Links to Consider, 7/8

Jason Manning's observations; Peter Gray on un-blind experiments; various EconLib articles; Ed West on Britain's love for France

Jason Manning writes,

As a reminder, I recommend Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for reading, and I am making progress with the Learn Math Fast System for teaching arithmetic. I think you can get good ideas out of Right Start Mathematics to mix in with the curriculum, but I found it hard to follow as a linear sequence.

This little advice on homeschooling comes near the end of a long post on disparate topics, including the sociology of tattoos and cultural-contagion factors in the baby bust.

Peter Gray writes,

many studies have shown that most college students bias their own responses in the direction that fits their understanding of what the researchers want to find. In this case it would have been obvious to most if not all participants that the researchers were trying to show that reducing social media use would make them feel better. Good social science research requires that the participants have no idea what the experiment is all about or what the researchers’ hypothesis is, but in this case there was no way to hide that.

Now the placebo effect. This refers to the simple fact that when people believe they are doing something that will make them feel better, that belief by itself makes them feel better.

When you test a drug, you give some people the drug and others a placebo. People who know they got the treatment might feel inclined to tell you that it works. Gray is saying that this is a problem with studies that tell the treatment group to cut down on social media.

When it is feasible, the way to conduct such a study is not to tell the people whether they received the treatment or the placebo. This is known as “blind.”

In some situations, the results of a treatment are going to be judged subjectively by the team of researchers. In those situations, you do not want to let the judges know who got the treatment and who got the placebo. This is known as “double-blind.”

For EconLib, Alexander William Salter reviews an old textbook from the UCLA school of economics.

Alchian and Allen defend the teamwork theory of the firm: Many production processes use team production, meaning the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The parts (e.g., an individual employee’s contribution) are difficult to value, and hence difficult to compensate. This creates some bad incentives for team members. They would rather slack off and let other team members do the heavy lifting. But if every team member thinks this way, nothing gets produced, and nobody gets compensated. The firm, and in particular the manager, is a governance mechanism. The firm hierarchically polices production, ensuring team members contribute the right amount of effort to the group project.

In another retrospective, Aeon Skoble looks back at Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

As long as people are free to form the communities they want, and no one is forced either to join or to remain, any number of communities are possible, and consistent with respect for people’s rights and autonomy. So the “minimal state” Nozick defends is not, contrary to incautious critics, a laissez-faire capitalist society. The “minimal state” is a framework, which allows for laissez-faire commercial societies and also communes, for high-tech societies and Amish country, for secular societies and religious societies—provided only that people join these communities voluntarily and may exit should they change their mind.

Then there is my own review of a new book by Paul Seabright on the economics of religion.

He offers many insights into the way that religions evolve under the pressure of competition. This is where they face challenges that are very similar to those faced by businesses.

Seabright believes that the Internet is going to force further evolution. He thinks that the Catholic Church is likely to incur another schism, comparable to what took place in the wake of the invention of the printing press. Of course, we can hope that it will not be accompanied by so much violence.

Ed West writes,

France and Britain are comparable in population and wealth. Both are dominated by an outsized capital which together served as the twin centres of western thought before the rise of the New World. Despite some major differences, their political culture is similar in many ways, notable for an emphasis on sarcasm and irony, and an educated elite who have a reactive disdain for their country and its traditions. French Twitter has a similar tendency towards attributing everything good to immigration including, remarkably to British observers, food. Imagine how terrible French food would be without immigration?

…And this is the great political line that now divides Europe, besides which all other issues pale in importance – whether we want our historically European societies to be transformed. If France’s voters decisively say no, despite the huge social pressure to conform, and the attempts of the centre, Left and far-Left to join forces, it will have a seismic influence on Britain.

UPDATE: Yesterday, France’s voters said no to Macron’s technocratic centrism. But they did not say yes to their NatCons decisively enough. With Macron’s cooperation, the New Popular Front won the most seats in France’s Parliament, even though they received far less votes than Le Pen’s National Rally. But the Bolsheviks will only be able to run the country if Macron continues to cooperate. Will he?

substacks referenced above:

@

A certain idea of Europe

@

#45. The Importance of Critical Analyses in Examining Social Science Evidence

@

Links for June, 2024