Links to Consider, 7/28

Musa al-Gharbi on Education and Privilege; Gary Saul Morson on Lenin; Hansonian Medicine Watch; Behavioral economists recant

Musa al-Gharbi writes,

Studies have found that graduates of elite K–12 schools who get into elite universities tend to be worse than average on the academic front. That is, they tend to be relatively weak students, not prodigious ones. Nonetheless, they tend to perform particularly well socioeconomically after graduation, especially relative to peers from less advantaged backgrounds who graduated from the same university and with higher GPAs. Why? Because while students from nonelite backgrounds tend to prioritize their academics when they get into top colleges, students from elite backgrounds spend much more time networking and socializing—and these latter behaviors tend to yield much higher career dividends in our ostensibly “meritocratic” system than actual talent or hard work.

Pointer from Rob Henderson. See also Tyler Cowen, who reproduces the excerpt from a new paper by Raj Chetty and others. One of the others is David J. Deming, who provides a link to the paper.

On Lenin, Gary Saul Morson wrote,

Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky—who cites Lenin—to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.”

…He does not just advance a claim, he insists that it is absolutely certain and, for good measure, says the same thing again in other words. It is absolutely certain, beyond any possible doubt, perfectly clear to anyone not dull-witted. … Nothing is true unless it is absolutely, indubitably so; if a position is wrong, it is entirely and irredeemably so; if something must be done, it must be done “immediately, without delay”; Party representatives are to make “no concessions whatsoever.” Under Lenin’s direction the Party demanded “the dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another” (italics mine). It was not enough just to shoot kulaks summarily, they had “to be shot on the spot without trial,” a phrase that in one brief decree he managed to use in each of its six numbered commands before concluding: “This order is to be carried out strictly, mercilessly.” You’d think that was clear enough already.

No concessions, compromises, exceptions, or acts of leniency; everything must be totally uniform, absolutely the same, unqualifiedly unqualified.

Another pointer from Henderson.

David E. Newman-Toker and many co-authors of a study write,

An estimated 795 000 Americans become permanently disabled or die annually across care settings because dangerous diseases are misdiagnosed. Just 15 diseases account for about half of all serious harms, so the problem may be more tractable than previously imagined.

One of the puzzles of health care economics is that when you compare any two populations in terms of spending and outcomes, higher spending does not seem to lead to better outcomes. Because this is true within the United States as well as internationally, the claim that “It’s the prices, stupid” does not hold up. Some economists speak of “flat of the curve medicine,” meaning interventions that add to cost with very little benefit. Robin Hanson is one of the few willing to go further, claiming that successful interventions on some people are canceled out in the aggregate by harm done to others. I have come to refer to harmful interventions as Hansonian Medicine. Note that the study is probably including errors of omission, which I would not count as Hansonian Medicine.

Nick Chater and George Loewenstein write,

An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society's most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which the individual operates. We now believe this was a mistake, along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both the academic and policy communities. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though by no means all) behavioral scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: to adopt what we call the “i-frame,” rather than the “s-frame.” The difference may be more consequential than i-frame advocates have realized, by deflecting attention and support away from s-frame policies. Indeed, highlighting the i-frame is a long-established objective of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation.

Spoiler alert: nudges don’t work. Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

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