Thanks to Balsa Research, every weekday I now get to meet and talk to someone new, usually multiple new people, all of whom are interesting, know things I don’t know that they are eager to explain to me, and who share a passion for modeling the world with an eye towards making things better rather than worse.
As someone who grew up poor, I hate this genre of writing. It always seems to assume that poor people can never be the authors of their misfortune and works back from there.
Maybe the best public policy isn't to confront people with their own mistakes, but pretending that irrationality is actually rational doesn't help us to understand why people make bad decisions.
Here's a recent example from my life. My mom's long-term boyfriend had a poorly managed handyman business. On one job he took payment in the form of a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle.
I warned him that the value of the car is taxed whenever it changes hands. This fell on deaf ears.
They live in a small town, but classic car buyers will travel some distance for the right car. I advised him to at least put the car on craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, which is free. He told me his plan was to put a sign on the car and attract people passing by. He hasn't even put a sign on the car. It's been sitting in the driveway for six months.
Selling the car is the highest value thing he could do. It would be maybe a few hours of work for many thousands of dollars.
The most charitable read I can give is that he knows he'll fritter away the proceeds and is keeping the car as illiquid savings. But I can't imagine him planning anything to that level. He's just bad at making decisions. I expect him to let the car sit in the driveway until it's in such bad shape that someone will have to be paid to tow it away.
I don't think this is a good model of how people behave.
Two people could have the exact same incentives, with the same goals, and the same information available to them. However, one person could end up achieving their goals while the other struggles. Why?
How can you explain consistently good or bad performance in something like chess tournaments? Does difference in incentive explain all, or even most, of that difference? At the top I think it's a safe assumption that everyone involved actually does want to win. The dominant factor is probably that some people are better than others at evaluating the state of the world and making decisions that advance their goals.
In the case of my mom's boyfriend, probably his greatest aspirations are drinking and golfing. Selling the car now, to a market broader than his small town, translates into more beer and golf. He can even quit his job as he is wont to do when he encounters a minor windfall, which will enable more drinking and golfing. Letting the car rot in the driveway for the next ten years yields no additional beer or golf.
In case I didn't make it clear, this car is not a fun indulgence. It just sits there, and as far as I know doesn't yield any utility as a pretty thing to look at. There are no tradeoffs, it's all dead-weight loss.
The obvious question is, does this imply that we should have higher marginal tax rates on poor people, since they don't benefit from having more money?
"You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird."
Just like peoples' own Congressperson is good but Congress overall is a dumpster fire, their kid is awesome and special and fine but the others are in trouble. Few people understand base rates.
In all fairness, if I were at the pool with my kids who I know can swim well above average, and some asked me if I was worried about my kids drowning more or kids in general drowning, it would be reasonable to say I worry more about other kids in general.
Base rates are important, but specific local knowledge trumps it.
This was my thought as well. I am in general worried about kids, but my own kids are talented and supported and well-educated and they're going to be fine.
I think that the above is actually true in my case, being of above average intelligence and SES, but I can see how on average people might think it's true for their kids as well, even if their kids are at higher than average risk of failure.
My kids too are high INT and SES, I still worry about them quite a lot. If people aren't so worried about their own kids, why do they act like they are very worried all the time?
>You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird.
I think you might be parsing the survey question differently than I (and some survey respondents?) did. Worry translating to intensity of care rather than to acknowledgment of a possible problem.
I worry more about my kids than kids in general in the sense that they are more important to me, but I worry less about my kids than kids in general in the sense that I think the likelihood of their failure is lower.
My kids are (almost) fully launched. (making their own way in the world) and I've stopped worrying, and just do my best to help. Don't worry about the vase. :^)
But worrying about them is the right thing for you to do at this point. Just letting you know it gets better.
1: I think you are misinterpreting the survey regarding worrying about kids growing up properly, specifically conflating "worrying about" and "doing something about." The former is likely to be parsed as "do you think/are you confident that X kids are going to grow up into functional adults?" which makes perfect sense when people respond "other people's kids, no, not really. Mine are going to be fine, but those other parents are crazy."
2: Re: Bike lane bounty: My guess is that lower income people report the bounty less because they don't care about bike lanes. Those lanes seem to be popular with the upper middle class set, not so much with the poor. Since one has to be in a position to see the blockage (so probably in a car?) and car enough to pay attention for potential blockages while in such a position, it isn't too surprising it is skewed towards the wealthier people who care about the lanes and probably are in a car that notice.
Bikes are a far more viable option when you can afford both to identify (e.g. via RE agent) and occupy a residence close to your workplace. I suspect E-bikes may help to change this, though, and local means-tested subsidies are helping with that.
Agreed. It seems that long commutes are the particularly common among the poor, at least in places where bike paths exist. (My dad bikes all the time, but he is more likely to have his way blocked by a deer or an errant cow, so bike paths are sort of irrelevant.)
2: Right, that makes sense when it's about bike lanes. When it's about money I expect it to work the other way. I mean, if I think of my young Magic-playing self, or my gambling self, no way am I turning down that kind of easy money. And I did not have it that rough.
Yes, but the mistake many people make when thinking about the poor is that they are really concerned about maximizing their income. Which sounds strange, I know. From a marginal utility perspective one would think they would get a lot of value from the extra cash. From a revealed preferences perspective, however, one can argue that they haven't really done much to optimize their income levels, so why would this particular instance be different?
It sounds callous, but damn, meet my wife... high paying job, two income household, and she all but clips coupons (she does that occasionally, too). If she could set up her laptop such that she could also keep an eye on the bike lane she'd totally do it.
I, on the other hand, could give a damn about bike lines, and kind of have a grudge against bicyclists on the road. Despite being pretty cheap myself, I wouldn't bother to snitch out someone blocking the path for the promise of 50$ odd dollars. On the other hand, if I could get the cops to ticket the guys who park their work vehicles and block entire lanes of traffic on the back roads around here, hell, I'd pay for the option.
Long story short: people care about money a lot less than people expect, and care about norm violation a great deal more than we expect.
Now, if the bounties were plentiful enough to make a living collecting them, then you would probably see people being more on top of it.
Hmm, I think a lot depends on who you are pissing off. (to get any money, convenience) and if they can find out if it was you who blew them in. No one cares about 'bike lanes' in a low income neighborhood.
The Democrat/Republican excess death curve is strange. Not that there's a delta at all and it's bad for Republicans, that's not surprising. What is surprising is that the delta gets worse over time. What's driving that?
There are many factors that I think would make the delta shrink. COVID strains have become less deadly, there are few people left with immune systems that have zero COVID defenses, the people most likely to die of COVID have already died.
One possible factor that would keep COVID in the mix is that Republicans engaged in riskier behavior as time went on and so were more likely to suffer a COVID infection. Do we have any data on infection rate by party?
Or, maybe COVID infections themselves aren't widening the gap, and it's something else.
Also re: bedrooms and windows, it's for egress in case of fire. In my state at least windows that people couldn't plausibly fit through don't count. You can't advertise your finished basement with tiny windows at the top of the wall as a bedroom.
So in terms of windows, my response is that I look at my windows, all of them, in my combined apartment, and (1) they don't open such that you could get out that way and (2) that's good because I'd have to worry about my kids doing it and anyone who did try to leave that way would die, we're floors up with no fire escape anywhere.
Same with my childhood apartment - there might have been one fire escape out of three bedrooms but I'm damn sure there weren't two. So at least in NYC that doesn't count.
I agree that the gap widening even now seems odd. If anything, it could be the best argument I've seen for Long Covid being a real issue!
I would like to hear your (or anyone else's) arguments about why Ohtani is clearly your (or their) pick for MVP above Judge. I thought that at first, and then looked at the WAR of each player and Judge was markedly higher, and then saw that people felt Ohtani's WAR was not fairly represented as a 2 way player. I looked further, and the calculations don't seem unreasonable to me, his WAR for pitching is only adequate even though his ERA is top 5, I assume due to the 6 man pitching rotation giving him fewer starts than other great pitchers. His batting is great, but he's always a DH, which to my understanding fairly comes with negative positional value, and pitcher fielding is included in pitching WAR to my understanding. To believe all these things to me points towards Judge being the correct vote for MVP.
If you think there's anything specific that's wrong with these statements, I'm interested as to your thoughts.
And of course, if you think WAR is not the best metric by which to measure MVP or is flawed for other reasons that make it unsuitable, I'm also interested.
First, Ohtani's WAR replaces TWO players, not one. That's a big deal. The Mets are a playoff team that would kind of love a replacement level player or two on their roster even if it replaced someone, in particular to be a DH (or C). It also means you have a full extra roster slot to use, which is pretty awesome. Pitching is a place where it's VERY easy to not be able to get replacement level for your last starter. How do you think the Angels got a 6-man rotation? Don't sleep on this.
Counterweight on DH is DHing constantly is not easy even if you're not a pitcher. DHs underperform and players who can field much prefer to stay in the field. Of course, I'd kill the rule (at which point Ohtani is the MVP and it's not remotely close since his ABs replace a pitcher).
Second, Ohtani is a special case where his value is a lot more than wins. So is Judge to a lesser extent - suppose it was Judge up against another position player, and that player had 0.1 higher WAR while Judge got 62 HRs. Seems obvious you give it to Judge. What Ohtani is doing here is completely insane, it is doing a ton to help MLB and the Angels both, and I would pay him a TON of extra money on that basis. Whereas Judge had an amazing year but I don't want to pay him that much extra to get him because I don't expect him to do it again.
The concrete vision of the future is utopian nonsense. It is completely detached from reality. There's nothing concrete about it, it's all fantasy based on left-wing denials of heritability and arrogance over the progression of history.
Say what you want about right-wingers talking about breaking up the US or otherwise seceeding from it - at least they have an ice cold appreciation for how things actually are on a political and societal level and how things are going to unfold. They're not saying that they're going to win and then everyone but some token group of leftists they tolerate is going to agree with them and their vision for a better world will be acheived. No, they know that these differences won't resolve themselves, the culture war never ends and in fact will become far worse as the left become more arrogant with their increasing institutional power, and many Americans know the only way out is to literally make a new country. You may think their political views are hopelessly wrong, you may think their new countries will become shitholes (which didn't happen to America in the past which had similar laws/values to what these people want, but whatever), you may think these people are evil. But by god if they're not down to earth in their ambitions.
About OTC contraceptives: If you look at the map, you can see that all red countries (prescription only) have a well-functioning and efficient healthcare system. Whereas light blue (informal OTC) countries have high corruption.
I support the prescription only system with some exception (just like in the UK). In general, contraceptives are divided into simpler ones (progestogen only) and combined ones (2 hormones). Progestogen only required more precise dosing and may fail more often whereas combined contraceptive pill may have more side effects and can increase, for example, cancer risk in some women. The general public may not be aware of all this and the specialist consultation is required.
The prescription for contraceptives usually is for 6 or 12 months. It is not too much of a burden to visit a doctor once or twice per year. In the UK people don't pay for a GP visit (NHS) and any pharmacy will give emergency supply in case of missed prescription anyway.
>Poor people aren't less rational than rich ones, they just have different incentives due to where they are on the demand curve.
An extremely strong claim with zero evidence.
As someone who grew up poor, I hate this genre of writing. It always seems to assume that poor people can never be the authors of their misfortune and works back from there.
Maybe the best public policy isn't to confront people with their own mistakes, but pretending that irrationality is actually rational doesn't help us to understand why people make bad decisions.
Here's a recent example from my life. My mom's long-term boyfriend had a poorly managed handyman business. On one job he took payment in the form of a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle.
I warned him that the value of the car is taxed whenever it changes hands. This fell on deaf ears.
They live in a small town, but classic car buyers will travel some distance for the right car. I advised him to at least put the car on craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, which is free. He told me his plan was to put a sign on the car and attract people passing by. He hasn't even put a sign on the car. It's been sitting in the driveway for six months.
Selling the car is the highest value thing he could do. It would be maybe a few hours of work for many thousands of dollars.
The most charitable read I can give is that he knows he'll fritter away the proceeds and is keeping the car as illiquid savings. But I can't imagine him planning anything to that level. He's just bad at making decisions. I expect him to let the car sit in the driveway until it's in such bad shape that someone will have to be paid to tow it away.
I don't think this is a good model of how people behave.
Two people could have the exact same incentives, with the same goals, and the same information available to them. However, one person could end up achieving their goals while the other struggles. Why?
How can you explain consistently good or bad performance in something like chess tournaments? Does difference in incentive explain all, or even most, of that difference? At the top I think it's a safe assumption that everyone involved actually does want to win. The dominant factor is probably that some people are better than others at evaluating the state of the world and making decisions that advance their goals.
In the case of my mom's boyfriend, probably his greatest aspirations are drinking and golfing. Selling the car now, to a market broader than his small town, translates into more beer and golf. He can even quit his job as he is wont to do when he encounters a minor windfall, which will enable more drinking and golfing. Letting the car rot in the driveway for the next ten years yields no additional beer or golf.
In case I didn't make it clear, this car is not a fun indulgence. It just sits there, and as far as I know doesn't yield any utility as a pretty thing to look at. There are no tradeoffs, it's all dead-weight loss.
The obvious question is, does this imply that we should have higher marginal tax rates on poor people, since they don't benefit from having more money?
I do, although if I am responding I will see any edits first.
Hmm they are already 'taxed' at a higher rate, no need to add more.
(most 'taxes' are in terms of interest payments and insurance costs. It's easy to take advantage of poorer people, I don't feel good about that.
"You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird."
Just like peoples' own Congressperson is good but Congress overall is a dumpster fire, their kid is awesome and special and fine but the others are in trouble. Few people understand base rates.
In all fairness, if I were at the pool with my kids who I know can swim well above average, and some asked me if I was worried about my kids drowning more or kids in general drowning, it would be reasonable to say I worry more about other kids in general.
Base rates are important, but specific local knowledge trumps it.
This was my thought as well. I am in general worried about kids, but my own kids are talented and supported and well-educated and they're going to be fine.
I think that the above is actually true in my case, being of above average intelligence and SES, but I can see how on average people might think it's true for their kids as well, even if their kids are at higher than average risk of failure.
My kids too are high INT and SES, I still worry about them quite a lot. If people aren't so worried about their own kids, why do they act like they are very worried all the time?
>You should worry more about your own kid’s success than the success of kids in general, and this going the other way is super weird.
I think you might be parsing the survey question differently than I (and some survey respondents?) did. Worry translating to intensity of care rather than to acknowledgment of a possible problem.
I worry more about my kids than kids in general in the sense that they are more important to me, but I worry less about my kids than kids in general in the sense that I think the likelihood of their failure is lower.
My kids are (almost) fully launched. (making their own way in the world) and I've stopped worrying, and just do my best to help. Don't worry about the vase. :^)
But worrying about them is the right thing for you to do at this point. Just letting you know it gets better.
One note is that the NYU students were not part of a non-SAT class.
https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1577232041107939328
Two points:
1: I think you are misinterpreting the survey regarding worrying about kids growing up properly, specifically conflating "worrying about" and "doing something about." The former is likely to be parsed as "do you think/are you confident that X kids are going to grow up into functional adults?" which makes perfect sense when people respond "other people's kids, no, not really. Mine are going to be fine, but those other parents are crazy."
2: Re: Bike lane bounty: My guess is that lower income people report the bounty less because they don't care about bike lanes. Those lanes seem to be popular with the upper middle class set, not so much with the poor. Since one has to be in a position to see the blockage (so probably in a car?) and car enough to pay attention for potential blockages while in such a position, it isn't too surprising it is skewed towards the wealthier people who care about the lanes and probably are in a car that notice.
Bikes are a far more viable option when you can afford both to identify (e.g. via RE agent) and occupy a residence close to your workplace. I suspect E-bikes may help to change this, though, and local means-tested subsidies are helping with that.
Agreed. It seems that long commutes are the particularly common among the poor, at least in places where bike paths exist. (My dad bikes all the time, but he is more likely to have his way blocked by a deer or an errant cow, so bike paths are sort of irrelevant.)
2: Right, that makes sense when it's about bike lanes. When it's about money I expect it to work the other way. I mean, if I think of my young Magic-playing self, or my gambling self, no way am I turning down that kind of easy money. And I did not have it that rough.
Yes, but the mistake many people make when thinking about the poor is that they are really concerned about maximizing their income. Which sounds strange, I know. From a marginal utility perspective one would think they would get a lot of value from the extra cash. From a revealed preferences perspective, however, one can argue that they haven't really done much to optimize their income levels, so why would this particular instance be different?
It sounds callous, but damn, meet my wife... high paying job, two income household, and she all but clips coupons (she does that occasionally, too). If she could set up her laptop such that she could also keep an eye on the bike lane she'd totally do it.
I, on the other hand, could give a damn about bike lines, and kind of have a grudge against bicyclists on the road. Despite being pretty cheap myself, I wouldn't bother to snitch out someone blocking the path for the promise of 50$ odd dollars. On the other hand, if I could get the cops to ticket the guys who park their work vehicles and block entire lanes of traffic on the back roads around here, hell, I'd pay for the option.
Long story short: people care about money a lot less than people expect, and care about norm violation a great deal more than we expect.
Now, if the bounties were plentiful enough to make a living collecting them, then you would probably see people being more on top of it.
Hmm, I think a lot depends on who you are pissing off. (to get any money, convenience) and if they can find out if it was you who blew them in. No one cares about 'bike lanes' in a low income neighborhood.
The Democrat/Republican excess death curve is strange. Not that there's a delta at all and it's bad for Republicans, that's not surprising. What is surprising is that the delta gets worse over time. What's driving that?
There are many factors that I think would make the delta shrink. COVID strains have become less deadly, there are few people left with immune systems that have zero COVID defenses, the people most likely to die of COVID have already died.
One possible factor that would keep COVID in the mix is that Republicans engaged in riskier behavior as time went on and so were more likely to suffer a COVID infection. Do we have any data on infection rate by party?
Or, maybe COVID infections themselves aren't widening the gap, and it's something else.
Also re: bedrooms and windows, it's for egress in case of fire. In my state at least windows that people couldn't plausibly fit through don't count. You can't advertise your finished basement with tiny windows at the top of the wall as a bedroom.
So in terms of windows, my response is that I look at my windows, all of them, in my combined apartment, and (1) they don't open such that you could get out that way and (2) that's good because I'd have to worry about my kids doing it and anyone who did try to leave that way would die, we're floors up with no fire escape anywhere.
Same with my childhood apartment - there might have been one fire escape out of three bedrooms but I'm damn sure there weren't two. So at least in NYC that doesn't count.
I agree that the gap widening even now seems odd. If anything, it could be the best argument I've seen for Long Covid being a real issue!
I would like to hear your (or anyone else's) arguments about why Ohtani is clearly your (or their) pick for MVP above Judge. I thought that at first, and then looked at the WAR of each player and Judge was markedly higher, and then saw that people felt Ohtani's WAR was not fairly represented as a 2 way player. I looked further, and the calculations don't seem unreasonable to me, his WAR for pitching is only adequate even though his ERA is top 5, I assume due to the 6 man pitching rotation giving him fewer starts than other great pitchers. His batting is great, but he's always a DH, which to my understanding fairly comes with negative positional value, and pitcher fielding is included in pitching WAR to my understanding. To believe all these things to me points towards Judge being the correct vote for MVP.
If you think there's anything specific that's wrong with these statements, I'm interested as to your thoughts.
And of course, if you think WAR is not the best metric by which to measure MVP or is flawed for other reasons that make it unsuitable, I'm also interested.
Several reasons.
First, Ohtani's WAR replaces TWO players, not one. That's a big deal. The Mets are a playoff team that would kind of love a replacement level player or two on their roster even if it replaced someone, in particular to be a DH (or C). It also means you have a full extra roster slot to use, which is pretty awesome. Pitching is a place where it's VERY easy to not be able to get replacement level for your last starter. How do you think the Angels got a 6-man rotation? Don't sleep on this.
Counterweight on DH is DHing constantly is not easy even if you're not a pitcher. DHs underperform and players who can field much prefer to stay in the field. Of course, I'd kill the rule (at which point Ohtani is the MVP and it's not remotely close since his ABs replace a pitcher).
Second, Ohtani is a special case where his value is a lot more than wins. So is Judge to a lesser extent - suppose it was Judge up against another position player, and that player had 0.1 higher WAR while Judge got 62 HRs. Seems obvious you give it to Judge. What Ohtani is doing here is completely insane, it is doing a ton to help MLB and the Angels both, and I would pay him a TON of extra money on that basis. Whereas Judge had an amazing year but I don't want to pay him that much extra to get him because I don't expect him to do it again.
The concrete vision of the future is utopian nonsense. It is completely detached from reality. There's nothing concrete about it, it's all fantasy based on left-wing denials of heritability and arrogance over the progression of history.
Say what you want about right-wingers talking about breaking up the US or otherwise seceeding from it - at least they have an ice cold appreciation for how things actually are on a political and societal level and how things are going to unfold. They're not saying that they're going to win and then everyone but some token group of leftists they tolerate is going to agree with them and their vision for a better world will be acheived. No, they know that these differences won't resolve themselves, the culture war never ends and in fact will become far worse as the left become more arrogant with their increasing institutional power, and many Americans know the only way out is to literally make a new country. You may think their political views are hopelessly wrong, you may think their new countries will become shitholes (which didn't happen to America in the past which had similar laws/values to what these people want, but whatever), you may think these people are evil. But by god if they're not down to earth in their ambitions.
About OTC contraceptives: If you look at the map, you can see that all red countries (prescription only) have a well-functioning and efficient healthcare system. Whereas light blue (informal OTC) countries have high corruption.
I support the prescription only system with some exception (just like in the UK). In general, contraceptives are divided into simpler ones (progestogen only) and combined ones (2 hormones). Progestogen only required more precise dosing and may fail more often whereas combined contraceptive pill may have more side effects and can increase, for example, cancer risk in some women. The general public may not be aware of all this and the specialist consultation is required.
The prescription for contraceptives usually is for 6 or 12 months. It is not too much of a burden to visit a doctor once or twice per year. In the UK people don't pay for a GP visit (NHS) and any pharmacy will give emergency supply in case of missed prescription anyway.