Insights from Online Discussions

Mine and other people’s

[After some discussion online I am adopting a policy of asking permission to quote things I see online and attributing them to the author only with his permission.]

Trumpism as a Lower-Class Pride Parade

… the real reason for pride parades isn't a theory of homosexuality's positive externality. It's not really about political demands either; if all the political demands are fulfilled in one year, you can be sure there will still be a pride parade next year, perhaps with a new set of political demands. It's a way for those who have been bullied, laughed at, and shamed for their homosexuality to say "f*** you" to their tormentors. If people respond with disgust and offense to the pride parade, that's all the better.

One way to think of the Trump movement is that it is, in part, a pride parade for lower-class whites. All their lives they've been laughed at and looked down on for their lack of money and educational credentials, and also for their lower-class cultural habits, for dressing like cowboys, watching daytime court shows, listening to country music, shopping at Wal-Mart, buying lotto scratchers, speaking with an accent, eating junk food, and (until recently) drinking Bud Light. And then there's a movement that comes along promising a celebration of lower-class identity. Take the reality TV star you were mocked for looking up to and make him President. They laugh at you for watching professional wrestling? Take a professional wrestler and make him a party convention speaker. If the upper-class people respond with disgust, compare it to Idiocracy, mission accomplished! If they respond with positive fear, say it's the second coming of fascism, well, that's all the better! As with the gay pride parade, it's not really about policy. It's the fact that Kidd Rock and Hulk Hogan are up on that stage and not asked to leave, not anything they say. (Alexander Turok)

“Build the Wall” as well designed rhetoric

Build A Wall is a moronic policy (ROACT)

"Build a wall" is rhetoric for "sharply reduce illegal immigration," a policy that many voters supported. It's intelligently constructed rhetoric, simple and vivid, which helps explain Trump's political success. Actually building a wall may or may not be a sensible policy but saying it achieves his objective.

Was Bryan's cross of gold speech moronic? Nobody was actually being crucified. If you checked the border between East and West Germany immediately after the war, I don't think you would see a literal curtain of iron — was Churchill a moron?

Imagining your opponents to be idiots may feel good but it's a poor way of predicting their behavior in order to oppose them.

Prediction Markets as a Hedge

Suppose you believe that Harris winning the election will make you much poorer, perhaps because much of your wealth is in oil company stocks. Suppose you believe that Trump winning will make you much poorer, perhaps because you work for a company that produces solar panels and depends on a government subsidy to stay in business. In either case, you would like to hedge your bets.

One way of doing so is to use a prediction market to bet against the outcome you want. If Harris wins your oil stocks go down but the money you bet on a Harris win doubles. If Trump wins you may have to look for a new job but you have the money you won betting on Trump to feed you and your family while you do so.

If enough people act that way, most of them in the same direction, they will push down the return on the candidate they don’t want, push up the probability of his winning deduced from that price, making it a biased estimate of the true odds. This is a point someone made online. I don’t think it is likely to be a significant effect but it is logically possible and interesting, and I like clever ideas that never occurred to me.

The Effect Of Artificial Wombs On the Abortion Controversy.

… if this sort of thing becomes possible and relatively easy, then abortion will switch to tubing, where the fetus is removed, gestated and sent to an orphanage. The political issues would shift in ways I can't really guess at. Would there be a lobby of women who insist that their fetuses need to die? … What would adoption look like in society? One in three women have abortions, so we'd be looking at a lot more kids. Enough that there are so many kids that healthy infants aren't adopted? …

Maybe this is flat impossible or no one is working on it so this doesn't matter at all. But if it were to come to pass I think the political questions, the answers, and the fights would all be different, in ways no one today would probably expect. (JohnathanD)

Stockholm Syndrome May Have an Evolutionary Explanation.

A common pattern in primitive conflict is for the winners to kill the enemy men, seize the women. A woman whose response is to hate the winners is less likely to pass her genes on to the next generation than one whose response is to love them.

Immigration and Jobs

She (Harris) is not going to grow the economy in some way that could provide enough new jobs for both you and the immigrants. (Conrad)

This sentence (parenthesis added) reflects a common economic error, the assumption that the number of jobs is unrelated to the number of workers, the unemployment rate whatever the difference between the two happens to be. If that were the case it would be an extraordinary coincidence that, over the past two hundred and fifty years, both numbers have increased by two orders of magnitude but rarely differed by as much as ten percent.

If we let in ten million workers, legally or illegally, and all of them get jobs, that doesn't mean that ten million Americans lose their jobs. Neither does it mean that wages will fall by enough to increase the demand for labor by ten million; the immigrants will be part of the demand for labor as well as the supply. It probably means that wages for kinds of labor that many immigrants do, such as harvesting crops, fall, and wages for kinds that they consume but don't do, rise.

In the early part of the last century the US had about a million people a year coming in, the equivalent of three million today. The unemployment rate didn't rise by one percent a year. It was basically flat at about five percent, with some ups and downs, from 1900 to 1930.

One commenter responded that the immigrants might send some of their income back to their home country, creating a demand for labor there not here. But dollars sent abroad don’t normally stay abroad, they come back as demand for American export goods produced with American labor.¹

The same error, seeing an economy as a static picture rather than a dynamic equilibrium, shows up in other discussions online. If store owners have to hire citizens at twenty dollars an hour instead of immigrants at ten to sweep their floors and lock up the store at night the result is not that the same number of people are hired and the owners, or their customers, are poorer by the increased cost of labor. It is that the cost of selling goods in stores that require unskilled labor to operate gets higher, causing store owners to do more of that work themselves, modify their businesses to require less of that input — self-check aisles and fewer clerks for example. The increased cost of buying goods in stores will cause some customers to switch to buying online instead. Things will change in more ways than I can predict, all in the direction of using less of an input that is now more expensive.

It would seem to follow that immigrants who were worse than natives would make the country poorer per-capita, and would presumably be a net cost to natives.

That's a fallacy of composition. If a million poor people are added to the population, the country becomes poorer per-capita even if the effect on the natives is positive, even if nobody is worse off.

If the immigrants come to work, not to go on welfare, we benefit more from immigrants who are different from us than from immigrants who are similar, just as we benefit more from trade with a country that is good at what we are bad at and bad at what we are good at.

"Good at what we are bad at" is a misleading way of putting it — what is needed for gains from trade is that the relative costs of the good being traded are different in the two countries. If it costs us an hour to produce a bushel of grain and an hour to produce a pound of steel we can gain by trade with a country where it costs two hours to produce the grain and six hours to produce the steel even though, measured by time, we are better at both. We aren't trading hours but wheat and steel, and if they exchange two bushels of their wheat for a pound of our steel both they and we gain.

Math and Social Justice

It may seem unusual to discuss issues of privilege and racism in relation to abstract mathematics.  In fact I am sometimes asked if I'm not worried that talking about social justice issues in math will put some people off math, those who don't agree with me about social justice issues. The thing is that when I *don't* talk about social justice issues in math, nobody asked me if I was worried about putting off those who *do* care about those issues. I think there are plenty of existing math books and classes that don't touch on those issues, and that talking about them includes and motivates many people who have not felt that math is relevant to them. (Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical world, p. 66)

Diagram

I would feel an awful lot better about the world if a forty-odd-year-old alleged comedy didn't keep accurately having predicted modern political situations. (Statismagician)

Re the Earth’s Shape

If the earth was flat, cats would have knocked everything off it by now.

That... is a powerful argument, but if the world is round, wouldn't the cats be constantly rolling it all over the place ?

What did you think was making it spin?

(Commenters in a “The Earth is round! Change my mind” thread)

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1. Some might come back as in investments in American firms or to purchase government bonds. I explained the relevant economics in an earlier post.