable room for the interpretation of certain behavioral norms, including those around pick-up time. As the noted in their paper, “Parents could form any belief on the matter, as they probably did, and act accordingly.” Once the fine was instituted, however, that ambiguity collapsed, along with the behavioral norms that had been established. The fine turned day care from a shared enterprise into a simple fee-for-service transaction, allowing the parents to regard the workers’ time as a commodity, and a cheap one at that. The parents assumed that the fine represented the full price of the inconvenience they were causing, and it seemed to remove any fears that they might suffer some unspecified consequence for abusing the workers’ goodwill.
Gneezy and Rustichini kept the fine in place for three months, then ended it. Once the fine stopped, however, the number of late pickups per week didn’t return to pre-fine levels; in fact, it remained as high as it had been when the fine was in place. Inducing parents to see the day-care workers as participants in a market transaction, rather than as people whose needs had to be respected, had alters the parents’ perceptions of the workers, an alteration that outlived the fine itself. One might impose a fine significant enough to deter lateness, the paper noted, but the experiment showed that market transactions are not merely additive to other human motivations; they alter them by their mere presence.”
From Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus (pp. 132-134), on Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini’s paper “A Fine Is a Price”.
July 31, 2010, 12:53am
“As Bryan Caplan, the George Mason University economist (who wrote in Reason back in 2007 about the many prevalent biases about economics that lead voters to prefer anti-free-market policies), has found in his studies of public opinion research vis à vis libertarian policy conclusions, “the sad truth is that the status quo is quite popular, and even moderate libertarian reforms like abolishing the minimum wage are persistently abhorrent to the overwhelming majority of the population.”
At Caplan’s advice, I spent some time trolling through the highly respected “General Social Survey” (GSS) to check out what Americans thought about more stringent applications of libertarian principles regarding when and where it is appropriate to bring state power to bear. While the more abstractly phrased questions tended to produce some modestly libertarian results—for example, 75 percent of Americans favor or strongly favor government spending cuts in the abstract—when asked about any specific spending area, the public tended to want more spending.
Still, some encouraging signs do appear amongst the GSS data, especially in changes that have occurred over the past 10 years. For example, from 1996 to 2006, the number of those who believed in definitely allowing public meetings advocating revolution went up nearly 20 percentage points, while those who believed in definitely not allowing them went down 9 percentage points.
But around 50 percent of Americans apparently have no objection to government control of wages; only 28 percent believe racists should definitely be allowed to publish books; only 27 percent think it should definitely not be the government’s role to provide jobs for all; and over 60 percent think government should prevent imports to protect the domestic economy.
”
— Brian Doherty - Where Do Libertarians Belong Politically? (reason.com July 21, 2010)
July 21, 2010, 11:53pm
“University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research explores similar territory: the differences in ethical reasoning between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. He argues that there are five dimensions along which people make moral choices, e.g., fairness, harm, loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity. Haidt finds that liberals focus chiefly on the first two dimensions, whereas conservatives deploy all five dimensions in their ethical reasoning.
…
What about libertarians? After his lecture, I asked Haidt where libertarians fit along the five moral dimensions. He asked me to guess how libertarians tested. “Like liberals,” I said, by which I meant that libertarians, like liberals, are less concerned about group loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity. He laughed and said, “Yes, like liberals, but without compassion.” Put another way, libertarians react like liberals, but without the concerns about egalitarianism that dominate the way liberals—and 10-year-olds—think about fairness.
”
— Ronald Bailey - Do Liberals Suffer from Arrested Moral Development? (reason.com June 1, 2010)
June 13, 2010, 4:21pm
“I ride my bike to work. It seems so pure.
We’re constantly urged to ‘go green’—use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth. How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic, and buy things with the government’s Energy Star label.
But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al Gore’s group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10 years.
‘It’s simply not possible,’ says Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy. ‘Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are produced by hydrocarbons—coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process. … The world consumes 200 million barrels of oil equivalent in hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias.’
Bryce used to be a left-liberal, but then: ‘I educated myself about math and physics. I’m a liberal who was mugged by the laws of thermodynamics.’
”
— John Stossel - Going “Green” (Reason.com May 27, 2010)
June 03, 2010, 12:01am
Okay, yes, the content of this snippet from a talk with Daniel Pink is good. But I’m interested in its presentation. Man, is it fun. I was totally engaged for 10 minutes and there were no explosions or anything. (Although, there was one Back to the Future joke, and that gets you a long way in my book.)
This was found on Rob Greco’s blog for his 6th grade class. I love the fact that I can find things on a blog for 6th graders and share it with all of you and feel that it’s relevant. In sixth grade I was picking my nose, pulling hair, and throwing rocks and not thinking about how standard economic concepts about incentives break sometimes.
PS: Are you reading Greco’s delicious stream? It’s literally a one-stop-shop for everything interesting happening on the web day to day. It’s almost a blog. Pats on the back, Mr. Greco, and see you in 5th period.
via Frank Chimero:
May 16, 2010, 11:01pm
“In the second place, cutting taxes instead of spending is seductively pleasant. It lets citizens enjoy more government services at no extra cost on April 15.
Forced to pay for everything they get, right away, Americans would undoubtedly choose to make do with less. But given the opportunity to party now and pay later—or never, if the tab can be billed to the next generation—they find no compelling reason to do without.
Think of it this way. If you want people to consume more of something, you reduce the price. If you want them to consume less, you raise the price. For most of the last 30 years, federal programs have been on sale, and they’ve found lots of buyers.
That’s how the low-tax strategy has worked in practice. So if we are going to reduce the size of the federal government, we can’t rely on starving the beast. We will have to tackle it and wrestle it to the mat.
”
— Steve Chapman - How Starving Government Still Gets Fat (Reason.com May 3, 2010)
May 03, 2010, 4:59pm
