The Price Elasticity of Belief: Beavers are Fish edition

I am so using this when I lecture on the price elasticity of beliefs in my public choice class next semester.

Suppose that you're trying to convert to your religion a bunch of people who eat a lot of beaver meat. And suppose that you want to ban them from eating meat on Fridays in Lent. And suppose that they don't want to give up beaver during Lent. What do you do?

In addition to disease, the European settlers also brought Catholicism with them, and successfully converted a large proportion of the indigenous population. And the native Americans and Canadians loved their beaver meat.

So in the 17th century, the Bishop of Quebec approached his superiors in the Church and asked whether his flock would be permitted to eat beaver meat on Fridays during Lent, despite the fact that meat-eating was forbidden. Since the semi-aquatic rodent was a skilled swimmer, the Church declared that the beaver was a fish. Being a fish, beaver barbeques were permitted throughout Lent. Problem solved!

The Church, by the way, also classified another semi-aquatic rodent, the capybara, as a fish for dietary purposes. The critter, the largest rodent in the world, is commonly eaten during Lent in Venezuela. “It’s delicious,” one restaurant owner told the New York Sun in 2005. “I know it’s a rat, but it tastes really good.”

Chalk this one up on the supply-side in the market for irrational beliefs.

Afternoon roundup

Today's afternoon news roundup.

Item the first: NZ's organ donor rate remains low; the kidney waiting list in particular remains long. Andy Tookey again suggests compensating cadaveric organ donors with subsidised funerals to encourage donation. I agree.

Item the second: if you're a small country, and the US ignores a WTO ruling in your favour, your options are pretty limited. Antigua gets points for creativity. HT: Susan.

Item the third: the National Business Review reprinted a couple of my posts this past weekend; here's cost-benefit analysis and banning cats. Their comment pool is a bit different from the one we have here. I'll be talking with Jim Mora and Radio New Zealand's The Panel on the topic around 4:15 this afternoon. [Update:  embedded below]


Item the fourth: American crime rates seem more sensitive to number of police on the streets rather than number of people in jail; the policy recommendation is to spend less on imprisoning people and spend more instead on community policing. A small portion of this effect is may be due to that crimes committed by police may be less likely to show up in the crime rates. The Bridgeport, Ct. police officers filmed stomping on the head of an immobilized and tazered individual are on desk duty rather than under arrest, at least so far. At least the guy who filmed them is unlikely to be arrested; had it happened in another state results could have been different. But I do agree with the overall policy recommendation - so much the more so if it could be done by diverting police resources away from victimless crimes.

Item the fifth: SciBlogs is running a survey on scientific literacy. I got a perfect score on it, but only because I lied a little bit about one of my answers. One question asks what makes a scientific result most credible: peer review, reputation of the research team, or a couple of other options. I knew the right answer was peer review. But I often put a lot more weight on researcher reputation. Things are so infrequently replicated, and results so often fragile when replicated, that I far more typically weigh a bundle of researcher reputation, publication, and topic. A new working paper from somebody who's credible is just worth more to me than a published piece from somebody who has a bit of a reputation for results that are fragile to specification search.

Item the sixth: +Jeet Sheth rightly wonders whether this is inconsistent with our usual assumptions around transitional gains traps. I'd think of it more in terms of a Peltzman regulatory model. In New Zealand, older used cars must undergo a basic safety inspection every six months while newer ones only need it every year - the Warrant of Fitness. They don't seem to be a profit centre for most garages except inasmuch as they give garages the opportunity to sell other (hopefully needed) services to those getting inspected; some garages specialise in only doing WoF checks on a quick while-you-wait basis. The national government proposed moving to annual inspections for vehicles first registered in 2000 or later. Recall that in the Peltzman model, regulation always balances the public interest with that of the regulated party; that balance changes as technology changes. The mechanics' trade association lobbied against the change, painting it as a road safety issue; the Automobile Association lobbied in favour of it despite also providing WoF checks. While dedicated WoF stations could have been earning some rents from the regulations, free entry into providing WoFs would have meant those rents would not have been huge. It's better viewed in a Peltzman model where deregulation (or a loosening of regulations) can emerge when a technological shock makes the regulation less beneficial to the regulated and to customers. Here, mechanics who weren't WoF specialists would have been seeing less benefit from the regulation as car manufacturing standards improved over time (and so potential gains from on-selling other services were smaller); the regulation's incidence was also pretty obvious to car owners.

Item the seventh: having this particular lotto number selection strategy isn't clever, it's just a way of increasing your winnings if your main numbers happen to come up. It's a bit nuts to purport that any number selection strategy is more clever than any other. It's a random draw guys. Random.

Item the eighth: Andrea Marchesetti points to a nice little story perhaps illustrating Caplan's rational irrationality model. Recall that in Caplan's model, when beliefs are of low cost, you'd indulge your bliss belief; when beliefs contrary to truth become expensive, you scale back demand for them. The Wall Street Journal reports that "haunted" homes in Hong Kong no longer trade at much of a discount; the property boom has pushed prices up. Entrepreneur Ng Goon Lau buys up at discount houses where an unnatural death has occurred, rents them out to expats who don't believe in ghosts, then later sells them - presumably with reports from the renters showing there to be no ghosts. It's unclear from the story whether the Hong Kong boom has brought in sufficient expats that haunted houses were bid up to standard prices without locals changing their beliefs, or whether the absolute increase in housing costs induced locals to put up with spooky ghost problems.

So concludeth the closing of the browser tabs.

Economist Irrationality

Boy is S.M. at The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog having to engage in contortions to defend the rationality of voting.

Launching off from Katherine Mangu-Ward's really excellent summary of the case against voting, S.M. invokes Gelman's argument that large N elections both reduce the probability of decisiveness and increase the potential benefits from winning.

The mathematics are convoluted, but the message is simple: even with a one in 10m chance of casting the decisive vote, the stakes are high. In fact, the lower the odds are of influencing the vote, the higher the stakes. This is because everything scales linearly and more people will bear the brunt—or enjoy the benefits—of a country led by candidate X rather than candidate Y. So your vote in Ohio, Wisconsin or another tipping-point state is worth $60,000 to your fellow citizens. That’s a pretty good return on the investment of the hour or so it takes to vote.

Except that the very fact of your decisiveness in the election proves that half of all voters disagree about whether you're making the world a better or a worse place! You can only be decisive by making or breaking a tie. That happens when half the voters think you're rather wrong. And, unless you are in an epistemically privileged situation relative to other voters (and why would you think you are!), you can't know whether you're on the right side or the wrong side. Gelman's a great statistician, but I've never liked his argument here.

Worse, S.M. pulls a pretty shonky Kantian move.

This misses the point of the Kantian argument for voting. The idea is not that one person’s decision to forgo voting would crash the system—how would that possibly happen?—but that it is immoral to act on a maxim that we cannot imagine everyone else acting on. So if I consider adopting Ms Mangu-Ward’s proposed maxim—I will abstain from voting because the costs of voting outweigh the benefits—I will first need to see if the maxim passes a test implicit in Kant’s categorical imperative. I ought not act in accordance with the maxim if it fails the test.

So let’s see: can I universalise the non-voting maxim? Can I imagine living in a world in which every eligible voter opts for a nap or a game of Temple Run in lieu of going to the polls? No. The logic of American democracy does not support such a universalised principle. No one votes, no one is elected, a moment of constitutional failure brings an emergency convention in which unelected delegates draft a new constitution calling for an alternate system of specifying leaders that doesn’t involve the public. The franchise, and America as we know it, disappears. Since the logic of the system cannot be sustained were everyone to adopt the nap-over-voting maxim, I am morally bound not to act on it.

Here's the universalisable version. Two weeks before the election, flip a coin. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads a third time (a 12.5% chance), study hard about the policy options, decide which candidate is best, and then go vote. If everybody does that, there's a non-trivial chance of being decisive (maybe we'd need four heads in a row to be more sure) and so you've an instrumental reason to get out and vote - and to vote more sensibly. At current levels of turnout, it's clear that everybody else is failing to play the universalisable Kantian "vote at low probability" rule, so a good rule of thumb is then "Don't vote unless turnout looks low enough; if turnout is low, run the coin flips."

The simplest and most plausible way of squaring voting with rationality is simply to recognize that people like doing it for its own sake. We don't try to come up with stories about how onanism increases reproductive fitness; it's done for its own sake. Same with voting. Unfortunately, that breaks most of the normative desirability of median voter outcomes.