This just in: The study of physics makes people less compassionate. Data show that when cornered at a party by the inventor of a perpetual motion machine, physics majors are particularly unlikely to offer positive encouragement.
Also, the study of history leads to closed-mindedness. After taking an American history course, students become considerably less open to the idea that Millard Fillmore might have been Abraham Lincoln’s vice president.
Meanwhile, the study of chemistry makes people less ambitious. Chemistry students are particularly unwilling to invest in lead-to-gold conversion kits, even when they are conveniently offered over the Internet.
Geology students are just plain nasty. Among all majors, they are the least likely to participate in coordinated meditation exercises for the prevention of earthquakes — even when the organizers estimate that hundreds of thousands of lives might be at stake.
And economics majors are so greedy that they are particularly unlikely to donate to left-wing interest groups that seek to undermine capitalism.
I made all of those up except for the last one, which I got from University of Washington Lecturer Yoram Bauman’s contribution to yesterday’s New York Times, where he actually (and this part I swear to God I am not making up!!!) draws the conclusion that students who have studied the merits of capitalism are among the least likely to support its detractors and then manages to conclude that this is because economics students are greedy.
What can one possibly say? Did no alternative hypothesis present itself to the editors of the New York Times? Did it not occur to them, for example, that economics courses might, you know, teach something about critical thinking? Except, of course, when those courses are taught by the likes of Yoram Bauman.
What is an “environmental economist” anyway?
How is economics students’ disapproval of anti-capitalism any different to homeopathy students’ disapproval of mainstream medicine? Or med students’ disapproval of homeopathy for that matter?
I mean, Steve and I presumably agree with the stances of two of the three groups above but this thought experiment doesn’t do much to help us agree on which one is wrong.
Some experiments suggest that people who study economics really are more greedy:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/economics_frank/
In one survey, economics professors were more than twice as likely as professors in any other subject, to report that they had given no money to charity in the previous year.
In this case the explanation can’t be that they refused to donate to groups that “undermine capitalism”, because you can donate to charities supporting any view that you want, including pro-libertarian ones. And even most libertarians don’t think that donating to AIDS orphans in Rwanda is “undermining capitalism”.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t answer the question of whether the study of economics *caused* the professors to become less inclined to give. Maybe they were born selfish and that made them study econ :)
To really establish cause and effect, it seems like this would work: divide people into two random groups, teach econ to half of them (however much you think makes a difference), then ask some subset of each group to donate to a left-wing group, and ask another subset to donate to a politically neutral but obviously worthy cause, like support for AIDS orphans in Africa (administered by a group that is known to be trustworthy).
Based on prior experiments, we already expect that econ students will be less likely to donate to the left-wing group, either because taking the econ course has made them selfish, or (as you hypothesize) because taking econ has taught them the merits of capitalism. But if they’re also less likely to donate to AIDS orphans, that would seem to indicate that taking econ really did make them more selfish.
I guess you are arguing that Econ majors and students would be better able to evaluate the utility of a donation to a left-wing student organization, and more likely to conclude that it is a waste of money, or worse. Or at least the study should have considered that possibility before deciding that the students were more selfish. This point was made on Yoram’s blog, and his response is:
So you are right. He does not consider the obvious alternative hypothesis, and suffers from the Psychologist’s fallacy. He even ends his paper (free link from his blog) by saying, “training students in ways that make them more self-interested makes them worse off.”
Remarkable how someone can actually draw such a conclusion, I’m at a loss for words…
This also touches on something I have thought about: how do you define if someone is greedy or not? Example: I never give to charity but I do give almost everything I earn (what’s left after the government has forced me to give 40% to everyone else) to my family, am I greedy or not greedy? I would wager that I give away more, both of my income and in absolute terms since I earn more than average, than most people who give to charity but I would show up as greedy in the test proposed by Bennett.
Maybe the problem is that Yoram Bauman is described in the NYT as “an environmental economist”. That sounds a bit like an astrological astronomer, or a homeopathic doctor.
Your post has inspired me and reminded me that I meant to make a few more donations to left-wing organizations and candidates before the end of the year.
I think Bennett is missing the point. He could as well argue that the only way we can tell if learning American history makes you more close-minded is to . The point is not whether people who study econ really are . It is that Baumann’s conclusion is such a howling non-sequitur that it would be obvious in any subject like hiotory or physics. It should be equally obvious in econ.
Steve omits a self-referential example. Mathematicians are less patient. We’ve seen Steve lose his when people try to tell him that the Peano Axioms are inconsistent!
Well, of course Yoram is well known as the “Stand up Economist” (analogous: Stand up Comedian), and his “10 Principles of Economics” (5:21, office safe) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4 is hilarious.
So at first I thought it was a joke. But I can’t read between the lines of his original article to conclude it’s anything but a non-sequitur.
It’s interesting that less than 24 hours before Steve’s post, Bryan Caplan at Econlog praised Yoram’s new book, volume 2 of a graphic novel (comic book) explaining economics [The Cartoon Book of Economics, Vol. 2: Macro, http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Introduction-Economics-Two-Macroeconomics/dp/0809033615/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b ]. Bryan felt Yoram got most everything spot on.
Thanks for the comments on my article, Steven. But you should look at our research in the context of the previous literature. Frey and Meier (2004) look at a nearly identical situation at the University of Zurich, where students are asked if they want to contribute to scholarship funds for needy students and for foreign students; almost 60% of students donate (!) and again economists donate less than the rest. Perhaps you want to argue that these scholarship funds are also not public goods, or perhaps you want to argue that “all taxation is theft” and therefore that there is a fundamental flaw in all public goods experiments? (Your comment on my blog (here) comes dangerously close to this when you argue that ATN is not a public good for students because “*somebody else is paying for that lunch*. Why is it more altruistic to care about students than to care about taxpayers?” Indeed, why is national defense a public good… think about it from the perspective of Iran! For that matter, classroom public goods experiments—where the experimenter hands out “free money”—are perhaps also not public goods… after all, that money belongs to someone, and if it didn’t go to me it would go to somebody else, like the experimenter or the school or the foundation that paid for the experiment. That’s why I didn’t contribute!!) So I stand by the claim in the NYT article that “academic research suggests that there’s a good deal of truth to the stereotype.” Having said that, I will also concede that your criticism is a fair one, albeit one that has been made before: “Indeed, it is possible in this case – as in, say, a requested donation for an organization dedicated to replacing competitive markets with economy-wide price controls – that economics training would reduce donation rates not because students become more SELFISH but because they become more EDUCATED. Regardless of the cause, however, it is clear that economics training changes the giving behavior of non-majors.” That’s from the last sentence of our published journal article; perhaps you should read it :)
PS. Maybe you will find more to your liking the 2nd volume of my Cartoon Introduction to Economics, just released! Bryan Caplan over at Econlib loved it.
Yoram: Not contributing to scholarship funds for needy students is arguably evidence of selfishness. Not contributing to a program that wants to take money from people named A, B and C in order to give money to people named X, Y and Z is not by any conceivable standard evidence of selfishness.
Regarding classroom public goods experiments, you are absolutely right, and I have made this point in print multiple times (in Slate, in Reason, and on this blog). The student who pays the experimenter to hand out “free money” to his fellow students is most assuredly not demonstrating altruism, or selflessness, or anything of the kind. You write “That money belons to someone and if it didn’t go to me it would go to someone else” as if we were supposed to point at this and laugh. In fact, I’d be disappointed in any economics student who failed to grasp this simple truth.
What about my other examples? What about the white person who opposes massive racially-based transfers from blacks to whites? Is he demonstrating selflessness? How does this differ from the student who opposes transfers from non-students to students?
I note that Yoram is spending time replying. This is good and I am pleased to see the response. But it is also time he is not spending at a food bank. I conclude that reading Landsburg makes people less caring.
This is absurd of course. It is not just that the causal link from reading Landsburg to spending time writing is unproven. Even if I could prove that, and even if I could prove that that meant fewer hours at a food bank it would still not prove the ‘less caring’ claim.
@Yoram: Did I read what you said correctly? You have just admitted (I choose the verb carefully) that what you said in the NYT is disclaimed in the last sentence of your journal article, but not in the NYT article? That in other words when presenting your data in a detailed report to competent peers you add the disclaimer, but when writing an opinion piece for broader consumption you suppress the rather large and serious caveat?
I assume that Yoram’s experiment used “Affordable Tuition Now” becasue he assumes that this is a cause that all (or nearly all) the students will support, so that he can see the refusal to donate $3 as an attempt to free-ride. But there are reasons why this is a bad choice. First, students might NOT support the ATN idea. Or they might support them only out of selfishness, as in Steve’s several examples. Or they might realize the program has little chance of success because they just read Mancur Olson in class.
ATN seems almost exactly wrong for the purpose intended.
Yoram, you claim to quote your paper, but I downloaded your paper from your blog and it does not say that at all.
I infer from this that an editor forced you to change your conclusion in order to publish the paper. But you do not agree with the change, so you are distributing a version of the paper without the change on your blog, and describing your results without the change in the NY Times. Is that correct?
‘Perhaps you want to argue that these scholarship funds are also not public goods….’
There’s no perhaps about it. Clearly they are not public goods in the Paul Samuelson (1954) definition of the term; non rivalrous and non excludable in consumption.
You teach economics?
So apparently pure transfers are a “public” good from the perspective of the recipients, whereas national defense is not a public “good” from the perspective of those who might wish to attack us. (How about people who like to pollute?) Before today I would’ve thought ‘public good for some’ was an oxymoron, and every $ one chooses (or not) to give to a student etc. has a corresponding impact on the amount of benefits provided.
Here’s a theory (I just made up) that might also be “cool” to examine: Economists like John List have found that people often behave quite differently in ‘the field’ – when they don’t know they’re being watched or judged by someone – than in ‘the lab’. (The results have called into question some of the basic tenets of behavioral economics.) Could there be some reason people who study economics are more likely to respond based on their actual convictions (e.g. due to their greater exposure to the realities of trade-offs), rather than the way they believe the experimenter ‘wants’ and/or how others might view their actions in terms of (less so informed notions of) ‘compassion’? If so, that wouldn’t seem to provide much of a commentary in terms of self-interest.
Not sure I’m getting all the nuances here, but here’s what I’ve gleaned so far:
Yoram Mauman interprets a study to demonstrate that students who become econ majors are less likely to give to charity than other students, and the act of taking an econ class tends to cause students who major in other subjects to become less willing to give to charity.
Landsburg offers an alternative interp of the data: Students who become econ majors are less likely to give to the particular charities in the study than are other students, and the act of taking an econ class tends to cause students that major in other subjects to become less willing to give to the particular charities in the study. But offer other charities, and perhaps you’d get different results.
I can’t deny the possibility of Landsburg’s analysis. In order to explore the analysis further, I’d be interested in hearing people’s nominations of charities that we imagine would be especially appealing to econ majors. (And perhaps we could then identify an actual working economist who has contact with students and who might be able to conduct an actual experiment….?)
But, for what it’s worth, I find Mauman’s thesis entirely plausible. For those of you who don’t speak Blog, this translates to, “Mauman’s thesis (to the extent that I understand it) conforms to my personal experience.”
I found my first econ class to be a revelation. It shook my world view quite a bit. It stripped a lot of sentimentality from my analyses and challenged conventional thinking. More importantly, it provided a framework from which to admire people who flouted conventional thinking, rather than to disdain them. And in helping me gain a new vantage point from which to view conventional thinking, my first econ class broke me free from a certain amount of groupthink.
Was there a loss of group cohesion? I expect so. Did that cause me to stop giving to charity? I’m not so sure….
…because, honestly, I’ve always been a cheapskate. I’ve always had a propensity for strategic (dare I say, back-stabbing?) behavior. And I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my strategic propensities. A study of economics ushered me into a community of people who regarded such strategic behavior as clever and laudable, within limits, and helped me come to terms with it. So, while I don’t know that I gave any less to charity than I had in the past, I suspect I stopped hassling other people (such as my parents) about the merits of giving to the Salvation Army guy at the storefront.
And yes, I opted to major in econ – a field of study I had never given a thought to upon entering college.
Just one more data point for your consideration.
In an ideal world we would be able to test how students behave with regard to an ideal public good. (I’m curious about what you think such a thing would be, incidentally. What about my example about national defense and Iran?) In the real world we have to look at the data we have, and the data set we had concerned donations to WashPIRG and ATN. We also had a fairly large body of evidence from other experiments, most of which pointed in the same direction. You’re free to quibble with bits of it, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree when you look at the big picture.
The good news is that we can attempt to make some progress on this problem experimentally. Go and ask your students whether they think it’s a public good for students at a public university to spend their own money lobbying for lower tuition rates for all the students at that public university. I bet you $1 that approximately zero percent bring up the issue you raise. (For the record, I would not make this bet if you asked them about white students lobbying for race-base transfers. Why that is I leave as a question for you to ponder, although I’d be happy to share my thoughts upon request.)
PS. Do these sorts of discussions really have to turn into scorched-earth battles filled with sarcasm and name-calling, and if so why? Remember that this study not only got past the editors at the NYT, but also the editors at JEBO; are you also going to go after them for being morons? (Pretty soon you’ll have nobody left to come to your holiday party :) Look, apparently we have a difference of opinion about what constitutes a public good, and perhaps I can even learn something from exchanging views on your blog, but I’m not going to keep coming here if all I find is vitriol.
PPS to Roger: I can’t post the final version of the paper online, but if you email me I will send you a PDF. You can contact me through my website.
Wow, remind me never to cross Landsburg. Your readers got your back, Steve.
Merlin leaves 2 huge piles. Anyone can remove items if he wants; plenty to go around. He refills them.
One is a pile of pills. Anyone who takes a pill needs no food as long as he is working towards a degree.
Is this a public good?
The second is a pile of slips with names. Anyone who picks one of the slips is entitled to have the named person pay for his food as long as he is working towards a degree.
Is this a public good?
Yoram: I do prefer to avoid vitriol (and as I think you know, there’s much about you that I admire). But it’s impossible for me to comment honestly on your piece without saying that I think it’s idiotic. It really does seem to me that there’s no other way to read it.
Here’s a simpler example: Ask your students how many of them are willing to pay $5 for the privilege of forcing a randomly chosen classmate to give $10 to another randomly chosen classmate. I am willing to bet that you will get no takers. Assuming that to be the case, are you honestly willing to view this outcome as evidence of selfishness among your students?
Yoram Bauman is confusing a collective interest with a public good. OPEC nations may have a collective interest in raising oil prices, but that is not a public good. Sugar producers may have a collective interest in lobbying for sugar quota, but that is not a public good either.
And the NYT and JEBO, if not morons, are negligent in failing to see the distinction and its relevance for the absurd conclusion that Bauman draws.
‘In the real world we have to look at the data we have, and the data set we had concerned donations to WashPIRG and ATN.’
Passerby to drunk on hands and knees under lamppost: ‘Did you lose something here?’
Drunk: ‘No, I lost my car keys over there, but the light’s better here.’
‘In the real world we have to look at the data we have, and the data set we had concerned donations to WashPIRG and ATN.’
Either this is an admission that the data chosen does not quite fit, or it’s an assertion that it simply has to, being the best at hand. The decision to interpret this as free-riding is tendentious. Surely the more natural implication is resistance to redistributive schemes.
In Yoram’s response to Roger he notes that — as Roger speculated — the early draft did not match the published paper. This vindicates Roger, not refutes him, and still leaves open the question Roger raised.
Yoram, the version of your paper that you distribute on your web site is good enough. I assume that it accurately reflects your opinion or you would not be posting it.
The fact that your study got past the editors at the NYTimes and JEBO means that it begs criticism all the more. If you can defend it, then please go ahead.
Steve Landsburg wrote:
Yoram[,] I do prefer to avoid vitriol (and as I think you know, there’s much about you that I admire). But it’s impossible for me to comment honestly on your piece without saying that I think it’s idiotic.
There is only one Steve Landsburg. Accept no substitutes.
Perhaps it is just that econ students figure they can spend their money more effectively and with less overhead than nearly any charity by targeting a recipient personally and directly. Few charities have zero overhead costs, and I don’t know of any which let an arbitrary donor decide who actually receives the donations.
As an example, perhaps they help a friend pay their tuition rather than contributing to a scholarship fund, or take a bag of groceries to a neighbor who lost their job instead of donating to the food bank. Or maybe they decide because of their new understanding of compound interest to save their money so that they can become a philanthropist when they retire.
Without knowing why, what is of little use.
Well, I read Yoram’s article, and it does seem to me that he needs to do more research
on the causality side.Perhaps he could look for differences in patterns of giving, in those situations where students do donate. Do economics students have the same pattern of giving, but give less overall? Or do they focus their giving more onto specific types of charity? Do they care about evidence that a charity is actually doing what they set out to do?
Or, he could place students in simulated “tragedy of the commons” situations, some with real money, and some with virtual money to avoid objections about “who pays for this experiment” – to see how they actually behave, not just infer their behaviour from a very specific experiment about a very specific charity. Or survey them about their opinions on congestion charges and global warming.
Or, he could examine people who do economics ‘mini-courses’ that focus on specific concepts in economics courses, to see if the effect depends on exactly what gets taught.
Or, he could try to correlate giving and other ‘commons’ behaviour with the grades obtained in economics courses. Do students stop giving more, the more they understand?
Does it depend which college they studied at, and therefore which “brand” of economics (Freshwater, Saltwater, Austrian, etc) is emphasised?
Does the effect extend to graduates of courses in personal finance? Bookkeeping? Marketing? Accounting? Actuarial studies?
Answers to any of these questions would still not address the question of causality. But they would certainly help tease the issue out.
I add one simple alternate hypothesis. Economics majors learn that it makes economic sense for them to contribute to just one charity. It makes no sense contributing $3 to each charity. I assume they could contribute $3 through the check-off to one group and another $3 through other means. And, of course, this assumes that either would be their number one choice. So, I’d expect neither to get any once one learns the silliness of spreading out the contributions (in most scenarios).
That said, I cannot fathom how anyone could view these two groups as anywhere near close to a “neutral” public good. Then again, I am one of those running laboratory experiments.
Unfortunately, we are still at the name-calling stage, although happily some of the names are now positive. (Being called an idiot is always nicer when it’s paired with words of admiration, so thank you for that, Steve.)
As for why we’re still at the name-calling stage, I think the answer is easy: you and your blog readers are unwilling to engage on the key issues, one theoretical and one practical.
The key theoretical issue is about what exactly counts as a public good… and perhaps even what counts as a good, period. You have failed to address my question about whether national security is a public good given the negative impacts on Iran, and more generally you have failed to give a definition. You have also failed to give examples. Anybody throwing around the word “idiotic” owes it to the world (not to mention to the idiot!) to do better.
The key practical question is exactly how likely it is that students are not giving money to ATN because they feel concern for the general taxpayers who would be on the hook if tuition rates went down. You keep trying to equate this with other situations—about race-based transfers or some student taking $10 from some other student—but we are talking here about practice, not theory, and as a practical matter I think it is obvious that these are not the same. In any case, the paper is about ATN, not about race-based transfers, so the appropriate test here is clear: ask students about the ATN situation. I have already offered to bet a dollar that approximately zero percent of them will say that student contributions to ATN are not a public good because of the impacts on taxpayers. But instead of taking me up on my bet—or addressing the theoretical question about public goods—you duck and weave and change the subject.
You have given me some good things to think about, Steve, and I deeply appreciate that, but you are failing to engage on either of those key issues. Why that is I don’t know, but of course I’m inclined to think that it’s because my point of view is not as idiotic as you claim :)
You offer two charities. The first is left-wing and therefore to find meaningful differences in support you would have to control for political leanings of the students in different faculties which you show no sign of having done.
The second charity is one which in pure theory is a transfer from an outgroup to an ingroup. Even if economics students do not consciously express that reason the classes teach the principle that such transfers tend to be bad (immigration restrictions,farm subsidies, tariffs, etc.)
You wish to make the claim that economics students give less to this charity because they become selfish through their classes, not because they learn theories which would indicate against that cause. That is a claim which needs more evidence than you seem to have given which seems to be, c’mon everybody knows low tuition is good so it must be selfishness.
Furthermore both charities are not in fact public goods in the sense that the market undersupplies the goods currently, the market does not provide too little of either political lobbying or education.
Yoram: As economists say all the time, and as I’ve consistently said in my books and on this blog, asking people why they did something is generally a very poor way to find out why they did something. Often they don’t know themselves.
But here’s an experiment you could do in principle: Ask students how much they’re willing to contribute to an organization that lobbies to reduce taxpayer-funded subsidies to public education. That’s the exact parallel of the study you did, and my guess is that if you do this, you’ll suddenly discover that economics majors are among the most generous of students.
Edited to add: Your position, incidentally, seems to be that economics instructors don’t do a very good job. After all, one of the main things we seek to instill in our students is an instinctive recognition that redistribution is a very different thing from wealth creation, and that in a redistribution scheme, every winner is paired with a loser. You’re guessing that econ students never learn that lesson. If so, you should be expressing disappointment with the quality of their education, not their morals.
Yoram writes:
your blog readers are unwilling to engage on the key issues, one theoretical and one practical.
The key theoretical issue is about what exactly counts as a public good…
I am one of the readers and I posted two examples on this, which go directly to point at issue: is it still a public good if it’s a transfer scheme.
Yoram has not responded.
‘You have failed to address my question about whether national security is a public good given the negative impacts on Iran, and more generally you have failed to give a definition. You have also failed to give examples. Anybody throwing around the word “idiotic” owes it to the world (not to mention to the idiot!) to do better.’
‘national’ excludes Iran from consideration for Americans. No?
Btw, I have given you (here and at your blog) the classic definition of a public good; non rivalrous consumption and non excludability. Also a specific example; radio broadcasts.
Even your rebuttals are fact free.
I want to go back to this: “your blog readers are unwilling to engage on the […]key theoretical issue is about what exactly counts as a public good”
Patrick R Sullivan posted the definition.
Ken B posted contrasting examples going to the heart of the disagreement.
Iceman posted about transfers and if they can be public goods.
Neil wrote “Yoram Bauman is confusing a collective interest with a public good.”
David Wallin disputed Yoram’s notion of a public good.
All of these comments precede Yoram’s assertion. I’d say the readers have addressed the issue quite directly. Yoram’s claim is absurd.
Yippie! Game on. Now, if only we could find an economist with access to students that would be interested in this issue. Anybody come to mind…?
That said, if we think that there were experimental design problems with the original study, do we really want to create a parallel study that mirrors those same problems? Or do we want to design a study that eliminates the problems? To put it another way, what exactly are we trying to demonstrate here?
Bauman interprets data to show that econ majors, and people with econ training, are less charitable than others. Landsburg contests this interpretation, suggesting that the outcome of Bauman’s study can be explained by considering the nature of the social causes in question. In brief, Landsburg argues that the charitable causes in the study would repel students who have developed a greater aversion to subsidies than the student body in general, and that econ majors (or those with some econ training) might comprise a disproportionate share of this group.
To offset this bias, Landsburg suggests inviting students to contribute to an organization dedicated to reducing subsidies to education. But in interpreting those results, we’d confront a similar problem we’ve confronted in the original study: it is still foreseeable that the subject matter of the social cause will repel (at least some) students. So we would again end up with results that would be hard to interpret, because people would need to balance their distaste for subsidies in general with their affinity for subsidies that benefit themselves.
What would be the likely outcome of Landsburg’s study? I would expect that almost no students would contribute to the cause — but of the three that did, two would be econ majors. Whether this outcome would demonstrate that “economics majors are among the most generous of students” would be a matter of interpretation, I guess.
Perhaps a better design would identify some social cause that would not foreseeably attract or repel students, a cause in which students would have no special self-interest in contributing or resisting contributions (other than the self-interest of holding onto their money).
Admittedly, I lack much of the libertarian sensibilities of other commenters here, so I’m not confident I could identify an appropriate cause. Is the Red Cross/Red Crescent too tainted with statism (or religious symbolism) for people’s tastes? Oxfam? Heifer Project? Micro-credit organizations?
Steve: Your claim that student efforts to increase tuition rates is “the exact parallel” of student efforts to reduce tuition rates is bizarre. You remain unwilling to engage on the main issues I raised earlier, and as a result this conversation is going nowhere. So let me close by noting that I’m glad that there’s much about me that you admire—very kind of you to say so!—and I hope my Cartoon Macro book will get added to the list. (My publisher will be sending you a copy. The rest of you can buy it, e.g., on Amazon for $12.) Over and out, Yoram.
Speaking personally, Yoram’s drive-by mischaracterizations do no inspire me to read his book.
He complained that no-one addressed his points. I listed people who did. He misrepresents Steve’s (brilliant) counter-example. He suggests that when Steve provides such a counter-example Steve is in fact dodging the issue!
“Over and out, Yoram.” Brave Sir Robin.
From Yoram’s article:
“You may question whether these groups actually serve the common good, but that’s mostly beside the point”
No way. It couldn’t possibly be more ‘on’ point. The simplest explanation is that Economic students are simply more likely to:
a) Find WashPIRG morally conflicting with their personal/political values
and
b) Feel that it’s not fair to try to force someone else to pay for their tuition (ATN)
Try something like a donation to “The Adam Smith Legacy Museum” and see what happens. Like, duh. The nature of the organization is the ‘key’ factor to someone who thinks about where money goes.
Bob
I’d say Yoram should stick to his economic humor in the future, and avoid attempts at serious economics research. Clearly humor is where his competitive advantage lies.
I previously remarked about how my first econ class striped a bit of sentimentality from my thinking. Did others have a similar experience? I have to wonder.
I vaguely recall a guy who said that economics teaches that people respond to incentives, and that the rest is just detail. Whatever a student might think about the merits of forcing others to pay for her tuition, a student would seem to have an incentive to support such a policy. To expect otherwise, even of econ students, would be to expect them to reject a fundamental premise of economics.
Is this offered as a statement of faith, or a hypothesis? Because if it’s the latter, I humbly observe that we have not yet conducted the experiment.
Steve, in what book do you discuss why asking people why they did something is a bad idea?
I think this is an important issue, for instance when you consider celebrity endorsements in the Armchair Economist. If you asked people why they buy products endorsed by celebrities, they could say
1. “I love that celebrity, so the product must be good, so I decided to buy it.” or
2. “The company must have paid the celebrity a lot of money, so the company must be reliable, so I decided to buy the product.”
I think that most people would likely say 1, and that this is an important fact. It’s an indication that they probably hadn’t thought of the chain of reasoning in 2. To test this, we could see what happens when celebrities just choose to endorse something without being paid. It seems to me that the fact that people said 1 rather than 2 implies that they would still buy products based on “natural” endorsement, and they might even buy it in roughly the same quantities as if the celebrity was paid (discounting for the fact that a paid endorsement is usually more publicized in advertising by the company in question).
Yoram may be a stand-up comedian, but he’s clearly not a stand up guy.
Content has been covered. Moving on to tone:
Yoram: People who study economics are bad people.
People who study economics: Yoram made an idiotic argument.
Yoram: I don’t like it when you insult me.
Yoram, I would be willing to bet that there are econ students who say that ATN is not a public good. I would also bet that there are students who are concerned about what some military action might do to Iran.
Yoram:
Would you send me a copy of your macro text book. I’m a very recent college graduate with minimal resources to get it; the kind of person I believe your research is aimed at helping. It seems you would only be out $12 so that should be of little concern to a man publishing articles in NYT.
I don’t have the $12 to spare, I could put it on the credit card I have, but would you really be so selfish as to make a poor student take out more loans? Mind you, your book is not worth $12 to me. If I had that $12 dollars I would likely spend it on groceries. Though perhaps we should hope that, through being educated by it, the world should on balance be a richer place. Don’t you think so, or are you one of the awful 40%? I will give you the address where to send it as soon as you would like. Thanks.
PS The twelve dollars towards groceries would also be graciously accepted.
@nobody.really –
” Whatever a student might think about the merits of forcing others to pay for her tuition, a student would seem to have an incentive to support such a policy. ”
The point here is that an Economics student is (probably) more likely to think more clearly and completely about the entire effect of taxation and not just the short-term personal incentive. Or, a slightly different way of wording the question – do you think that Economics students are more likely to support high taxation, or lower tax burdens as a general principle? The answer to this question will be important to how they respond to a ATN donation.
“Is this offered as a statement of faith, or a hypothesis? Because if it’s the latter, I humbly observe that we have not yet conducted the experiment.”
No, this is a statement of Economic first principles – That people actually consider and think about what it is that they spend money on – that the product, be it a widget or a charity, is a key factor in whether the money is spent.
Would you conclude that Republicans are less generous because you found out that they give less money to Democratic candidates?????
Bob
Wait, I’m back… with a meta-comment: the way to settle this—and put more educational value into it—is to have a debate. So I propose an Idiot Debate, with the following proposed rules: (1) I will pay my own way to come to Rochester this spring on a mutually agreeable date. (2) In addition to my doing an economics comedy show, Steve and I will have an open-to-the-public debate centered on my paper and the topic of “Who is the bigger idiot, Yoram or Steve?” (3) At the end of the debate, the audience will vote on who is the bigger idiot, Yoram or Steve, or if it’s a tie. (4) If more than 60% of the audience vote that Yoram is a bigger idiot, I will leave town with my tail between my legs and you will have gotten a free comedy show. (5) If the vote is tied—less than 60% for Yoram, less than 60% for Steve—then you will pay me my standard college fee of $3000. (6) If more than than 60% of the audience vote that Steve is a bigger idiot, you will pay me double my standard college fee.
What do you say, Steve? I’m open to modifications of the rules, but if you truly believe what you wrote (“But it’s impossible for me to comment honestly on your piece without saying that I think it’s idiotic. It really does seem to me that there’s no other way to read it.”) then it seems there should be a way for us to put this to the test.
Yoram: Please note, I think Steve said your study was idiotic, he didn’t call you idiotic. There’s a subtle but important difference. See arguments “ad hominem”.
Anon cosmoslogist et al: Its nothing to do with being an environmental economist! I’m an “environmental economist” (i.e. an economist interested in the environment, among other things*) and I agree with Steve (though I haven’t read the original paper) – indeed, I tweeted much the same thing days back.
On the subject of what is a public good, I would suggest that
a) National Defence is actually a club good for Americans (nonrivalrous, but excludable through immigration restrictions). It may however have public good properties as well (including for many Iranians) if it deters the Iranian regime from attacking the US. (whether the US military/government’s actions have actually made such an attack more or less likely is another question)
Finally, looking forward to cartoon macro Yoram!
*indeed, you could argue that Steve is an environmental economist as well!
p.s. this is essentially an empirical question, so a study is more appropriate than a debate.
The problem is, it is very hard to find a test of altruism which would be viewed similarly by economists and non-economists, both morally and in terms of its perceived efficacy. Even transfers from the subject to a “deserving” recipient might be viewed differently – e.g. economists may think about the disincentives to work created by charitable donations.
Steve’s solution is neat, but even then economists might have less faith in the campaigning ability of charitable organisations etc.
A tough one.
“Indeed, why is national defense a public good… think about it from the perspective of Iran!”
Bryan Caplan has made just that point.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen other studies indicating econ students are more greedy. I just think Yoram used FANTASTICALLY bad examples to make that argument.
Yoram: Our point of contention is not “Who is the bigger idiot?”; it’s whether a specific argument that you made is idiotic.
I’d happily accept your terms for a debate confined to that topic, except that it’s very hard for me to imagine that the topic is of sufficient general interest to draw an audience.
So let me propose an alternative bet, which, unlike your bet, actually addresses our differences. Let’s run an experiment to see whether econ students are more or less willing than others to contribute to 1) an organization that opposes the estate tax and 2) an organization that opposes tuition subsidies. If they turn out more willing, you will write a blog post advertising that economics courses promote generosity. If they turn out less willing, I will write a blog post advertising the opposite. The loser will pay for the cost of the experiment (including the fees of the neutral and respected experimentalists we will hire to design the study) and donate $3000 to the “public good” of the winner’s choice.
Look: You keep saying that “transferring money from taxpayers to students and/or colleges” is a public good; surely this is true or false to exactly the same extent that “transferring money from students and/or colleges to taxpayers” is a public good. So this experiment, in conjunction with yours, is exactly what it will take to separate the question of willingness to pay for public goods from the question of which public goods various sorts of students are most likely to value.
You wrote: “It seems there should be a way to put this to the test”. Yes. I’ve just proposed it. Do you accept?
You are an evil man Steven Landsburg.
That is of course a large part of the reasdon I read you.
Originally the argument was whether or not Yoram’s NY Times piece was idiotic, but it seems to have evolved into whether or not Yoram is in fact an idiot (someone who teaches economics without understanding its elementary principles).
Since I’m writing from Seattle it would be a simple matter for me to appear at the UW and debate you on either topic. I won’t even ask you to pay for my parking. Let me know where and when.
Steve, why are you saying that not contributing to scholarship funds for needy students evidence of selfishness? I clearly remember reading in one of your books that it doesn’t make any sense to contribute to multiple charities and it should be pretty easy to find more worthy causes than needy students in Switzerland(for example AIDS orphans in Rwanda).
Isn’t the opposite more reasonable since an average student in Zurich significantly more likely to become a needy Swiss student than an AIDS orphan in Rwanda?
Pavel: Point extremely well taken.
Yet another point: Econ students are (I hope) more likely than others to realize that a policy of subsidizing tuition has the primary effect of raising tuition by approximately the amount of the subsidy (given that a state-issued license to educate is a good that’s pretty much in fixed supply).
If Bryan Caplan is correct and education is mostly signalling then subsidizing it is most likely bad for the society and good for students/suppliers-of-education even if the supply of license to educate is non-fixed making donations to ATN a rather antisocial activity.
It’s pretty depressing that someone can make the errors Yoram_Bauman has made here and still hold a steady job as an economist, publishing this kind of stuff.
And that’s even *before* we get to the bit about a guy who makes $3000 just for showing up and yet lectures econ geeks about generosity!
(I know, probably not on-topic enough to make it through the Silas filter, but I had to say it.)
(Btw, has Steve_Landsburg ever gone so far as to use the “idiot” appellation for anything I’ve said?)
Steve Landsburg: Yoram Bauman must have a hard time teaching students to think critically.
…
Steve Landsburg: I’m not saying Yoram Bauman is an idiot. He’s just making a specific idiotic argument.
Seems pretty disingenuous to me.
To Steve Landsburg,
I don’t really understand you attempt at a humorous critique. From my reading, the donation will advance the cause of those who donate, since they are all students paying tuition fees, and will all benefit from successful lobbying by ATN (and possibly the other mob).
Your analogies with physics and chemistry etc make no sense.
The article even said –
“You may question whether these groups actually serve the common good, but that’s mostly beside the point. Regardless of the groups’ actual social value, a purely self-interested individual would choose to free-ride rather than contribute; after all, a single $3 donation is not going to make a noticeable difference in tuition rates.”
What you are saying is that free-riding less selfish than contributing. When in fact, the best course of action is to rise up and make stand for students to pay the full cost of their tuition, and get rid of subsidies from tertiary education.
What you seem to point at, but I don’t see it clearly articulated, is that one can’t distinguish between free riding, and not believing in the cause. Economic students, for example, may believe that if they support these causes they will be taxed higher in the future.
I guess you could ask students in a later survey whether they actually support the cause or not? But surely there are surveys of students asking about optimal tertiary funding structures that would complement these findings.
What you need is to determine a situation where the economist has a conscious incentive to free-ride. Maybe a raffle where there are free or paid tickets?
Just caught up on this. I believe David Henderson summed it up well over at econlog:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/12/bauman_versus_l.html
—
Bauman wrote an article making a strong claim.
Landsburg showed that the claim did not follow from the evidence.
Bauman admitted that the claim did not follow from the evidence and pointed out that his and Elaina Rose’s original study had pointed that out.
—
I need to think more about the conclusion from Bauman’s NYT column: people who study economics are less likely to give money to left-leaning organizations, therefore economics professors should teach more about the shortcomings of free markets. I’m just not following that.
Steve:
1) You write that I “keep saying that ‘transferring money from taxpayers to students and/or colleges’ is a public good”. This is wrong, and as Cameron writes above I say explicitly in the op-ed that the big-picture social value of a group like ATN is “mostly besides the point” in terms of our study. What I do keep saying (and what I said in the article) is that students donating money to an organization that fights for lower tuition for students is subject to the sorts of free-rider issues we associate with public goods. As Cameron writes above, “the donation will advance the cause of those who donate, since they are all students paying tuition fees, and will all benefit from successful lobbying by ATN.” If you like, you can think of ATN as a public good when the public is limited to college students. This is the same reason that national defense is thought of as a public good even though it hurts the Iranians: it’s (arguably) a public good for America. Is it possible that some Americans are opposed to funding national defense because of their concerns for Iran? Yes, it’s possible, but I believe that empirically it’s not likely to be very important. Similarly, it’s possible that students choose not to fund ATN because they’re concerned about the general welfare of taxpayers, but I believe that empirically it’s not likely to be very important. Ultimately our research was an empirical study, and you’re criticizing it on the basis of a theoretical possibility that in my opinion is not very likely. It’s as if I wrote an empirical paper about whether people believed in the fossil record, and we asked people whether they believed that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago during the Carboniferous Period, and they said No, and so I wrote that “our research suggests that people don’t believe in the fossil record”… and then you jumped in and said “Aha! People are saying No because dinosaurs didn’t appear until the Triassic Period!” Yes it’s possible… in my opinion it’s just not very likely.
2) I don’t like your debate topic proposal and want to go back to something more like my proposal. If you’d like we can narrow it down to which of us has the most idiotic arguments surrounding the topic at hand. You claim that it’s idiotic to argue that college student donations to a group that fights for lower tuition for college students is a public-goods game. I claim that it’s idiotic to argue that “ask[ing] students how much they’re willing to contribute to an organization that lobbies to reduce taxpayer-funded subsidies to public education” is the “exact parallel” of asking students how much they’re willing to contribute to an organization that lobbies to increase taxpayer-funded subsidies to public education.
PS. I think we could get a good turn-out for the debate and if necessary we could pay people to attend :)
Yoram:
it’s possible that students choose not to fund ATN because they’re concerned about the general welfare of taxpayers, but I believe that empirically it’s not likely to be very important.
So…just to be sure I’ve got this right — your conclusion that econ students are “Grinchlike” is founded on your prior belief that econ students don’t care about the welfare of strangers. Given that, why bother with a study?
Suppose we took Yoram’s word for it that non-contributors are overwhelmingly free-riders. What does this imply?
Should we automatically label their actions as ungenerous? No – an action can be free-riding without being seen as socially undesirable. For example, suppose we were all to work together to rob a bank, but I slacked off, causing us to steal less money than we otherwise would have. My behaviour may have been self-interested, but few observers would condemn me for not doing more for my fellow robbers. This is not to say that supporting lower student tuition is morally equivalent to robbing a bank, just that “helping your in-group” would not considered by most people as an umambigiously altruistic act.
What can we say then? Well, it’s plausible that free-riders in this experiment are likely to act in ways that are more umambigiously selfish. So if we accept that economics students didn’t have deeper objections than free-riding and if we accept that free-riders here are more likely to be selfish in other areas, then we could accept Yoram’s conclusions about the lack of generosity in economics students.
But wait – Yoram already acknowledges previous research which does show economics students acting in more umambigiously selfish ways. Rather than do something boring like try to replicate that research, he decided he wanted to try his own take on it, damned if it’s a strictly inferior approach!
Yoram:
Let’s go a little farther with your national defense analogy. The key difference between national defense and tuition subsidies is that national defense can easily be welfare-enhancing, *even if you account for the Iranians in your calculus*. Tuition subsidies (unless you concoct some self-serving and implausible story about positive externalities) can’t.
Here’s why that matters:
Suppose that we ask Americans to contribute voluntarily to national defense. Most of them say no. A plausible explanation is that they’d rather free ride.
Now ask Americans to contribute voluntarily to a program of attacking small defenseless countries and taking their resources. Most of them say no. Free riding is no longer the most plausible explanation here. Instead, the most plausible explanation is that most Americans feel squeamish about attacking small defenseless countries and taking their resources — *even if that policy benefits Americans*.
In other words, there’s a difference between an actual public good, the provision of which can be welfare-enhancing, and a transfer of resources, which can’t be. And this difference matters crucially when you’re trying to explain why people don’t mail checks to the government to support these very different policies.
Now tuition subsidies are, of course, not at all like national defense and very much like attacking small countries and taking their resources. This is not an ideological point; it’s the purely economic point that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I’d hope that any college student would grasp it instinctively, but I suspect that ini practice, it’s mostly the economics students who grasp it. That’s the obvious reason why economics students are less likely to back this program.
Summary: When people won’t contribute to welfare-enhancing public goods like national defense, it’s fair to call them free riders. When they won’t contribute to welfare-decreasing policies like wars of conquest, it’s not. This is particularly true when they *realize* that those programs are welfare-decreasing. Tuition subsidies are welfare-decreasing; economics students get that; that’s why economics students don’t contribute. And no, they might not give this explanation if you asked them; they’re acting on instinct. But it’s a trained and educated instinct.
So here’s a question for you: Suppose an organization supports sending out gangs of marauders to stop people in the street, kill them, take their money, and give it to college students. When students fail to contribute to this organization, do you want to call them free riders?
You don’t have to believe that tuition subsidies are the moral equivalent of killing people and taking their money for this analogy to work. You only have to believe that both policies benefit students, that both are welfare-decreasing, and that economics students will naturally care about that. The welfare-decreasing aspect of the marauders will be obvious to everyone; with the tuition subsidies, maybe just to the econ students.
I repeat this question, and I’d like you to answer it: If students won’t contribute to the marauding bands, are you prepared to label them free riders?
Yoram earlier:
In an ideal world we would be able to test how students behave with regard to an ideal public good. (I’m curious about what you think such a thing would be, incidentally. What about my example about national defense and Iran?) In the real world we have to look at the data we have, and the data set we had concerned donations to WashPIRG and ATN.
Yoram now:
You write that I “keep saying that ‘transferring money from taxpayers to students and/or colleges’ is a public good”. This is wrong
I quite agree with Yoram: Steve has made the foolish error of taking Yoram’s words seriously. No wonder Yoram only wants to debate who is the bigger idiot; he has good evidence it is Steve.
>Let’s run an experiment to see whether econ students are more or less willing than others to contribute to 1) an organization that opposes the estate tax and 2) an organization that opposes tuition subsidies.
This offer is extremely generous, IMO. It’s quite possible that learning about economics makes you greedy *and* learning about economics makes you opposed to ATN.
If this is the case, Yorum’s article was idiotic, and yet he will still win the bet.
The link is above but I certainly think it worth repeating … EconLog adjudicates http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/12/bauman_versus_l.html
and be sure to follw his good advice! :)
>From my reading, the donation will advance the cause of those who donate
You’re assuming that students will care more about fellow students than they care about people who are not students. Not all students support taking money from other people and giving it to students. Economics students are especially likely to understand that “lower tuition” means “making other people pay for it.”
—
Ken B: “EconLog adjudicates . . . be sure to follow his good advice!”
David Henderson: “I also recommend that readers read comments on Landsburg’s site by Ken B. They are quite good.”
—
Okay Ken B, you are David Henderson aren’t you? ;-)
Steve Landsburg: Don’t agree to anything that allows Youram to do a stand-up routine at your university. Check out this video from about the 2:00 mark to about 2:30 to see why:
Yoram: Sorry for mistyping your name. I should have proofread. The reference to the video, by the way, is all in good fun.
This dead horse has been thoroughly whipped, but if I may get one more remark in.
An activity that benefits a group in a non-rivalous and non-excludable way is a public good if the costs of the activity are borne solely by the benefiting group. If the costs are borne by another group, the activity is a collective interest, not a public good. As Steve as pointed out, claims about the selfishness of economists typically involve experiments that are collective interests, not public goods. Bauman’s is an egregious example, but not the only one.
There are, of course, true public goods and it surely is possible to properly design an experiment to examine the behavior of economists and non-economists with regard to free-riding on voluntary contributions to such. Until I see such an example, I will withhold judgment on economics training and selfishness.
Yoram, even if you are right about what students consider a public good, you are still making a big assumption that should have been explicitly stated in your paper and your op-ed article. It appears that you do not even realize that you are making an assumption that crucially affects your conclusions.
Yoram responds http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/12/bauman_versus_l.html#176167
Another possible explanation is that the economics students are saving all the charity dollars to put towards the single charity that will do the most good, a tendency that seems to come with additional economics training.
If this were the case, I could see it supporting the conclusion that econ training makes people *less* selfish and more concerned with doing good works than *appearing* to do good works.
Perhaps Yoram could post his comment that was deleted (on econlib) here. I’d like to see what he wrote that was deleted by the anonymous econlib editor (if they are going to censor something, they should at least have the courage to give their name).
Eric Crampton found evidence that econ students were more charitable than average:
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2011/12/is-this-also-joke.html
Prof. Bauman’s op-ed basically says that it doesn’t matter that it’s a left-wing organization; let’s just assume it is indeed a public good. He totally brushes off the possibility that maybe people don’t like donating to an organization with views they don’t agree with. How would Prof. Bauman feel if I sent him a link to donate to (insert your right-wing organization here), and then say I can assume it means he is selfish? Really?
Secondly, while I never studied economics formally, I can easily spot so many holes in Prof. Bauman’s conclusion. He didn’t even attempt to say whether he controlled for other factors. For example, students’ incomes: Maybe economics students on average come from poorer homes and have less money to donate? Or maybe they prefer to donate money to other causes? I think a far better indicator of students’ selfishness is what % of their total income they donate to charity in general. Saying “YOU must donate $3 to the charity of MY choice NOW or you are considered selfish, is, as Prof. Landsburg says, idiotic. And btw, he never said you are an idiot. He said that your article is “idiotic.” Very big difference. His attack was on your work, not personal.
Finally, Prof. Landsburg just takes it as a given that econ majors will on average be bigger free-market supporters than the rest of the student body. Why do you say so? There’s an economist at George Mason (I wanna say it’s Bryan Caplan but I am not 100% sure) who determined that economists (which I know are not the same as college econ majors) are on average MORE LEFT-WING than the rest of society, INCLUDING on economics matters. I don’t know the political/economic leanings of econ majors at Washington, but I am not so sure that we should accept as a given the assumption they are bigger supporters of a free market than the rest of the student body; an assumption that, as I understand it, must be true for your arguments to work.
JohnW:
He tried to make an analogy of David Henderson telling his bridge partner that a bidding convention was wrong because it didn’t work all the time, as if that was the same thing that is happening in this argument. Then, he said something about having David Henderson’s math degree revoked, which I assume is what got him deleted. Deleting it seems like a poor choice to me.
I do give YB credit for having engaged here, but trying to respond on substance has seemed like a bit of a moving target. (And what would a blog be without a little snideness thrown in?) I never did quite see why this was really about public goods, and it turns out it’s not; characterizing the charitable causes in question that way simply facilitates a verdict of selfish free-riding. Or suggesting national defense isn’t a “pure” public good means anything can be a ‘sorta’ public good. On the other hand, even if we’re just talking about free riding, as others have noted ATN is not a particularly strong test of selfishness (i.e. one person is simply willing to spend $3 less to pursue their own self-interest than another).
@nobody.really (and Bob_Mac):
“Whatever a student might think about the merits of forcing others to pay for her tuition, a student would seem to have an incentive to support such a policy. To expect otherwise, even of econ students, would be to expect them to reject a fundamental premise of economics.”
I think a better answer is that you need to broaden your conception of incentives to include not just direct financial rewards, but everything that contributes to personal utility, including holding and adhering to whatever philosophical principles one chooses. I’m sure we can all think of things we would not do for $3 or more, out of principle.
After doing comedy in China and Singapore and not getting in trouble, I’ve now been censored! In the United States! On a libertarian website! (There’s nothing like libertarian hypocrisy… but I rush to admit that I’m excluding liberal hypocrisy because it happens so much more often. It’s the diamond-water paradox :)
So I’m going to post my censored comment here. It was in a response to a purported attempt by David Henderson to “mediate” my dispute with Steve, a task he went about by declaring Steve to be correct! So here’s the comment that was censored:
************
Wow, I’m stunned by your response, David. In the Update at the bottom of your original post, you write this: “Yoram seems to imply that I had written that he had written that he had proven something. I didn’t. I did, as he points out, say that he made a strong claim. Yoram, in his response, equates the term “claim” to “conclusion.” I guess that’s fair. Yoram says he didn’t reach a strong conclusion. I think he did. I leave readers to judge for themselves.”
In the spirit of your original post, I’ll sum up:
Henderson wrote an article making a strong claim.
Bauman showed that the claim did not follow from the evidence.
Henderson “leave[s] readers to judge for themselves.”
David, if this is really how you see things then you’re not fit to mediate a bridge game with my grandmother. (Yoram: “Grammy, I think we should play Blackwood.” Grammy: “Yoram, sometimes Blackwood doesn’t work.” Henderson: “Bauman makes a strong claim, and Grammy shows the claim doesn’t follow from the evidence.” Yoram: “Hold on, that’s not what I claimed.” Henderson: “I leave readers to judge for themselves.”)
I’m going to petition the University of Winnipeg to take away your mathematics degree. As a fellow math major I’m appalled.
*************
You’ve got to admit that that’s hilarious. And I’ve got to admit that I’m violating my own call for less sarcasm, so I want to acknowledge that. (I should have been more specific and called for less sarcasm that was thoughtless and humorless :) Incidentally, Econlib has given me any number of reasons for censoring my comment, but the one I like most is that I was “threatening” David Henderson. And of course the Econlib editor has denied that her living in Rochester NY and being named Landsburg has so little to do with anything that she doesn’t even need to mention it :)
PS. Some of the commenters here (esp Ken B) attempted to speak up for me on Econlib, and for that I am grateful… so grateful that I will respond to Ken B’s previous comment in a moment. Stay tuned!
Yoram:
It gets harder and harder to take you seriously when you keep posting one thing after another that ignores the substantive questions you’ve been asked and the substantive issues that have been raised.
Since the day I’ve started blogging, I’ve been blessed with a cadre of commenters who actually seem interested in staying on topic and settling their differences through reasoned debate. It’s increasingly obvious you don’t fit in with this crowd.
So I will try this exactly one more time before giving up on you:
Suppose I organize a “White Students Union” with the purpose of assaulting black students, taking their money, and redistributing it to white students. Suppose some white students refuse to make voluntary contributions to this organization. Are you or are you not prepared to read their reluctance as evidence of “grinchiness”?
(And no, before you attempt to deflect attention away from the substantive issue again, I did NOT just say that taxation is always and everywhere the moral equivalent of assault. If you refuse to see the *analogy* between this and your original study — people feeling squeamish about supporting organizations that work in their own narrowly defined interests at the expense of others they might also care about — then I’ll have to conclude you’re not even trying to engage in an honest discussion here.)
I’m not sure I have ‘stuck up’ for Yoram as he says — I have been quite relentlessly critical, and remain so. But I am glad he notes I am trying to be fair and take him seriously. Danke mein Herr.
@Thomas Bayes: No, but we Canucks stick together.
Sorry in advance for the length of this comment.
I answer Steve’s question at the bottom, but first—as promised—let’s go back to
Ken B.’s previous comment. In honor of Ken (and I mean that) I want to take a look in detail at that comment, piece by piece, and to prove that I’ve read everything I’ve added what I believe to be links to the various comments (but have otherwise not changed Ken’s post):
***
I want to go back to this: “your blog readers are unwilling to engage on the […]key theoretical issue is about what exactly counts as a public good”
***
Great, I agree, let’s go back to it. In doing so, let’s remember that the “key theoretical issue is about what exactly counts as a public good”. I will begin by noting that this is not a rhetorical question; the posts on this page raise good points and I confess that I’m not confident that I know the answer.
***
Patrick R Sullivan posted the definition.
***
Patrick refers to the “the classic definition of a public good; non rivalrous consumption and non excludability. Also a specific example; radio broadcasts.”
Okay, great. So radio broadcasts are an example of a public good. So let’s say I investigate who gives money to NPR and find out that it’s not economists. Does Patrick conclude that this supports the conclusion that economists are Grinches? I doubt it. So we are led to the conclusion that Patrick fails to address the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”. His definition is no good. (Plus, if radio is a public good then why are there so many radio stations in existence?? Isn’t underprovision a key element of public goods?)
***
Ken B posted contrasting examples going to the heart of the disagreement.
***
These are good examples, and my intuition is that the second one is definitely not a public good, but that the first one is. Of course, I cannot say for sure because offering up examples does not address the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”.
***
Iceman posted about transfers and if they can be public goods.
***
Iceman raises some interesting points (“Before today I would’ve thought ‘public good for some’ was an oxymoron”) but he fails to address the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”.
***
Neil wrote “Yoram Bauman is confusing a collective interest with a public good.”
***
Neil may be correct, but instead of addressing the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”, Neil simply confuses matters even more (at least in my head) by introducing a second undefined term: “collective interest”.
***
David Wallin disputed Yoram’s notion of a public good.
***
David adds to the confusion by introducing a third undefined term: “neutral public good”.
***
All of these comments precede Yoram’s assertion. I’d say the readers have addressed the issue quite directly. Yoram’s claim is absurd.
***
Sorry, Ken, but you’re wrong. These readers have not directly addressed the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”. They have made good points and offered good examples and raised good questions, but the only definition offered up was Patrick’s and it was no good.
In the spirit of the season, I will now offer up my own tentative definition: Action X is a public good for group G in situation S if (1) a benevolent central planner for group G would take action X in situation S, (2) laissez faire by members of group G in situation S would not lead to action X, and (3) action X would increase welfare for an overwhelming majority of the people in group G in situation S.
Part 1 of this definition incorporates Steve’s point that public goods should be welfare-enhancing. Of course, the definition of welfare-enhancing is itself unclear: Are we using Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks or what? I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question, and that’s one rationale for part 3 of the definition (discussed below).
Part 2 of the definition incorporates the ideas of free-riding and underprovision, which are clearly central to public goods.
Part 3 of the definition is also vague (what does “overwhelming majority” mean?), but it gets at the idea that a “public good” should benefit a broad segment of the “public”… without necessarily benefiting everybody.
So now let’s look at Steve’s example of white students pooling their funds to assault black students and take their money. If group G is all students, I would say that this IS NOT a public good for group G because it violates parts 1 and 3 of the definition. If group G is all white students, I would say that this IS a public for group G. Now we can ask why some (hopefully all!) white students refuse to donate money to this effort. One possibility is that they are selfishly free-riding, and one possibility is that they are selflessly concerned about black students. This is (as I noted long ago) an empirical question. In the deep South in 1950 I would lean toward the former explanation, and in just about everywhere in 2011 I would lean toward the latter explanation. Similarly, the question about why students don’t donate to a group fighting to lower tuition rates is an empirical question. In this case I strongly lean toward the selfish explanation, and Steve leans toward the selfless explanation, to such an extent that he says that “there is no other way to read it”. I have offered to debate Steve on this point, but he refuses.
PS. You are all of course free to poke holes in my definition and my argument, and in fact I hope you will. But I think you should also do more to poke holes in each other’s arguments. Did none of you think that there were problems with “radio broadcasts” as an example of a public good? When Steve writesthat “national defense can easily be welfare-enhancing, *even if you account for the Iranians in your calculus*”, did none of you notice that Wonks Anonymous had previously linked to Bryan Caplan offering up what he claimed was a proof that national defense is not welfare-enhancing and is not a public good? Did none of you think to question Steve’s point that public education is NOT welfare-enhancing “unless you concoct some self-serving and implausible story about positive externalities”. (I’m no expert in this area, but… Wow! Steve must still be mad that they tried to teach his daughter to recycle :)
The point I’m trying to make here is that right-wing libertarians often show a disappointing tendency to act like the borg. (In case nobody has done so already, I propose that the group of you here on this blog be called the “landsborg” :) This is of course perfectly natural for just about any group (perhaps because it is a public good for most groups in most situations!), but it is worth resisting. I don’t claim to be perfect in this area myself, but I can at least provide some evidence that I take a critical look at everything I come across, not just the stuff I disagree with.
PS. Please ignore the parenthetical comment (“(perhaps because it is a public good for most groups in most situations!”) at the end of my post. I was too clever by half, and that comment is wrong. Now you can focus on telling me why the rest of it is wrong too :)
Yoram,
Ok, I’ll bite. Whether you’re using Kaldor-Hicks or Pareto as your “welfare-enhancing” definition, transfers fail the criterion — you’re harming one person by Pareto and by Kaldor-Hicks you haven’t increased wealth. Yep, you need to give an argument for a positive externality argument and evidence. Yes, you can handwave by saying you’re transferring from people not in group G to people in Group G, but that’s, well, handwaving. More to, well, your point, if you’re going with that as the goal (how can we take from others outside of our group to get more from people in our group), then the classic argument for any government at all is precisely that you get too much of such grabs absent government. Sure, you can argue with that point, but I guess I’ll just have to call you a right libertarian anarchocapitalist. Or the Borg, depending on your choice. ;)
Re education, I’d point out that the primary argument in the literature seems to be how much of education is human capital and how much is signaling. So far as I know, no one seriously argues human capital is a positive externality and signaling is generally considered a negative externality. It’s possible to argue there’s a positive externality that trumps this, but, again, that’s something that’s in dispute and so it doesn’t really get us anywhere to assert that it’s not in dispute and that people’s actions on that score must not reflect that possibility. But I suppose in some sense you’re not making that assertion … but then, I’m confused. What are we arguing about again?
Yoram wrote:
“Neil may be correct, but instead of addressing the “key theoretical issue… about what exactly counts as a public good”, Neil simply confuses matters even more (at least in my head) by introducing a second undefined term: “collective interest”.”
I wrote earlier:
“An activity that benefits a group in a non-rivalous and non-excludable way is a public good if the costs of the activity are borne solely by the benefiting group. If the costs are borne by another group, the activity is a collective interest, not a public good. As Steve as pointed out, claims about the selfishness of economists typically involve experiments that are collective interests, not public goods. Bauman’s is an egregious example, but not the only one.”
A public good is a collective interest, but not all collective interests are public goods. A public good actually creates value, whereas a collective interest may simply transfer value, and even destroy value in the process. I gave you explicit examples of such collective interests that are not public goods, and so have others. You choose not to read and understand.
Yoram:
I think I can summarize your answer to my question thus: You expect white students to care about black students, but you don’t expect students to care about non-students. I’m having a lot of trouble imagining where these expectations come from. It does seem that you are starting from the presumption that students are an awfully Grinchy bunch, even before you look at data.
But then of course *your own expectations* lead to a quite different interpretation of your data. You’ve started with the tacit assumption that students are Grinchlike in their attitudes toward non-students. Your data support the interpretation that the taking of economics courses makes them *less* Grinchlike.
And this, I think, would be a much more natural interpretation than your own, because a lot of what we teach in economics has to do with seeing all the consequences of your actions, and evaluating their desirability on the basis of all those consequences. I’ve argued elsewhere that when we teach cost-benefit analysis, what we’re really doing is teaching compassion — that is, we’re teaching our students to stop and consider *all* the people who are affected by a given action or policy before deciding whether to support it.
Given that, I’d expect economics students to be the least Grinchlike students on campus, and I view your results as a confirmation of that expectation. Do you object to this?
Crikey. I doubt any of us has the time to immediately absorb Yoram’s recent flood, as it is the day before Christmas. My quick take is that Yoram *disagrees* with the comments by various folks that I noted. He does not rebut my claim that he ignored them earlier, or that they existed earlier. Whether these folks were right or wrong is a different question from whether they addressed what Yoram identifies as the key theoretical point. [I disagree with Yoram on this. The key point is, is there another reasonable and resonably likely way to intepret the students’ behaviour. But I was trying to address what seemed to be one of his ideas.]
I’ll read it all more carefully later.
Yoram: Or to put my last comment more succinctly — Your results are equally consistent with the propositions that
a) economics courses make students *more* Grinchlike toward fellow students
or
b) economics courses make students *less* Grinchlike toward non-students.
And the only basis you have for preferring one of these interpretations to the other is your own prior expectation. Correct?
from:
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON FACULTY COUNCIL ON STUDENT AFFAIRS
The Faculty Council on Student Affairs met at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 13, 2005
…
Affordable Tuition Now
Parks said, “Students want to bridge any concerns people have about Affordable Tuition Now (ATN).” (One of the students formerly in charge of ATN has admitted to $5,000 theft from its funds. That student is no longer involved with ATN. Some $40,000 in all may be lost in ATN’s funds.) Parks said this issue will be a major topic at the next ASUW meeting. He said there has been coverage of this misappropriation on all the local networks. There are completely different people running ATN now, and the organization is “a good one”, said Parks.
Parks said Affordable Tuition Now organizes Student Lobby Day – the day on which UW students go to the state legislature to raise issues important to the ASUW – and pays for hundreds of students to attend the event in Olympia. Parks said the ASUW wants to reassure students and to let them know that they should still support ATN. He said an internal audit hopefully will be created within the organization. Kravas asked if other models, outside of the ASUW, have been looked at. Parks replied: “ATN was the reaction to the Washington Student Lobby (WSL), which we didn’t like that well.”
Having just downloaded the article, I note the data comes from Summer 1999 to Spring 2002. It is not clear if the theft ocurred before or after Spring 2002, or if any news of it hit prior to then.
Prof. Landsburg:
I know you have a lot on your plate, but I’d appreciate if you can address one point (which I originally posted at 12/22 @ 3:52 PM), but I’ll summarize very briefly here so you don’t have to go back there. Here goes:
As I understand it, your arguments throughout this post (at least in regard to the WashPIRG donations) hinge on the presumption that economics majors at Washington are more right-wing than the rest of the student body.
a) is my understanding correct; and
b) if so, why are you so certain that this is true?
Do you generally take it as a given that econ people (eg. college econ majors, economists, etc.) are on average more right-wing than other folks?