The Jedi Gap

Is there a growing Jedi gap? Or is the Canadian National Household Survey letting us down?

The CBC reports:

Once numbering in the vicinity of 20,000, the ranks of those in this country who claim to be Jedi Knights inspired by Star Wars movies have dwindled to fewer than half that figure, according to Statistics Canada's first release of data from the 2011 National Household Survey.

"A lot less this time. I think there's about 9,000 reporting Jedi," said Jane Badets, a senior analyst at Statistics Canada.

"And that was true elsewhere in other countries. A lot less than in other countries, too, doing censuses. Very low reporting of things like Jedi."

What started as a gag among friends on a British Columbia ski hill ballooned into something of a phenomenon on the 2001 census when thousands of Canadians told Statistics Canada they followed the Jedi religion of Star Wars lore.

But Frances Woolley shows some very large problems with the NHS. Either Canada's ethnic make-up changed radically since 2006, or ethnicity affects one's likelihood of answering voluntary surveys; the latter seems more likely.

Recall that New Zealand had 20,000 Jedi in 2006; we have yet to see figures from the 2013 Census. Our Census remains mandatory. While we know that while Jedi will not lie, they may refrain from identifying themselves as Jedi if it's voluntary.

This has important national defence implications. While New Zealand has been able to cut defence spending down to trivial levels, trusting in its strong cohort of Jedi in case of any emergency, Canada cannot really tell whether they really need the Joint Strike Fighter because of dwindling Jedi numbers, or whether the Jedi just failed to complete the voluntary forms.

It also has implications for ongoing negotiations in the Trans-Pacific Trade talks. If Canada can no longer rely on Jedi mind tricks to defend supply management in dairy, perhaps New Zealand's Jedi will be able to push us towards free trade.

Our daughter, born on Star Wars Day three years ago, is one of the Jedi in the 2013 New Zealand Census.

Living Free

Frances Woolley says we should ignore the aggregate indices of economic freedom and look instead to whether people experience freedom. She points to the World Values Survey question asking whether people think they have freedom of choice and control over the way their lives turn out.

The survey question asks:

V46.- Some people feel they have completely free choice and control over their lives, while other people feel that what they do has no real effect on what happens to them. Please use this scale where 1 means "none at all" and 10 means "a great deal" to indicate how much freedom of choice and control you feel you have over the way your life turns out.

Results? I've pulled them into a Google spreadsheet; I'm rather sure I don't believe the numbers. Colombia ranks about the highest on the table, with 52% giving an answer of 9 or 10. 42% of Mexicans give an answer of 10. If we rank by medians, here are some of the values (so long as I haven't messed up taking the median on ordinal data):

• Mexico: 9.2
• Colombia: 9.0
• New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Trinidad: 8.3
• USA, Canada, S. Africa, Australia, Brazil, Romania, Uruguay, Jordan, Andorra, Guatemala: 8.2
• China, Finland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Turkey, Ghana, 8.1
• Zambia, Malaysia: 7.0
• VietNam, Iran: 6.9
• Germany: 6.8
• Netherlands, Serbia 6.7
• Rwanda: 6.0
• Ethiopia, Mali, Hong Kong, Egypt: 5.9
• India: 5.5
• Burkina Faso, Iraq 5.0
• Morocco: 4.9

I can kinda understand having fairly nominally unfree countries right at the top if it's cheap to buy off the police: worst would then be the meddling countries that enforce things. But Iran beating Hong Kong? Finland matching China? 

I sympathise with Frances when she writes:

This is why I start fuming when people start talking about freedom. It's how people live their lives that matters, not abstract ideology.

But I still expect that the Human Freedom Index provides a better proxy for experienced freedom than the WVS measure. It's pretty easy to imagine someone agreeing that they have a great deal of control over their lives because they know what things to avoid doing if they don't want to have the police shoot them.

Culture and agents

Frances Woolley very nicely points out the problem with hand-wavy references to 'culture' as explanation: by explaining everything, it explains nothing. She also points out that it violates economists' methodological individualism:

"Culture" as an explanation also violates what Eric Crampton calls "the first rule of the microeconomists club": methodological individualism. A good economic explanation starts with the choices of individual rational actors. It begins with the premise that people are, fundamentally, all alike - we want social status, reproductive success (or sex, anyways), economic security. What looks like differences in tastes are, in fact, differences in ways of achieving those fundamental goals that we all share. [emphasis added]

Frances's point here is important. I'm not sure that I'm 100% committed to the idea that we all do in fact share fundamental goals; we at least put pretty different weights on the different goals. I'm not even sure that I'm committed to the idea that individual preferences are stable or even knowable outside of the context of choice. But people having different constraints and production functions for similar base goals is a much better starting point than looking at the outcomes of others' optimisations and deeming them to be doing a bad job of fulfilling their own utility functions.

Rumplestatskin at Macrobusiness read Frances as saying culture can't matter, then defended the study of culture in economics. He concluded:

It is genuinely unfortunate that to be taken seriously by the economics ‘in crowd’ you have to start with a theory that ignores time, has a unique equilibrium, and aggregates all agents into one.  There are so many avenues of research being pursued at the fringe of the profession, and within other disciplines, such as sociology anthropology, and psychology, that have so much to offer in terms of explaining and predicting social and economic phenomena by happily embracing cultural explanations.

I'm not sure I follow Rumplestatskin's path from "methodological individualism" to "ignores time, has a unique equilibrium, and aggregates all agents into one." There are plenty of models of that sort, but they're hardly required; they're just more tractable. Hayek was one of the biggest proponents of methodological individualism and was hardly this kind of theorist. And I tend to think representative agent models when taken too seriously can do harm: it can be too tempting to assume that deviations from the modeled path stem from a policy-relevant irrationality or stupidity rather than from differences in individual production technologies or utility functions that we'd assumed away for tractability.

Further, Frances was simply saying that 'culture' can't be the sum of one's explanation. As she'd written:

The Becker-Stigler view does not imply that culture or preferences are unimportant. Rather, it is rallying cry for economic imperialists, a call for economists to take culture, preferences, and all of the other phenomena ignored by previous generations, and explain them using the tools of rational choice theory.

According to this approach, "culture" is the beginning of an explanation, not the end. Why is there son preference is some places and not in others? What are the advantages and disadvantages, the costs and benefits, of sons? How can son preference persist?