In Search of Laws of Human Economic Nature, pt. 1

I have just submitted a job application for a mail-order harem of demure Asian brides. (http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/ – Link is safe.)

Now that you hopefully are interested enough to read on (don’t think I haven’t noticed the insane google searches that got you here, dear readers, after my last post), let’s talk about the philosophy of economics, and, within it, the philosophy of econometrics! This is also a plea of help from Bayesians. After a long conversation with an engineer yesterday in the Quaker House on St. Giles, I realised I had no capacity to translate what I have learnt so far in econometrics from one dubious metaphysical worldview into another dubious metaphysical worldview. (But who, basically, understands probability?)

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[The following is written partly as a guide for myself, so there will be notes and citations that are prompts for me to do more reading…bear with me!]

I am currently reading Tony Lawson’s seminal Economics and Reality – seminal for philosophers of economics, though sadly not a staple read for the average Economics PhD. His broad target is the methodologies underlying modern neoclassical economic thought – economic “pure theory”, and the use of econometrics. Although an econometrician by profession and background, he argues for a radical philosophical departure from the metaphysics and epistemology of the neoclassical tradition. Also, he taught John Latsis, one of my most engaging and awesome tutors. So in many ways, a cool guy.

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“Economics, so far, has not led to very accurate and universal laws like those obtaining in the natural sciences.” – Haavelmo (1944)

Haavelmo’s observation led him to develop probabilistic methods in what we nowadays recognise as statistics or econometrics (the latter being the application of the former in economic research). However, Lawson contends that we are no closer today to the holy grail of physical law, despite sixty years of econometric research and applications. The answer, in Lawson’s view, is to abandon the project as it has been, and adopt a fundamentally different approach in our methodology.

[It seems that the holy grail is nonetheless still holy – although I haven’t read enough of Lawson to get a good grasp of his take on this, he thinks that economics can be a successful science – although I’m not sure whether that entails law-like regularities. Will get back on this.]

To take a step back – econometrics as a whole has two major projects. The overarching aim (and I would love criticism/suggestions on this point: I have been taught econometrics in one department, in one approach) is to extract information about the true population values of certain variables from finite sample size information.

One project in econometrics is to develop metrics that describe different kinds of distributions of values – that is, the population moments – and how to estimate them from finite sample set data. This gives us probabilistic estimates of what true population values are, to tell us what to expect to see from yet unseen population data. This project is extremely philosophically interesting in its own right; when we make inferences from finite samples (the height of all the people in the room) to larger or potentially infinite populations (the height of all people), we must use probabilistic methods of reasoning.

Probabilities pile up in all parts of statistics. Take a variable that we are investigating – the wage someone earns – and we are testing the hypotheses that women’s wages differ from men’s wages. We have two populations of interest: all of the women in the economy, and all of the men. If we had access to all the wage data, then we would be able to just say whether the population averages were different. However, if we only have access to sample subsets of the populations, then we can use frequentist probabilistic hypothesis testing.

In this case, we find that x differs from y with statistical significance of p. Imagine that there is an underlying distribution of wages for men and for women, for which the averages are the same. Say we were to pluck, at random, men and women from the population to use in our samples, and we did this 100 times, generating 100 different samples (which can be overlapping: so we release the people back into the wild each time). In p% of these 100 different samples, we would find that the sample means differed from one another. How low does p have to be for us to be sure that we’re not in that sceptical scenario? That’s one way in which probability underlies statistics. But it goes deeper: the only reason that we can use this method of probabilistic inference at all is because we think the Central Limit Theorem applies in this case. [Which I will write about further, soon.]

One question so far: How does this work in a Bayesian and not a frequentist model of probability? Is there an alternative interpretation? I don’t quite understand Bayesianism, because I don’t get what credences actually mean. Are they meant to relate to a mental process that actually occurs, or that we can consciously be aware of, or that we can introspect about philosophically?

The second major project in econometrics, which relies on but goes further than the first project, is to estimate the effect of independent variables x1, x2…xn on a dependent variable of interest, y.

And for that project, see you on Wednesday…

Let’s Talk About Sex

Let’s talk about sex.

You might not want to, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid.

11pm. 2010. Cycling home, just leaving Oxford Rail Station. FIFA World Cup night.
Group of drunk young men in car: “HEY, SEXY THING!”

10pm. August 2009. At a pub for a friend’s birthday, walking through a room full of balding men.
One man turns to me: “HELLO LOVELY, WHAT’RE YOU DOING HERE?”
As if to answer his own question, he gropes my ass and guffaws loudly to his mates.

8pm. October 2010. Walking home in Oxford from Bonn Square, with two bags full of Women’s Campaign materials for Freshers’ Fair. A middle-aged looking man is walking in the opposite direction. He sees me and changes his direction so he can stride across to me. Arms open wide, he comes right up to me, chest almost touching mine, and says: “WHAT’RE YOU UP TO?”

While we’re talking about sex, we might as well talk about power.

2004. I am 13, and our maths department at school releases lists of names in order of the marks we receive in the twice-yearly exams. I am consistently topping the list. A maths teacher who has never taught me picks up the marks list, and says to the whole class: “Who is this Yang boy?” Oh, the fun of puberty in a social pressure cooker.

2008. I am 17, and the only remaining girl in my A2 Physics set at school. To start off a mechanics class, our Physics teacher tells a joke. The premise of the joke – and I am proficient at the antisocial art of deconstructing jokes – is that one pays for much for private healthcare, one might as well be getting blow-jobs from the nurses. Everyone laughs apart from me. In class, I tell the teacher that he shouldn’t tell blow-job jokes to us (never mind that this is not just a blow-job joke, but a sex work and property joke). “It’s only a joke.”

We could even throw in race, too. Sex, power, and rice. I mean race.

2003. I am 13. I have been in the UK for 8 years now. I am crossing a street in London, when a man says “Konnichiwa?” to me. This is the first time I wonder why people say “Konnichiwa?” to me.

2010. I am 20. I have been in the UK for 15 years. Rushing to a rehearsal on a late December evening, a young man stops me as I am crossing a road, and says “Ni hao?”

Good shot, but this is kind of a Gettier case of cultural sensitivity.

I say “Ni hao!” cheerfully, because I hate the Englishness that stops strangers from acknowledging one another. I tell him his accent is not bad. He takes this as a hint to engage me in – I am not kidding – a five-minute non-stop introduction of himself and his study of Mandarin Chinese. I used to debate in the format of 5 minute speeches. Unfortunately, there was no structure or persuasion behind his spiel. Then, he asks me for my mobile number, and where I live. After I realise he is not going to stop asking repeated questions about my life, I politely decline them, and say I’m on my way to a concert rehearsal, which I’m quite late for. He keeps on talking about himself and how we should be pen-pals or conversational language buddies. I end up having to say “No, sorry,” and walking around him to cross the street.

2011. I am 20. I have now been in the UK for almost 16 years. In Dundee, an elderly non-British-looking couple say to me in the street: “Konnichiwa, how are you enjoying the UK?”

A note to the aforementioned: you are not being “welcoming”, “well-meaning” or “culturally considerate” if you think that every single woman you come across who looks East Asian 1) is of Japanese origin, 2) speaks Japanese, 3) is fresh off the boat, 4) would like to speak Japanese to you.

I mean, “welcoming” – where exactly are you trying to welcome me to? The pavement? The traffic light intersection? The town? Your bizarre Orientalist mind?

You are not paying someone a “compliment” if you do so by hurling one at a lone street-walker at night-time at the speed of 60mph down the high street. Nor are sexually explicit compliments paid by groups – gangs – of strangers, on public transport, directed at someone who feels humiliated and has no natural space of reply.

Yet both these types of non-excuse excuses are given when language is used to show public ownership of a gender or race as a class separate from others. Why do we fall for them? Why do we fall for them? Why do we even use them to explain to our friends how they are being treated? Do we really think that all street harassers are merely innocent and socially naive at recognising what is appropriate for a given situation, and really do mean well – or do we think that they are blameworthily disrespectful street harassers?

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A note of background: In the vast majority of these anecdotes, I was not angry at the time of them actually happening. What I am angry at, in retrospect, is the social signals given off to others, as well as the attitudes underlying the behaviour – and the way that these attitudes are then condoned or excused.

Rationality and Conflict

(UPDATED 14/09/2011 – rephrasings and reorganising of material)

At the end of last Hilary term (March 2011), I was lucky enough to attend the National Union of Students Women’s Campaign Conference – three days of intense discussion, collaboration and learning about our common feminist goals. I think the most important thing I gained from the conference is that I got to know so many other student campaigners, and we built, in a very short time, a surprisingly constructive, supportive community. We asked many questions of each other. A very common question was on how to deal with conflict in the course of our political activities. I think this is a vital question to engage with for the members of any political campaign, and it’s one of the questions that captures the most emotional energy. So I’m writing this, partly for fellow politically-minded people, but also partly aimed at myself.

Conflict is important disagreement between people. It is not only endemic to campaigners, for whom a political strategy for social change is crucial. Conflict is also present in the life of anyone who disagrees with someone at some point over an emotive issue.

Yet the presence of conflict is often seen as a sign of failure. Many people I know, including myself, sometimes see the onset of an argument as a negative reflection of ourselves; a failing to pre-empt the argument by diffusing the point of disagreement. This self-blame is grounded on the presumption that being in superficial accord with those around you is the best state of things, and this presumption often comes with a feeling that you have done something wrong in provoking sincere, serious dispute with someone.

Maybe it’s about our upbringing. What isn’t? Maybe it’s about the gendering of our upbringing. What isn’t? (Okay, I’m being facetious.) But whatever it is, this instinct to please can be destructive of personal and social development.

You take a moral stance because you believe in it; and the stronger your belief, the more you stand your ground. By the very fact that you are setting out to change people’s minds, you will encounter countless people who don’t see things your way. If someone doesn’t see it like you, what does that say to your belief? It can’t be evidence of the wrongness of your belief, because the existence of those people is presumed by the political nature of your project. This is a truism, yet is unappreciated when we take disagreement itself to be a negative mark on us. Furthermore, it takes two people to disagree passionately; if you are engaged in disagreement with another person, and the disagreement is passionate, this is because they are standing their ground as well as you are standing yours. The issue is important to both of you; and it cannot be a negative mark on you that it is important for you.

This is of course not a recommendation, practical or sociable, that provoking disagreement in every situation is wise. For that you have your social judgment. I just want to reaffirm that the existence of disagreement in itself is not reason to think you have done wrong in the interaction.

You might think that this is such obvious advice that nobody could need it. But say you are discussing some political issue with a friend over dinner, or even a half-stranger in some kind of discussion forum. Over your wandering conversation, you hit upon disagreement about a fundamental issue. Say you’re a liberal egalitarian and she is a fervent let-the-market-eat-everything Nozickian libertarian, or sexist, or perhaps libertarian and sexist (mmm, unappealing). Say you decide to challenge her, and let’s assume it’s a sunny morning in your mind, and you are able to engage your shiniest argumentative powers. She retorts just as coherently, and you have a heated argument. At the end of it, she is still as fervent a Nozickian as before.

What has gone wrong? Why is there still disagreement? Why was there disagreement to begin with? Even worse, you reckoned it was a good day for you; if you can’t win the argument on your best form, when will you ever be able to win it? And now arises these self-directed, slightly self-blaming questions.  So let’s try to diagnose what’s gone on that causes these feelings and questions. I’m going to describe one part of this unease, which I shall call meta-ethical unease.

(Meta-ethical unease) There was conflict in the first place – that was bad enough. You don’t disrespect your friend; you reckon that if a belief is good enough for her, it could be good enough for you too; and so the fact that you disagree so much makes you feel uncomfortable in the first place. As Cohen puts it (elsewhere, differently) – the very thought that you could have had very, very different flags pinned to your moral mast, had you been born in different lands, makes you feel uncomfortable about hoisting yours so highly.

Then, not only was there conflict in the first place, but secondly, you were unable to resolve it – that’s the other half of the unease. You tried your best, and if you can’t communicate your ideas well, then who else can do it for you? Maybe you lost your cool, and resent yourself for not having argued in a more dispassionate and academic way. (Some of my friends reading this from outside the Land of Oz – Oxford – will find this kind of self-resentment completely laughable. It kinda is, and that tells us something too.)

The origin of this kind of meta-ethical unease with conflict is a mistaken faith in political rationalism. (Well – I’m sure one can feel this way without ever having read Rawls – but the philosophical basis for this unease is, I think, with rationalism.) Some forms of liberal universalism posit the existence of a standard, normal, or “right” method of value-acquisition by which everyone, or everyone regular, can converge on the same set of values. These are liberal universal values. This view of value-acquisition is analogous to strict methodological/epistemological views of belief-formation; if you check your deductions, check your evidence, and check your sources, you will converge on the true set of beliefs, like everyone else – as long as you’re doing it right. However, value-acquisition is very different, psychologically and methodologically, from belief-formation.

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A schoolchild who has not done her sums properly might be blamed by her teacher for being too hasty. Whose rebuke, then, are we afraid of when we attempt to match our moral sums against others’, and find that our answers don’t match?

That’s just one question for the atheist moral realist or quasi-realist; what does it mean to get morality wrong, and why does it matter for ourselves?

I think the most fruitful direction to take that question in is this: we are afraid of our own rebuke; not being faithful to some component of ourselves.

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The question that I started this essay off considering, however, is slightly different. If political rationalism leads one very quickly into a fear of conflict, what do other meta-ethical and meta-political positions tell us about conflict, and about our reactions to them? Which meta-ethical position sustains the most healthy attitude towards conflict? It seems that the more relativistic one’s meta-ethical position, or the less realist, the less soul-cringing one engages in upon discovering conflict. However, I don’t think relativistic meta-ethics is able to fully support first-order ethical views, so we should ask the slightly different question: Which meta-ethical position, that supports first-order ethical views, sustains the most healthy attitude towards conflict?

Returning to the cashing-out of the unease with conflict in the scenario I gave, here is a fuller way of contrasting meta-ethical unease with another form of unease:

(Meta-ethical unease) It is possible that there is someone else with a fundamentally different ethical position to yours. That is, there are processes of socialisation, or psychological processes, which you (believe you) haven’t experienced, but which someone else has, that has led them to different views.

(Pragmatic unease) There’s –at least- one agent in the world who seriously disagrees with you, and so they form a pragmatic block to your ability to enact your political goals.

Furthermore, you’re finding it difficult to change their mind. This adds to the

(Meta-ethical unease) – not only are there processes of socialisation or psychology that result in moral views completely different to yours, but the processes of socialisation you are used to (e.g. intellectual debate) are not robust enough to displace theirs. This could be seriously problematic if the process of socialisation you are using is a fundamental part of your meta-political or meta-ethical system. For example, the epic process of considered discussion is the postulated basis for how people approach consensus in a hypothetical Parliament that determines the values embedded in the political theory (Rawls).

(Pragmatic unease) – not only are there people who will block you, but it’s hard to stop them from blocking you by trying to change their mind. You will have to look to other means.

The meta-ethical unease we experience leads us to question how it is that people come to hold abhorrent views, or to lack compassion, or to be so morally different from you, when otherwise, you are similar in background and socialisation. The Kantian has some ways of looking at amoral people (people who lack morals, or lack what we recognise as morals, rather than people who do evil wilfully, who are immoral) – the Humean has others. Which is more humane? Are amoral people stupid, closed-minded, or dispassionate, non-empathetic, psychopathic?

(To be clear, I’m not yet concerned with moral behaviour, i.e. whether one follows the norms one professes to adopt, but with the acquisition of those norms – although the line between holding and acting on a value may be very hard to draw.)

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I want to take this direction of inquiry further into a pragmatic understanding of the decisions we face in everyday life. Which meta-ethical diagnosis can lead us not to a binary on/off understanding of moral norm acquisition, but can lead us to understand how our own moral norms can be bent, lost, and questioned afresh?

We all belong to cultures in which abhorrent views about the value of humans and other living things have been held, or still are widely held – views about the value of certain races, genders, sexual proclivities. As whole cultures, as extended families with a shared heritage of socialisation, we are therefore not wholly good or evil, but our shared tradition contains many strands of moral better and worse.

It seems that in each of us, there are the seeds of moral compassion, that lead us to acquire norms and values about how to treat others. How are these seeds sown? And how do we avoid our own moral droughts?

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p.s. apologies for general misuse and abuse of the term “socialisation”; if you would like to suggest some corrections, please do! I never studied sociology, my big social science blind spot.

And we have lift-off!

Hello World!

Thank you for taking the time to get here. I hope you stay, think and debate a little longer. Also: send in any tree or tree-climbing photos; they will be much appreciated.

xx Yuan