Category: Books

Love Canal as a “Pseudo-Event” Caused by an “Availability Cascade”

(p. 142) An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could he applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.
Kuran and Sunstein focused on two examples that are still controversial: the Love Canal affair and the so-called Alar scare. In Love Canal, buried toxic waste was exposed during a rainy season in 1979, causing contamination of the water well beyond standard limits, as well as a foul smell. The residents of the community were angry and frightened, and one of them, (p. 143) Lois Gibbs, was particularly active in an attempt to sustain interest in the problem. The availability cascade unfolded according to the standard script. At its peak there were daily stories about Love Canal, scientists attempting to claim that the dangers were overstated were ignored or shouted down, ABC News aired a program titled The Killing Ground, and empty baby-size coffins were paraded in front of the legislature. A large number of residents were relocated at government expense, and the control of toxic waste became the major environmental issue of the 1980s. The legislation that mandated the cleanup of toxic sites, called CERCLA, established a Superfund and is considered a significant achievement of environmental legislation. It was also expensive, and some have claimed that the same amount of money could have saved many more lives if it had been directed to other priorities. Opinions about what actually happened at Love Canal are still sharply divided, and claims of actual damage to health appear not to have been substantiated. Kuran and Sunstein wrote up the Love Canal story almost as a pseudo-event, while on the other side of the debate, environmentalists still speak of the “Love Canal disaster.”

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Experience Can Provide Sound Intuitive Knowledge

(p. 11) . . . , the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics. We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.
The psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire. Soon after they started hosing down the kitchen, the commander heard himself shout, “Let’s get out of here!” without realizing why. The floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped. Only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot. Together these impressions prompted what he called a “sixth sense of danger.” He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood.
We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician–only more common.
The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Steve Jobs Showed that Art and Commerce Could Be “Happy Bedfellows”

OldmanGary2012-06-22.jpg

Gary Oldman. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) Gary Oldman is an English actor . . . widely known for his roles as Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” film series and Jim Gordon in the Batman movies.
. . .
READING Right now I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I love when people have a singleness of purpose and don’t get dissuaded. I can connect with that. I can recognize it. I think a lot of artists have that. Art and commerce are not particularly happy bedfellows, but he was the exception.
I read quite a lot of biographies. I like nonfiction. The other book I’m carrying around with me at the moment is “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” by Rebecca Solnit. It deals with the 19th century and the arrival of speed with the coming of the industrial age. We were very much governed by nature before; we were at the mercy of our own speed and horses and the like. It’s interesting to think of living at that pace.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; Gary Oldman.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., February 5, 2012): 2.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: online version of the interview is dated February 4, 2012.)

Our Cups Will Runneth Over If We Choose Entrepreneurship, Imagination, Will and Optimism

AbundanceBK2012-06-11.jpg

Source of book image: http://www.abundancethebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cover-NYTimes-3d-500.jpg?139d23

(p. 18) in Silicon Valley, where the locals tend to be too busy starting companies to wallow in gloom, Peter Diamandis has stood out as one of the more striking optimists. Several years ago, Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards entrepreneurs with cash for achieving difficult goals, like putting a reusable spaceship into flight on a limited budget. More recently he helped start Singularity University, an academic program that convenes several weeks a year in the Valley and educates business leaders about the “disruptive” — i.e., phenomenally innovative — technological changes Diamandis is anticipating. To be sure, Diamandis is both very bright (he studied molecular biology and aerospace engineering at M.I.T. before getting an M.D. at Harvard) and well informed. Moreover, he’s not the kind of optimist who will merely see the glass as half full. He’ll give you dozens of reasons, some highly technical, why it’s half full. Then he’ll explain that your cognitive biases are tricking you into seeing the glass of water in a negative light, and cart out the research of acclaimed psychologists like Daniel Kahne­man to prove his point. Finally he may suggest you stop fretting: new technologies will soon fill the glass up anyway. Indeed, they are likely to overfill it.
. . .
(p. 19) Throughout the book Diamandis . . . offers small groups of driven entrepreneurs as a kind of Leatherman solution to the world’s problems. It’s true that plenty of insurgents are doing impressive things out there — Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, which helped jump-start the world’s electric car industry, is a good example.
. . .
. . . , there’s a significant idea embedded within “Abundance”: We should remain aware, as writers like Jared Diamond have likewise told us, that societies can choose their own future, and thus their own fate. In that spirit Diamandis and Kotler put forth a range of possible goals we may achieve if we have the imagination and the will. A little optimism wouldn’t hurt, either.

For the full review, see:
JON GERTNER. “Plenty to Go Around.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., April 1, 2012): 18 & 19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 30, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Behavioral Economics Does Not Undermine Capitalism

thinkingfastandslowBK2012-06-21.jpg

Source of book image: http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/thinkingfastandslow.jpg

Daniel Kahneman first gained fame in economics through research with Tversky in which they showed that some of economists’ assumptions about human rationality do not always hold true.
Kahneman, whose discipline is psychology, went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, sharing the prize with Vernon Smith. (Since the Prize is not normally awarded posthumously, Tversky was not a candidate.)
I have always thought that ultimately there should be only one unified science of human behavior—not claims that are “true” in economics and other claims that are “true” in psychology. (I even thought of minoring in psychology in college, before I realized that the price of minoring included taking time-intensive lab courses where you watched rats run through mazes.)
But I don’t think the implications of current work in behavioral economics are as clear as has often been asserted.
Some important results in economics do not depend on strong claims of rationality. For instance, the most important “law” in economics is the law of demand, and that law is due to human constraints more than to human rationality. Gary Becker, early in his career, wrote an interesting paper in which he showed that the law of demand could also be derived from habitual and random behavior. (I remember in conversation, George Stigler saying that he did not like this paper by Becker, because it did not hone closely to the rationality assumption that Stigler and Becker defended in their “De Gustibus” article.)
The latest book by Kahneman is rich and stimulating. It mainly consists of cataloging the names of, and evidence for, a host of biases and errors that humans make in thinking. But that does not mean we cannot choose to be more rational when it matters. Kahneman believes that there is a conscious System 2 that can over-ride the unconscious System 1. In fact, part of his motive for cataloging bias and irrationality is precisely so that we can be aware, and over-ride when it matters.
Sometimes it is claimed, as for instance in a Nova episode on PBS, that bias and irrationality were the main reasons for the financial crisis of 2008. I believe the more important causes were policy mistakes, like Clinton and Congress pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home loans to those who did not have the resources to repay them; and past government bailouts encouraging finance firms to take greater risks. And the length and depth of the crisis were increased by government stimulus and bailout programs. If instead, long-term cuts had been made in taxes, entrepreneurs would have had more of the resources they need to create start-ups that would have stimulated growth and reduced unemployment.
More broadly, aspects of behavioral economics mentioned, but not emphasized, by Kahneman, can actually strengthen the underpinnings for the case in favor of entrepreneurial capitalism. Entrepreneurs may be more successful when they are allowed to make use of informal knowledge that would not be classified as “rational” in the usual sense. (I discuss this some in my forthcoming paper, “The Epistemology of Entrepreneurship.”)
Still, there are some useful and important examples and discussions in Kahneman’s book. In the next several weeks, I will be quoting some of these.

Book discussed:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

The Becker article mentioned above is:
Becker, Gary S. “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 1 (Feb. 1962): 1-13.

The Stigler-Becker article mentioned above is:
Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March 1977): 76-90.

A Renting Labor Force Is More Dynamically Mobil

RentalPropertyGraphic2012-06-12.jpg

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C2) The U.S. economy needs the dynamism that renting enables as much as–if not more than–it needs the stability that ownership engenders. In the current economy, there are vast gulfs between the employment pictures in different regions and states, from 12% unemployment in Nevada to 3% unemployment in North Dakota. But a steelworker in Buffalo, or an underemployed construction worker in Las Vegas, can’t easily take his skills to where they are needed in North Dakota or Wyoming if he’s underwater on his mortgage. Economists, in fact, have found that there is frequently a correlation between persistently high local unemployment rates and high levels of homeownership.

For the full essay, see:
DANIEL GROSS. “Renting Prosperity; Americans are getting used to the idea of renting the good life, from cars to couture to homes. Daniel Gross explores our shift from a nation of owners to an economy permanently on the move–and how it will lead to the next boom..” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 5, 2012): C1 & C2.
(Note: the online version of the essay has the date May 4, 2012.)

Sam Walton Was “America’s Greatest Entrepreneur of the Twentieth Century”

(p. 194) Sam Walton is my pick for America’s greatest entrepreneur of the twentieth century.
He not only built the world’s largest retailing empire and the single most valuable company in America, he created the institution with the greatest muscle to do good today.

Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

“Under a Mountain in Omaha”

(p. 170) lnformatics had been run from the top down. Here’s a story typical of the way the company worked. They had a trainer at headquarters who was told to educate the troops at the Federal Systems Division in northern California, which was run by Geno Tolari, a tough-minded football player from Pittsburgh. When the trainer arrived and announced, “I’m here to train your people,” Geno shot back, “You can’t train my people.”
The trainer got haughty. After all, he was from headquarters. “I’m the education department. I train your people.”
But Geno insisted, “You can’t train my people because you don’t know what they do.”
So now the trainer asked, “Okay, what do they do?”
Geno answered, “I don’t know.”
The trainer thought Geno was joking with him, and insisted, “I’m the trainer; I need to know what they do.”
That’s when Geno confessed, “I can’t tell you because I don’t (p. 171) know. They’re under a mountain in Omaha, and it’s a military secret, and the Air Force won’t tell us what they do.”

Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

Lincoln “Would Abhor” Roosevelt’s “Progressivism”

LifeOfRobertTLincolnBK2012-06-11.jpg

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) In 1912, . . . , Robert Lincoln uncharacteristically leapt into the arena of national debate to challenge Theodore Roosevelt’s appropriation of his father’s name for TR’s “New Nationalism” agenda. Robert, writing in the Boston Herald, labeled Roosevelt’s progressivism a doctrine that the elder Lincoln “would abhor if living.”

For the full review, see:
RYAN L. COLE. “BOOKSHELF; The Son Also Rises; Prominent lawyer, self-made millionaire, cabinet secretary–Robert Lincoln was more than just his father’s greatest advocate.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 9, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Emerson, Jason. Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Obama’s World Bank President Opposes Growth, Profits and Globalization

President Obama’s pick for World Bank President, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is scheduled to take office on July 1, 2012.

(p. A8) Dr. Kim has drawn fire recently for comments in a book he co-edited in 2000, “Dying for Growth.” In a piece he co-authored for it, Dr. Kim co-wrote that “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”
. . .
. . . an economist who has become one of Dr. Kim’s leading critics, New York University’s William Easterly, said the World Bank nominee offered an “amateur” approach to economics through an “antiglobalization point of view” that is critical of corporations.
“His critique was much more radical, that the system itself was responsible for creating poverty,” Mr. Easterly said.

For the full review, see:
SUDEEP REDDY. “WORLD NEWS; Criticism Over U.S.’s World Bank Pick Swells.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 9, 2012): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: online version of the article is dated April 8, 2012.)

William Easterly’s wonderful and courageous book is:
Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002 [1st ed. 2001].