Regarding Musa al-Gharbi's except, I had a history professor at Swarthmore who observed that his "A" students became professors and his "C" students donated buildings. Guess that still holds true.
There is a lot in that excerpt I'm skeptical about. I've also long been skeptical about the A and C student thing. (I think we just noticed the cases where it's a C student more readily.) Anyway, here's the one I find least compelling,
"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."
Whether they spend more time building the network or not, I'd bet most of the advantage comes from the network they had before even arriving at college.
Not only do nudges not work (in the sense of having limited benefits overall), they often have unintended consequences. From a recent review of financial studies paper:
“This paper studies the direct and indirect effects of nudging, by means of a field experiment with a financial management platform in Brazil. Reminders for upcoming credit card payments reduce credit card late-payment fees by 14%, but increase overdraft fees in checking accounts by 9%. The unintended effect is concentrated on users with a history of overdraft use. These users experienced a net increase of 5% in total fees, while the rest experienced savings of 15%. The results provide clear insights for nudge design: Like any policy action, nudges can have side effects, and one size may not fit all.”
The author Paolina Medina has several interesting nudge-related papers.
The problem with this is that no nudge is still a nudge.
If the default 401k contribution is zero, how is that less of a nudge than say 5%?
If the school lunch line displays desserts more prominently than the fruit, how is that less of a nudge?
As for your late payment example, if that attempt to nudge didn't work, that's no indication nudges don't work. It just means THAT nudge didn't work as intended.
The overall literature on nudges finds fairly disappointing effects, as the authors Arnold cites in the post report.
There are of course some small decisions that have to be made one way or another as you point out. But most government nudge interventions don’t fit into that category, and the effects of making one innocuous change are very often either negligible or already being realized by the private sector without any government initiatives to bring them about.
I don't know your politics but I'm nonetheless befuddled. There is no doubt nudges aren't as effective as some alternatives and some don't work as intended at all. To say that invalidates nudges or means they don't work seems an absurd strawman. I would think the libertarian-conservative-small government types that most typically frequent this substack would still favor the i-frame solutions described by the authors Kling cited, even if less effective than the s-frame they describe, which I'd assume most Klingites would be mostly against on principle.
Back when I was a youthful Marxist, I read widely in the correspondence of both Marx and Lenin. The letters are revealing. You could not escape the fact that both men were cranks: obsessed with their personal "systems", inflexible, obdurate, intolerant, and bad-tempered. They saved their most savage invective for those closest to them in ideology and spirt, who happened to differ with them on some small matter. You can only imagine how unpleasant it must have been to know them. Lenin was worst of the two, since he was less "intellectual" than Marx, aside from being a moral idiot.
I'm no fan of nudge ideas, but as for potency, it's obvious that you will move a person more with a shove (like bans enforced by threats of serious penalties) than a nudge (which preserves choice to still pick the 'bad' option at a small cost). The nudge advocates don't claim that nudges are just as effective as shoves; the authors are playing games. The whole point of nudge is to try and get some effect -without- shoving, accepting that most of the time you will not get close to what you could get by shoving.
Anyway, the part that jumped out at me was, "Whereas the average impact of nudges reported in academic journals is large – at 8.7% – their analysis yielded a mean impact of just 1.4%."
Assuming for the sake of argument that these percentage averages actually mean anything, the academic literature averages to overstating the total empirical average by not a little bit but instead by a whole order of magnitude: 520%. Trust the science indeed.
Unintentional, unplanned, unrecognized, etc. nudges are still nudges. Worse, it is much easier to do something nefarious when you pretend you aren't nudging at all.
There is no reason to (dis)incentivize something you want to be rid of entirely (as litter, in the public sphere). There is no "just right" Goldilocks amount of litter.
Of course, on private land you are free to dig a pond, then buy and fill it with plastic bags; and string a barbed wire fence, and plant mesquite trees, and skewer plastic bags at decorative intervals.
I guess I'm no libertarian because it's the incentive programs I find creepy. I just passed a billboard (in New Mexico) that said "#Dadication" with a picture of vague ethnic dad holding his kid's hand.
Now this is imbecilic of course - the sign can only be directed at Hispanics (they have special signs for Indians, on the res - like don't shake your baby). If Mexican men have lost their "Dadication" it is due to their Americanization, a stupid sign of which is the hideous (and offensive) PSA billboards with which we choose to befoul the landscape.
The Dadication billboard, by the way, said "fatherhood.gov". Whatever the hell Big Papa thing that is, or what sort of permanent budget center it serves, I want no part of it, and it actively courts my contempt. I who was once trained to feel nothing but gratitude, and pride in my country ...
Are you going to ban everything that might end up as litter? Sounds pretty silly to me. And to be reasonable you need to consider both positives and negatives. I for one rate the convenience of plastic bags very positively.
Spoken like an excellent New Man. Your views dovetail very well with social engineering, a concern for litter belonging to an older America which must needs be forgotten, demographics being what they are, and environmentalists as endangered as sage grouse. People - only people, especially poor people - are the highest good; more people, all excepting the class of people who were conservation-minded, is better; nature sucks; up is down; open the border - I see no real difference in our views of the situation, apart from my being unreconstructed.
I have an Uncle In Law that makes about $500k a year "fundraising" for various environmental/animal rights charities. I'm aware of no special skills or abilities he has and he's never struck me as unnaturally charismatic. However, he does seem to know a lot of rich people personally as friends going all the way back to his private K-12 days, and that seems to be enough.
Are Ivies wrong to want such a person over someone meritocratic but unlikely to be able to fundraise millions based solely on personal networks?
He gets paid so much because his income is a dividend from his huge endowment of "social circle capital", which, among members of the same team is organizational capital (and a society's narrow elite tends towards convergence and thus being a loose and informal team).
Where I work, secrecy is so important and increasingly so that the top folks can only work with a tiny inner circle on everything until literally the last minute when they are compelled to bring others into the plan to help implement and execute. Because you can only do this with people you truly trust, and that kind of trust takes years of interactive experience to generate, the membership of the inner circles tends to be stagnant and consisting mostly of elderly incumbents and a few proteges being groomed to take over in a generation (or two).
This is kind of like the organizational capital of a mafia or cartel, in which one gets a huge endowment of "social circle capital" by being born into his family and thus literally more 'familiar' to and informally punishable by the patriarchs, and thus more 'trustable', which is worth a huge amount to the leaders.
The reason everybody wants their kids to go to the "best schools" possible is that this is a euphemism for the perfectly accurate instinct that what makes a school good is not what is learned there but the quality of the professors and student body in terms of potential leverageable social connections. Just like banks do maturity transformation, elite schools transform your tuition into social circle capital, and for many people it's a fair trade for an investment that pays off.
I'm in agreement. I also think there is a mutually beneficial arrangement between old money and new talent mixing.
I think its naive to think going to Flagship Public University is going to give you the same social capital just because the education is as good.
I can also see why my Uncle making 500k for nonsense work while kind of being a basket case and having no skills is off putting to people's sense of fairness.
It doesn't really matter what is in the self-interest of the Ivies.
If the law as it stands today contains some restriction on admitting those people, then best for society to enforce that law. *Especially* if the overall result is to harm the ivies.
How does one truly measure wasteful or ineffective healthcare spending? My opinion is we can't. Last year I had my knee replaced. I could have lived with it. With surgical options of a few decades ago I would have. I did it not because it had to be done but that it was deteriorating exponentially and, because of the specific underlying issue, it was near certain to continue that path. Today it is far better. But how does that show up in any measure of health statistics? It doesn't. But it would if the surgery had gone horribly wrong.
Last month I finished months of physical therapy for tennis elbow.
Next is lens replacement for my cataracts that are rather minimally affecting my vision.
"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.“
To what does this refer? Has he not heard of systemic racism? Claims that we are controlled by the rich and powerful? In what areas is it common belief that problems are with the individual and not systemic?
The health care effect is what you would expect to see if medical care was roughly about as useful as it always has been (which is not much). To be charitable, a subset of medical treatments unequivocally work. These generate a halo of credibility that is much-abused to provide a massive number of quack treatments that are either useless or harmful. The excellence in treating bullet wounds rubs off on to Lipitor, Vioxx, Zoloft, and DES. The government, by propping up the medical profession, greatly clouds the market coordination mechanism, making it so that providers and consumers alike are indifferent to product quality and effectiveness.
The better that some health treatments become, the bigger the fuzzy halo of quackery grows.
The worst hustle comes from end-of-life care, in which medical providers loot their patients and the government while their patients are under extreme duress. Once governments like Canada's come under financial pressure for the impossible costs associated with end-of-life care, they abandon even the pretense of Hippocratic ethics and start getting into the murder-for-hire business, building a monopoly on what has historically been considered first-degree murder.
Regarding Musa al-Gharbi's except, I had a history professor at Swarthmore who observed that his "A" students became professors and his "C" students donated buildings. Guess that still holds true.
There is a lot in that excerpt I'm skeptical about. I've also long been skeptical about the A and C student thing. (I think we just noticed the cases where it's a C student more readily.) Anyway, here's the one I find least compelling,
"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."
Whether they spend more time building the network or not, I'd bet most of the advantage comes from the network they had before even arriving at college.
Not only do nudges not work (in the sense of having limited benefits overall), they often have unintended consequences. From a recent review of financial studies paper:
“This paper studies the direct and indirect effects of nudging, by means of a field experiment with a financial management platform in Brazil. Reminders for upcoming credit card payments reduce credit card late-payment fees by 14%, but increase overdraft fees in checking accounts by 9%. The unintended effect is concentrated on users with a history of overdraft use. These users experienced a net increase of 5% in total fees, while the rest experienced savings of 15%. The results provide clear insights for nudge design: Like any policy action, nudges can have side effects, and one size may not fit all.”
The author Paolina Medina has several interesting nudge-related papers.
https://sites.google.com/site/paolinamedinapalma/research
The problem with this is that no nudge is still a nudge.
If the default 401k contribution is zero, how is that less of a nudge than say 5%?
If the school lunch line displays desserts more prominently than the fruit, how is that less of a nudge?
As for your late payment example, if that attempt to nudge didn't work, that's no indication nudges don't work. It just means THAT nudge didn't work as intended.
The overall literature on nudges finds fairly disappointing effects, as the authors Arnold cites in the post report.
There are of course some small decisions that have to be made one way or another as you point out. But most government nudge interventions don’t fit into that category, and the effects of making one innocuous change are very often either negligible or already being realized by the private sector without any government initiatives to bring them about.
I don't know your politics but I'm nonetheless befuddled. There is no doubt nudges aren't as effective as some alternatives and some don't work as intended at all. To say that invalidates nudges or means they don't work seems an absurd strawman. I would think the libertarian-conservative-small government types that most typically frequent this substack would still favor the i-frame solutions described by the authors Kling cited, even if less effective than the s-frame they describe, which I'd assume most Klingites would be mostly against on principle.
Back when I was a youthful Marxist, I read widely in the correspondence of both Marx and Lenin. The letters are revealing. You could not escape the fact that both men were cranks: obsessed with their personal "systems", inflexible, obdurate, intolerant, and bad-tempered. They saved their most savage invective for those closest to them in ideology and spirt, who happened to differ with them on some small matter. You can only imagine how unpleasant it must have been to know them. Lenin was worst of the two, since he was less "intellectual" than Marx, aside from being a moral idiot.
"They saved their most savage invective for those closest to them in ideology and spirt, who happened to differ with them on some small matter."
I see that happening on the right today.
I'm no fan of nudge ideas, but as for potency, it's obvious that you will move a person more with a shove (like bans enforced by threats of serious penalties) than a nudge (which preserves choice to still pick the 'bad' option at a small cost). The nudge advocates don't claim that nudges are just as effective as shoves; the authors are playing games. The whole point of nudge is to try and get some effect -without- shoving, accepting that most of the time you will not get close to what you could get by shoving.
Anyway, the part that jumped out at me was, "Whereas the average impact of nudges reported in academic journals is large – at 8.7% – their analysis yielded a mean impact of just 1.4%."
Assuming for the sake of argument that these percentage averages actually mean anything, the academic literature averages to overstating the total empirical average by not a little bit but instead by a whole order of magnitude: 520%. Trust the science indeed.
All nudges eventually become shoves.
Unintentional, unplanned, unrecognized, etc. nudges are still nudges. Worse, it is much easier to do something nefarious when you pretend you aren't nudging at all.
This is why ideological opponents of local plastic bag bans are so silly.
Explain? Plastic bag bans seem silly to me.
There is no reason to (dis)incentivize something you want to be rid of entirely (as litter, in the public sphere). There is no "just right" Goldilocks amount of litter.
Of course, on private land you are free to dig a pond, then buy and fill it with plastic bags; and string a barbed wire fence, and plant mesquite trees, and skewer plastic bags at decorative intervals.
I guess I'm no libertarian because it's the incentive programs I find creepy. I just passed a billboard (in New Mexico) that said "#Dadication" with a picture of vague ethnic dad holding his kid's hand.
Now this is imbecilic of course - the sign can only be directed at Hispanics (they have special signs for Indians, on the res - like don't shake your baby). If Mexican men have lost their "Dadication" it is due to their Americanization, a stupid sign of which is the hideous (and offensive) PSA billboards with which we choose to befoul the landscape.
The Dadication billboard, by the way, said "fatherhood.gov". Whatever the hell Big Papa thing that is, or what sort of permanent budget center it serves, I want no part of it, and it actively courts my contempt. I who was once trained to feel nothing but gratitude, and pride in my country ...
Are you going to ban everything that might end up as litter? Sounds pretty silly to me. And to be reasonable you need to consider both positives and negatives. I for one rate the convenience of plastic bags very positively.
Spoken like an excellent New Man. Your views dovetail very well with social engineering, a concern for litter belonging to an older America which must needs be forgotten, demographics being what they are, and environmentalists as endangered as sage grouse. People - only people, especially poor people - are the highest good; more people, all excepting the class of people who were conservation-minded, is better; nature sucks; up is down; open the border - I see no real difference in our views of the situation, apart from my being unreconstructed.
Well, you've really lost me this time. I have pretty much no idea what you're talking about...
I think social cohesion is just as important as having a meritocracy.
I have an Uncle In Law that makes about $500k a year "fundraising" for various environmental/animal rights charities. I'm aware of no special skills or abilities he has and he's never struck me as unnaturally charismatic. However, he does seem to know a lot of rich people personally as friends going all the way back to his private K-12 days, and that seems to be enough.
Are Ivies wrong to want such a person over someone meritocratic but unlikely to be able to fundraise millions based solely on personal networks?
He gets paid so much because his income is a dividend from his huge endowment of "social circle capital", which, among members of the same team is organizational capital (and a society's narrow elite tends towards convergence and thus being a loose and informal team).
Where I work, secrecy is so important and increasingly so that the top folks can only work with a tiny inner circle on everything until literally the last minute when they are compelled to bring others into the plan to help implement and execute. Because you can only do this with people you truly trust, and that kind of trust takes years of interactive experience to generate, the membership of the inner circles tends to be stagnant and consisting mostly of elderly incumbents and a few proteges being groomed to take over in a generation (or two).
This is kind of like the organizational capital of a mafia or cartel, in which one gets a huge endowment of "social circle capital" by being born into his family and thus literally more 'familiar' to and informally punishable by the patriarchs, and thus more 'trustable', which is worth a huge amount to the leaders.
The reason everybody wants their kids to go to the "best schools" possible is that this is a euphemism for the perfectly accurate instinct that what makes a school good is not what is learned there but the quality of the professors and student body in terms of potential leverageable social connections. Just like banks do maturity transformation, elite schools transform your tuition into social circle capital, and for many people it's a fair trade for an investment that pays off.
I'm in agreement. I also think there is a mutually beneficial arrangement between old money and new talent mixing.
I think its naive to think going to Flagship Public University is going to give you the same social capital just because the education is as good.
I can also see why my Uncle making 500k for nonsense work while kind of being a basket case and having no skills is off putting to people's sense of fairness.
It doesn't really matter what is in the self-interest of the Ivies.
If the law as it stands today contains some restriction on admitting those people, then best for society to enforce that law. *Especially* if the overall result is to harm the ivies.
How does one truly measure wasteful or ineffective healthcare spending? My opinion is we can't. Last year I had my knee replaced. I could have lived with it. With surgical options of a few decades ago I would have. I did it not because it had to be done but that it was deteriorating exponentially and, because of the specific underlying issue, it was near certain to continue that path. Today it is far better. But how does that show up in any measure of health statistics? It doesn't. But it would if the surgery had gone horribly wrong.
Last month I finished months of physical therapy for tennis elbow.
Next is lens replacement for my cataracts that are rather minimally affecting my vision.
"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.“
To what does this refer? Has he not heard of systemic racism? Claims that we are controlled by the rich and powerful? In what areas is it common belief that problems are with the individual and not systemic?
The health care effect is what you would expect to see if medical care was roughly about as useful as it always has been (which is not much). To be charitable, a subset of medical treatments unequivocally work. These generate a halo of credibility that is much-abused to provide a massive number of quack treatments that are either useless or harmful. The excellence in treating bullet wounds rubs off on to Lipitor, Vioxx, Zoloft, and DES. The government, by propping up the medical profession, greatly clouds the market coordination mechanism, making it so that providers and consumers alike are indifferent to product quality and effectiveness.
The better that some health treatments become, the bigger the fuzzy halo of quackery grows.
The worst hustle comes from end-of-life care, in which medical providers loot their patients and the government while their patients are under extreme duress. Once governments like Canada's come under financial pressure for the impossible costs associated with end-of-life care, they abandon even the pretense of Hippocratic ethics and start getting into the murder-for-hire business, building a monopoly on what has historically been considered first-degree murder.
about behavioral economy
no welfare SYSTEM would adopt policies that would greatly reduce the number of welfare recipients or the amount of money spent on welfare