# On the quality of matches

Apr 11 JDN 2459316

Many situations in the real world involve matching people to other people: Dating, job hunting, college admissions, publishing, organ donation.

Alvin Roth won his Nobel Prize for his work on matching algorithms. I have nothing to contribute to improving his algorithm; what baffles me is that we don’t use it more often. It would probably feel too impersonal to use it for dating; but why don’t we use it for job hunting or college admissions? (We do use it for organ donation, and that has saved thousands of lives.)

In this post I will be looking at matching in a somewhat different way. Using a simple model, I’m going to illustrate some of the reasons why it is so painful and frustrating to try to match and keep getting rejected.

Suppose we have two sets of people on either side of a matching market: X and Y. I’ll denote an arbitrarily chosen person in X as x, and an arbitrarily chosen person in Y as y. There’s no reason the two sets can’t have overlap or even be the same set, but making them different sets makes the model as general as possible.

Each person in X wants to match with a person in Y, and vice-versa. But they don’t merely want to accept any possible match; they have preferences over which matches would be better or worse.

In general, we could say that people have some kind of utility function: Ux:Y->R and Uy:X->R that maps from possible match partners to the utility of such a match. But that gets very complicated very fast, because it raises the question of when you should keep searching, and when you should stop searching and accept what you have. (There’s a whole literature of search theory on this.)

For now let’s take the simplest possible case, and just say that there are some matches each person will accept, and some they will reject. This can be seen as a special case where the utility functions Ux and Uy always yield a result of 1 (accept) or 0 (reject).

This defines a set of acceptable partners for each person: A(x) is the set of partners x will accept: {y in Y|Ux(y) = 1} and A(y) is the set of partners y will accept: {x in X|Uy(x) = 1}

Then, the set of mutual matches than x can actually get is the set of ys that x wants, which also want x back: M(x) = {y in A(x)|x in A(y)}

Whereas, the set of mutual matches that y can actually get is the set of xs that y wants, which also want y back: M(y) = {x in A(y)|y in A(x)}

This relation is mutual by construction: If x is in M(y), then y is in M(x).

But this does not mean that the sets must be the same size.

For instance, suppose that there are three people in X, x1, x2, x3, and three people in Y, y1, y2, y3.

Let’s say that the acceptable matches are as follows:

A(x1) = {y1, y2, y3}

A(x2) = {y2, y3}

A(x3) = {y2, y3}

A(y1) = {x1,x2,x3}

A(y2) = {x1,x2}

A(y3) = {x1}

This results in the following mutual matches:

M(x1) = {y1, y2, y3}

M(y1) = {x1}

M(x2) = {y2}

M(y2) = {x1, x2}

M(x3) = {}

M(y3) = {x1}

x1 can match with whoever they like; everyone wants to match with them. x2 can match with y2. But x3, despite having the same preferences as x2, and being desired by y3, can’t find any mutual matches at all, because the one person who wants them is a person they don’t want.

y1 can only match with x1, but the same is true of y3. So they will be fighting over x1. As long as y2 doesn’t also try to fight over x1, x2 and y2 will be happy together. Yet x3 will remain alone.

Note that the number of mutual matches has no obvious relation with the number of individually acceptable partners. x2 and x3 had the same number of acceptable partners, but x2 found a mutual match and x3 didn’t. y1 was willing to accept more potential partners than y3, but got the same lone mutual match in the end. y3 was only willing to accept one partner, but will get a shot at x1, the one that everyone wants.

One thing is true: Adding another acceptable partner will never reduce your number of mutual matches, and removing one will never increase it. But often changing your acceptable partners doesn’t have any effect on your mutual matches at all.

Now let’s consider what it must feel like to be x1 versus x3.

For x1, the world is their oyster; they can choose whoever they want and be guaranteed to get a match. Life is easy and simple for them; all they have to do is decide who they want most and that will be it.

For x3, life is an endless string of rejection and despair. Every time they try to reach out to suggest a match with someone, they are rebuffed. They feel hopeless and alone. They feel as though no one would ever actually want them—even though in fact there is someone who wants them, it’s just not someone they were willing to consider.

This is of course a very simple and small-scale model; there are only six people in it, and they each only say yes or no. Yet already I’ve got x1 who feels like a rock star and x3 who feels utterly hopeless if not worthless.

In the real world, there are so many more people in the system that the odds that no one is in your mutual match set are negligible. Almost everyone has someone they can match with. But some people have many more matches than others, and that makes life much easier for the ones with many matches and much harder for the ones with fewer.

Moreover, search costs then become a major problem: Even knowing that in all probability there is a match for you somewhere out there, how do you actually find that person? (And that’s not even getting into the difficulty of recognizing a good match when you see it; in this simple model you know immediately, but in the real world it can take a remarkably long time.)

If we think of the acceptable partner sets as preferences, they may not be within anyone’s control; you want what you want. But if we instead characterize them as decisions, the results are quite differentand I think it’s easy to see them, if nothing else, as the decision of how high to set your standards.

This raises a question: When we are searching and not getting matches, should we lower our standards and add more people to our list of acceptable partners?

This simple model would seem to say that we should always do that—there’s no downside, since the worst that can happen is nothing. And x3 for instance would be much happier if they were willing to lower their standards and accept y1. (Indeed, if they did so, there would be a way to pair everyone off happily: x1 with y3, x2 with y2, and x3 with y1.)

But in the real world, searching is often costly: There is at least the involved, and often a literal application or submission fee; but perhaps worst of all is the crushing pain of rejection. Under those circumstances, adding another acceptable partner who is not a mutual match will actually make you worse off.

That’s pretty much what the job market has been for me for the last six months. I started out with the really good matches: GiveWell, the Oxford Global Priorities Institute, Purdue, Wesleyan, Eastern Michigan University. And after investing considerable effort into getting those applications right, I made it as far as an interview at all those places—but no further.

So I extended my search, applying to dozens more places. I’ve now applied to over 100 positions. I knew that most of them were not good matches, because there simply weren’t that many good matches to be found. And the result of all those 100 applications has been precisely 0 interviews. Lowering my standards accomplished absolutely nothing. I knew going in that these places were not a good fit for me—and it looks like they all agreed.

It’s possible that lowering my standards in some different way might have worked, but even this is not clear: I’ve already been willing to accept much lower salaries than a PhD in economics ought to entitle, and included positions in my search that are only for a year or two with no job security, and applied to far-flung locales across the globe that I don’t know if I’d really be willing to move to.

Honestly at this point I’ve only been using the following criteria: (1) At least vaguely related to my field (otherwise they wouldn’t want me anyway), (2) a higher salary than I currently get as a grad student (otherwise why bother?), (3) a geographic location where homosexuality is not literally illegal and an institution that doesn’t actively discriminate against LGBT employees (this rules out more than you’d think—there are at least three good postings I didn’t apply to on these grounds), (4) in a region that speaks a language I have at least some basic knowledge of (i.e. preferably English, but also allowing Spanish, French, German, or Japanese) (5) working conditions that don’t involve working more than 40 hours per week (which has severely detrimental health effects, even ignoring my disability which would compound the effects), and (6) not working for a company that is implicated in large-scale criminal activity (as a remarkable number of major banks have in fact been implicated). I don’t feel like these are unreasonably high standards, and yet so far I have failed to land a match.

What’s more, the entire process has been emotionally devastating. While others seem to be suffering from pandemic burnout, I don’t think I’ve made it that far; I think I’d be just as burnt out even if there were no pandemic, simply from how brutal the job market has been.

Why does rejection hurt so much? Why does being turned down for a date, or a job, or a publication feel so utterly soul-crushing? When I started putting together this model I had hoped that thinking of it in terms of match-sets might actually help reduce that feeling, but instead what happened is that it offered me a way of partly explaining that feeling (much as I did in my post on Bayesian Impostor Syndrome).

What is the feeling of rejection? It is the feeling of expending search effort to find someone in your acceptable partner set—and then learning that you were not in their acceptable partner set, and thus you have failed to make a mutual match.

I said earlier that x1 feels like a rock star and x3 feels hopeless. This is because being present in someone else’s acceptable partner set is a sign of status—the more people who consider you an acceptable partner, the more you are “worth” in some sense. And when it’s something as important as a romantic partner or a career, that sense of “worth” is difficult to circumscribe into a particular domain; it begins to bleed outward into a sense of your overall self-worth as a human being.

Being wanted by someone you don’t want makes you feel superior, like they are “beneath” you; but wanting someone who doesn’t want you makes you feel inferior, like they are “above” you. And when you are applying for jobs in a market with a Beveridge Curve as skewed as ours, or trying to get a paper or a book published in a world flooded with submissions, you end up with a lot more cases of feeling inferior than cases of feeling superior. In fact, I even applied for a few jobs that I felt were “beneath” my level—they didn’t take me either, perhaps because they felt I was overqualified.

In such circumstances, it’s hard not to feel like I am the problem, like there is something wrong with me. Sometimes I can convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong and the market is just exceptionally brutal this year. But I really have no clear way of distinguishing that hypothesis from the much darker possibility that I have done something terribly wrong that I cannot correct and will continue in this miserable and soul-crushing fruitless search for months or even years to come. Indeed, I’m not even sure it’s actually any better to know that you did everything right and still failed; that just makes you helpless instead of defective. It might be good for my self-worth to know that I did everything right; but it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m in a miserable situation I can’t get out of. If I knew I were doing something wrong, maybe I could actually fix that mistake in the future and get a better outcome.

As it is, I guess all I can do is wait for more opportunities and keep trying.

# Men and violence

Apr4 JDN 2459302

Content warning: In this post, I’m going to be talking about violence, including sexual violence. April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I won’t go into any explicit detail, but I understand that discussion of such topics can still be very upsetting for many people.

After short posts for the past two weeks, get ready for a fairly long post. This is a difficult and complicated topic, and I want to make sure that I state things very clearly and with all necessary nuance.

While the overall level of violence between human societies varies tremendously, one thing is astonishingly consistent: Violence is usually committed by men.

In fact, violence is usually suffered by men as well—with the quite glaring exception of sexual violence. This is why I am particularly offended by claims like “All men benefit from male violence”; no, men who were murdered by other men did not benefit from male violence, and it is frankly appalling to say otherwise. Most men would be better off if male violence were somehow eliminated from the world. (Most women would also be much better off as well, of course.)

I therefore consider it both a matter of both moral obligation and self-interest to endeavor to reduce the amount of male violence in the world, which is almost coextensive with reducing the amount of violence in general.

On the other hand, ought implies can, and despite significant efforts I have made to seek out recommendations for concrete actions I could be taking… I haven’t been able to find very many.

The good news is that we appear to be doing something right—overall rates of violent crime have declined by nearly half since 1990. The decline in rape has been slower, only about 25% since 1990, though this is a bit misleading since the legal definition of rape has been expanded during that interval. The causes of this decline in violence are unclear: Some of the most important factors seem to be changes in policing, economic growth, and reductions in lead pollution. For whatever reason, Millennials just don’t seem to commit crimes at the same rates that Gen-X-ers or Boomers did. We are also substantially more feminist, so maybe that’s an important factor too; the truth is, we really don’t know.

But all of this still leaves me asking: What should I be doing?

When I searched for an answer to this question, a significant fraction of the answers I got from various feminist sources were some variation on “ruminate on your own complicity in male violence”. I tried it; it was painful, difficult—and basically useless. I think this is particularly bad advice for someone like me who has a history of depression.

When you ruminate on your own life, it’s easy to find mistakes; but how important were those mistakes? How harmful were they? I can’t say that I’ve never done anything in my whole life that hurt anyone emotionally (can anyone?), but I can only think of a few times I’ve harmed someone physically (mostly by accident, once in self-defense). I’ve definitely never raped or murdered anyone, and as far as I can tell I’ve never done anything that would have meaningfully contributed to anyone getting raped or murdered. If you were to somehow replace every other man in the world with a copy of me, maybe that wouldn’t immediately bring about a utopian paradise—but I’m pretty sure that rates of violence would be a lot lower. (And in this world ruled by my clones, we’d have more progressive taxes! Less military spending! A basic income! A global democratic federation! Greater investment in space travel! Hey, this sounds pretty good, actually… though inbreeding would be a definite concern.) So, okay, I’m no angel; but I don’t think it’s really fair to say that I’m complicit in something that would radically decrease if everyone behaved as I do.

The really interesting thing is, I think this is true of most men. A typical man commits less than the average amount of violence—because there is great skew in the distribution, with most men committing little or no violence and a small number of men committing lots of violence. Truly staggering amounts of violence are committed by those at the very top of the distribution—that would be mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin. It sounds strange, but if all men in the world were replaced by a typical man, the world would surely be better off. The loss of the very best men would be more than compensated by the removal of the very worst. In fact, since most men are not rapists or murderers, replacing every man in the world with the median man would automatically bring the rates of rape and murder to zero. I know that feminists don’t like to hear #NotAllMen; but it’s not even most men. Maybe the reason that the “not all men” argument keeps coming up is… it’s actually kind of true? Maybe it’s not so unreasonable for men to resent the implication that we are complicit in acts we abhor that we have never done and would never do? Maybe this whole concept that an entire sex of people, literally almost half the human race, can share responsibility for violent crimes—is wrong?

I know that most women face a nearly constant bombardment of sexual harassment, and feel pressured to remain constantly vigilant in order to protect themselves against being raped. I know that victims of sexual violence are often blamed for their victimization (though this happens in a lot of crimes, not just sex crimes). I know that #YesAllWomen is true—basically all women have been in some way harmed or threatened by sexual violence. But the fact remains that most men are already not committing sexual violence. Many people seem to confuse the fact that most women are harmed by men with the claim that most men harm women; these are not at all equivalent. As long as one man can harm many women, there don’t need to be very many harmful men for all women to be affected.

Plausible guesses would be that about 20-25% of women suffer sexual assault, committed by about 4% or 5% of men, each of whom commits an average of 4 to 6 assaults—and some of whom commit far more. If these figures are right, then 95% of men are not guilty of sexual assault. The highest plausible estimate I’ve seen is from a study which found that 11% of men had committed rape. Since it’s only one study and its sample size was pretty small, I’m actually inclined to think that this is an overestimate which got excessive attention because it was so shocking. Larger studies rarely find a number above 5%.

But even if we suppose that it’s really 11%, that leaves 89%; in what sense is 89% not “most men”? I saw some feminist sites responding to this result by saying things like “We can’t imprison 11% of men!” but, uh, we almost do already. About 9% of American men will go to prison in their lifetimes. This is probably higher than it should be—it’s definitely higher than any other country—but if those convictions were all for rape, I’d honestly have trouble seeing the problem. (In fact only about 10% of US prisoners are incarcerated for rape.) If the US were the incarceration capital of the world simply because we investigated and prosecuted rape more reliably, that would be a point of national pride, not shame. In fact, the American conservatives who don’t see the problem with our high incarceration rate probably do think that we’re mostly incarcerating people for things like rape and murder—when in fact large portions of our inmates are incarcerated for drug possession, “public order” crimes, or pretrial detention.

Even if that 11% figure is right, “If you know 10 men, one is probably a rapist” is wrong. The people you know are not a random sample. If you don’t know any men who have been to prison, then you likely don’t know any men who are rapists. 37% of prosecuted rapists have prior criminal convictions, and 60% will be convicted of another crime within 5 years. (Of course, most rapes are never even reported; but where would we get statistics on those rapists?) Rapists are not typical men. They may seem like typical men—it may be hard to tell the difference at a glance, or even after knowing someone for a long time. But the fact that narcissists and psychopaths may hide among us does not mean that all of us are complicit in the crimes of narcissists and psychopaths. If you can’t tell who is a psychopath, you may have no choice but to be wary; but telling every man to search his heart is worthless, because the only ones who will listen are the ones who aren’t psychopaths.

That, I think, is the key disagreement here: Where the standard feminist line is “any man could be a rapist, and every man should search his heart”, I believe the truth is much more like, “monsters hide among us, and we should do everything in our power to stop them”. The monsters may look like us, they may often act like us—but they are not us. Maybe there are some men who would commit rapes but can be persuaded out of it—but this is not at all the typical case. Most rapes are committed by hardened, violent criminals and all we can really do is lock them up. (And for the love of all that is good in the world, test all the rape kits!)

It may be that sexual harassment of various degrees is more spread throughout the male population; perhaps the median man indeed commits some harassment at some point in his life. But even then, I think it’s pretty clear that the really awful kinds of harassment are largely committed by a small fraction of serial offenders. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between propensity toward sexual harassment and various measures of narcissism and psychopathy. So, if most men look closely enough, maybe they can think of a few things that they do occasionally that might make women uncomfortable; okay, stop doing those things. (Hint: Do not send unsolicited dick pics. Ever. Just don’t. Anyone who wants to see your genitals will ask first.) But it isn’t going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life. As long as the serial offenders continue, women will still feel utterly bombarded.

There are other kinds of sexual violations that more men commit—being too aggressive, or persisting too much after the first rejection, or sending unsolicited sexual messages or images. I’ve had people—mostly, but not only, men—do things like that to me; but it would be obviously unfair to both these people and actual rape victims to say I’d ever been raped. I’ve been groped a few times, but it seems like quite a stretch to call it “sexual assault”. I’ve had experiences that were uncomfortable, awkward, frustrating, annoying, occasionally creepy—but never traumatic. Never violence. Teaching men (and women! There is evidence that women are not much less likely than men to commit this sort of non-violent sexual violation) not to do these things is worthwhile and valuable in itself—but it’s not going to do much to prevent rape or murder.

Thus, whatever responsibility men have in reducing sexual violence, it isn’t simply to stop; you can’t stop doing what you already aren’t doing.

After pushing through all that noise, at last I found a feminist site making a more concrete suggestion: They recommended that I read a book by Jackson Katz on the subject entitled The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help.

First of all, I must say I can’t remember any other time I’ve read a book that was so poorly titled. The only mention of the phrase “macho paradox” is a brief preface that was added to the most recent edition explaining what the term was meant to mean; it occurs nowhere else in the book. And in all its nearly 300 pages, the book has almost nothing that seriously addresses either the motivations underlying sexual violence or concrete actions that most men could take in order to reduce it.

As far as concrete actions (“How all men can help”), the clearest, most consistent advice the book seems to offer that would apply to most men is “stop consuming pornography” (something like 90% of men and 60% of women regularly consume porn), when in fact there is a strong negative correlation between consumption of pornography and real-world sexual violence. (Perhaps Millennials are less likely to commit rape and murder because we are so into porn and video games!) This advice is literally worse than nothing.

The sex industry exists on a continuum from the adult-only but otherwise innocuous (smutty drawings and erotic novels), through the legal but often problematic (mainstream porn, stripping), to the usually illegal but defensible (consensual sex work), all the way to the utterly horrific and appalling (the sexual exploitation of children). I am well aware that there are many deep problems with the mainstream porn industry, but I confess I’ve never quite seen how these problems are specific to porn rather than endemic to media or even capitalism more generally. Particularly with regard to the above-board sex industry in places like Nevada or the Netherlands, it’s not obvious to me that a prostitute is more exploited than a coal miner, a sweatshop worker, or a sharecropper—indeed, given the choice between those four careers, I’d without hesitation choose to be a prostitute in Amsterdam. Many sex workers resent the paternalistic insistence by anti-porn feminists that their work is inherently degrading and exploitative. Overall, sex workers report job satisfaction not statistically different than the average for all jobs. There are a multitude of misleading statistics often reported about the sex industry that often make matters seem far worse than they are.

Katz (all-too) vividly describes the depiction of various violent or degrading sex acts in mainstream porn, but he seems unwilling to admit that any other forms of porn do or even could exist—and worse, like far too many anti-porn feminists, he seems to willfully elide vital distinctions, effectively equating fantasy depiction with genuine violence and consensual kinks with sexual abuse. I like to watch action movies and play FPS video games; does that mean I believe it’s okay to shoot people with machine guns? I know the sophisticated claim is that it somehow “desensitizes” us (whatever that means), but there’s not much evidence of that either. Given that porn and video games are negatively correlated with actual violence, it may in fact be that depicting the fantasy provides an outlet for such urges and helps prevent them from becoming reality. Or, it may simply be that keeping a bunch of young men at home in front of their computers keeps them from going out and getting into trouble. (Then again, homicides actually increased during the COVID pandemic—though most other forms of crime decreased.) But whatever the cause, the evidence is clear that porn and video games don’t increase actual violence—they decrease them.

At the very end of the book, Katz hints at a few other things men might be able to do, or at least certain groups of men: Challenge sexism in sports, the military, and similar male-dominated spaces (you know, if you have clout in such spaces, which I really don’t—I’m an effete liberal intellectual, a paradigmatic “soy boy”; do you think football players or soldiers are likely to listen to me?); educate boys with more positive concepts of masculinity (if you are in a position to do so, e.g. as a teacher or parent); or, the very best advice in the entire book, worth more than the rest of the book combined: Donate to charities that support survivors of sexual violence. Katz doesn’t give any specific recommendations, but here are a few for you: RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC.

Honestly, I’m more impressed by Upworthy’s bulleted list of things men can do, though they’re mostly things that conscientious men do anyway, and even if 90% of men did them, it probably wouldn’t greatly reduce actual violence.

As far as motivations (“Why some men hurt women”), the book does at least manage to avoid the mindless slogan “rape is about power, not sex” (there is considerable evidence that this slogan is false or at least greatly overstated). Still, Katz insists upon collective responsibility, attributing what are in fact typically individual crimes, committed mainly by psychopaths, motivated primarily by anger or sexual desire, to some kind of institutionalized system of patriarchal control that somehow permeates all of society. The fact that violence is ubiquitous does not imply that it is coordinated. It’s very much the same cognitive error as “murderism”.

I agree that sexism exists, is harmful, and may contribute to the prevalence of rape. I agree that there are many widespread misconceptions about rape. I also agree that reducing sexism and toxic masculinity are worthwhile endeavors in themselves, with numerous benefits for both women and men. But I’m just not convinced that reducing sexism or toxic masculinity would do very much to reduce the rates of rape or other forms of violence. In fact, despite widely reported success of campaigns like the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, the best empirical research on the subject suggests that such campaigns actually tend to do more harm than good. The few programs that seem to work are those that focus on bystander interventions—getting men who are not rapists to recognize rapists and stop them. Basically nothing has ever been shown to convince actual rapists; all we can do is deny them opportunities—and while bystander intervention can do that, the most reliable method is probably incarceration. Trying to change their sexist attitudes may be worse than useless.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that much—not all, but much—of what is called “sexism” is actually toxic expressions of heterosexuality. Why do most creepy male bosses only ever hit on their female secretaries? Well, maybe because they’re straight? This is not hard to explain. It’s a fair question why there are so many creepy male bosses, but one need not posit any particular misogyny to explain why their targets would usually be women. I guess it’s a bit hard to disentangle; if an incel hates women because he perceives them as univocally refusing to sleep with him, is that sexism? What if he’s a gay incel (yes they exist) and this drives him to hate men instead?

In fact, I happen to know of a particular gay boss who has quite a few rumors surrounding him regarding his sexual harassment of male employees. Or you could look at Kevin Spacey, who (allegedly) sexually abused teenage boys. You could tell a complicated story about how this is some kind of projection of misogynistic attitudes onto other men (perhaps for being too “femme” or something)—or you could tell a really simple story about how this man is only sexually abusive toward other men because that’s the gender of people he’s sexually attracted to. Occam’s Razor strongly favors the latter.

Indeed, what are we to make of the occasional sexual harasser who targets men and women equally? On the theory that abuse is caused by patriarchy, that seems pretty hard to explain. On the theory that abusive people sometimes happen to be bisexual, it’s not much of a mystery. (Though I would like to take a moment to debunk the stereotype of the “depraved bisexual”: Bisexuals are no more likely to commit sexual violence, but are far more likely to suffer it—more likely than either straight or gay people, independently of gender. Trans people face even higher risk; the acronym LGBT is in increasing order of danger of violence.)

Does this excuse such behavior? Absolutely not. Sexual harassment and sexual assault are definitely wrong, definitely harmful, and rightfully illegal. But when trying to explain why the victims are overwhelmingly female, the fact that roughly 90% of people are heterosexual is surely relevant. The key explanandum here is not why the victims are usually female, but rather why the perpetrators are usually male.

That, indeed, requires explanation; but such an explanation is really not so hard to come by. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, for nearly every form of violence, the vast majority of that violence is committed by men? It sure looks genetic to me.

Indeed, in anyother context aside from gender or race, we would almost certainly reject any explanation other than genetics for such a consistent pattern. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, about 10% of people are LGBT? Probably genetics. Why is it that, in near every human society, about 10% of people are left-handed? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, do smiles indicate happiness, children fear loud noises, and adults fear snakes? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, are men on average much taller and stronger than women? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, is about 90% of violence, including sexual violence, committed by men? Clearly, it’s patriarchy.

A massive body of scientific evidence from multiple sources shows a clear casual relationship between increased testosterone and increased aggression. The correlation is moderate, only about 0.38—but it’s definitely real. And men have a lot more testosterone than women: While testosterone varies a frankly astonishing amount between men and over time—including up to a 2-fold difference even over the same day—a typical adult man has about 250 to 950 ng/dL of blood testosterone, while a typical adult woman has only 8 to 60 ng/dL. (An adolescent boy can have as much as 1200 ng/dL!) This is a difference ranging from a minimum of 4-fold to a maximum of over 100-fold, with a typical value of about 20-fold. It would be astonishing if that didn’t have some effect on behavior.

This is of course far from a complete explanation: With a correlation of 0.38, we’ve only explained about 14% of the variance, so what’s the other 86%? Well, first of all, testosterone isn’t the only biological difference between men and women. It’s difficult to identify any particular genes with strong effects on aggression—but the same is true of height, and nobody disputes that the height difference between men and women is genetic.

Clearly societal factors do matter a great deal, or we couldn’t possibly explain why homicide rates vary between countries from less than 3 per million per year in Japan to nearly 400 per million per year in Hondurasa full 2 orders of magnitude! But gender inequality does not appear to strongly predict homicide rates. Japan is not a very feminist place (in fact, surveys suggest that, after Spain, Japan is second-worst highly-developed country for women). Sweden is quite feminist, and their homicide rate is relatively low; but it’s still 4 times as high as Japan’s. The US doesn’t strike me as much more sexist than Canada (admittedly subjective—surveys do suggest at least some difference, and in the expected direction), and yet our homicide rate is nearly 3 times as high. Also, I think it’s worth noting that while overall homicide rates vary enormously across societies, the fact that roughly 90% of homicides are committed by men does not. Through some combination of culture and policy, societies can greatly reduce the overall level of violence—but no society has yet managed to change the fact that men are more violent than women.

I would like to do a similar analysis of sexual assault rates across countries, but unfortunately I really can’t, because different countries have such different laws and different rates of reporting that the figures really aren’t comparable. Sweden infamously has a very high rate of reported sex crimes, but this is largely because they have very broad definitions of sex crimes and very high rates of reporting. The best I can really say for now is there is no obvious pattern of more feminist countries having lower rates of sex crimes. Maybe there really is such a pattern; but the data isn’t clear.

Yet if biology contributes anything to the causation of violence—and at this point I think the evidence for that is utterly overwhelming—then mainstream feminism has done the world a grave disservice by insisting upon only social and cultural causes. Maybe it’s the case that our best options for intervention are social or cultural, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore biology. And then again, maybe it’s not the case at all:A neurological treatment to cure psychopathy could cut almost all forms of violence in half.

I want to be completely clear that a biological cause is not a justification or an excuse: literally billions of men manage to have high testosterone levels, and experience plenty of anger and sexual desire, without ever raping or murdering anyone. The fact that men appear to be innately predisposed toward violence does not excuse actual violence, and the fact that rape is typically motivated at least in part by sexual desire is no excuse for committing rape.

In fact, I’m quite worried about the opposite: that the notion that sexual violence is always motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women will be used to excuse rape, because men who know that their motivation was not oppression will therefore be convinced that what they did wasn’t rape. If rape is always motivated by a desire to oppress women, and his desire was only to get laid, then clearly, what he did can’t be rape, right? The logic here actually makes sense. If we are to reject this argument—as we must—then we must reject the first premise, that all rape is motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women. I’m not saying that’s never a motivation—I’m simply saying we can’t assume it is always.

The truth is, I don’t know how to end violence, and sexual violence may be the most difficult form of violence to eliminate. I’m not even sure what most of us can do to make any difference at all. For now, the best thing to do is probably to donate money to organizations like RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC. Even $10 to one of these organizations will do more to help survivors of sexual violence than hours of ruminating on your own complicity—and cost you a lot less. # Good news for a change Mar 28 JDN 2459302 When President Biden made his promise to deliver 100 million vaccine doses to Americans within his first 100 days, many were skeptical. Perhaps we had grown accustomed to the anti-scientific attitudes and utter incompetence of Trump’s administration, and no longer believed that the US federal government could do anything right. The skeptics were wrong. For the promise has not only been kept, it has been greatly exceeded. As of this writing, Biden has been President for 60 days and we have already administered 121 million vaccine doses. If we continue at the current rate, it is likely that we will have administered over 200 million vaccine doses and fully vaccinated over 100 million Americans by Biden’s promised 100-day timeline—twice as fast as what was originally promised. Biden has made another bold promise: Every adult in the United States vaccinated by the end of May. I admit I’m not confident it can be done—but I wasn’t confident we’d hit 100 million by now either. In fact, the US now has one of the best rates of COVID vaccination in the world, with the proportion of our population vaccinated far above the world average and below only Israel, UAE, Chile, the UK, and Bahrain (plus some tiny countries like Monaco). In fact, we actually have the largest absolute number of vaccinated individuals in the world, surpassing even China and India. It turns out that the now-infamous map saying that the US and UK were among the countries best-prepared for a pandemic wasn’t so wrong after all; it’s just that having such awful administration for four years made our otherwise excellent preparedness fail. Put someone good in charge, and yes, indeed, it turns out that the US can deal with pandemics quite well. The overall rate of new COVID cases in the US began to plummet right around the time the vaccination program gained steam, and has plateaued around 50,000 per day for the past few weeks. This is still much too high, but it is is a vast improvement over the 200,000 cases per day we had in early January. Our death rate due to COVID now hovers around 1,500 people per day—that’s still a 9/11 every two days. But this is half what our death rate was at its worst. And since our baseline death rate is 7,500 deaths per day, 1,800 of them by heart disease, this now means that COVID is no longer the leading cause of death in the United States; heart disease has once again reclaimed its throne. Of course, people dying from heart disease is still a bad thing; but it’s at least a sign of returning to normalcy. Worldwide, the pandemic is slowing down, but still by no means defeated, with over 400,000 new cases and 7,500 deaths every day. The US rate of 17 new cases per 100,000 people per day is about 3 times the world average, but comparable to Germany (17) and Norway (18), and nowhere near as bad as Chile (30), Brazil (35), France (37), or Sweden (45), let alone the very hardest-hit places like Serbia (71), Hungary (78), Jordan (83), Czechia (90), and Estonia (110). (That big gap between Norway and Sweden? It’s because Sweden resisted using lockdowns.) And there is cause for optimism even in these places, as vaccination rates already exceed total COVID cases. I can see a few patterns in the rate of vaccination by state: very isolated states have managed to vaccinate their population fastest—Hawaii and Alaska have done very well, and even most of the territories have done quite well (though notably not Puerto Rico). The south has done poorly (for obvious reasons), but not as poorly as I might have feared; even Texas and Mississippi have given at least one dose to 21% of their population. New England has been prioritizing getting as many people with at least one dose as possible, rather than trying to fully vaccinate each person; I think this is the right strategy. We must continue to stay home when we can and wear masks when we go out. This will definitely continue for at least a few more months, and the vaccine rollout may not even be finished in many countries by the end of the year. In the worst-case scenario, COVID may become an endemic virus that we can’t fully eradicate and we’ll have to keep getting vaccinated every year like we do for influenza (though the good news there is that it likely wouldn’t be much more dangerous than influenza at that point either—though another influenza is nothing to, er, sneeze at). Yet there is hope at last. Things are finally getting better. # What if everyone owned their own home? Mar 14 JDN 2459288 In last week’s post I suggested that if we are to use the term “gentrification”, it should specifically apply to the practice of buying homes for the purpose of renting them out. But don’t people need to be able to rent homes? Surely we couldn’t have a system where everyone always owned their own home? Or could we? The usual argument for why renting is necessary is that people don’t want to commit to living in one spot for 15 or 30 years, the length of a mortgage. And this is quite reasonable; very few careers today offer the kind of stability that lets you commit in advance to 15 or more years of working in the same place. (Tenured professors are one of the few exceptions, and I dare say this has given academic economists some severe blind spots regarding the costs and risks involved in changing jobs.) But how much does renting really help with this? One does not rent a home for a few days or even few weeks at a time. If you are staying somewhere for an interval that short, you generally room with a friend or pay for a hotel. (Or get an AirBNB, which is sort of intermediate between the two.) One only rents housing for months at a time—in fact, most leases are 12-month leases. But since the average time to sell a house is 60-90 days, in what sense is renting actually less of a commitment than buying? It feels like less of a commitment to most people—but I’m not sure it really is less of a commitment. There is a certainty that comes with renting—you know that once your lease is up you’re free to leave, whereas selling your house will on average take two or three months, but could very well be faster or slower than that. Another potential advantage of renting is that you have a landlord who is responsible for maintaining the property. But this advantage is greatly overstated: First of all, if they don’t do it (and many surely don’t), you actually have very little recourse in practice. Moreover, if you own your own home, you don’t actually have to do all the work yourself; you could pay carpenters and plumbers and electricians to do it for you—which is all that most landlords were going to do anyway. All of the “additional costs” of owning over renting such as maintenance and property taxes are going to be factored into your rent in the first place. This is a good argument for recognizing that a$1000 mortgage payment is not equivalent to a $1000 rent payment—the rent payment is all-inclusive in a way the mortgage is not. But it isn’t a good argument for renting over buying in general. Being foreclosed on a mortgage is a terrible experience—but surely no worse than being evicted from a rental. If anything, foreclosure is probably not as bad, because you can essentially only be foreclosed for nonpayment, since the bank only owns the loan; landlords can and do evict people for all sorts of reasons, because they own the home. In particular, you can’t be foreclosed for annoying your neighbors or damaging the property. If you own your home, you can cut a hole in a wall any time you like. (Not saying you should necessarily—just that you can, and nobody can take your home away for doing so.) I think the primary reason that people rent instead of buying is the cost of a down payment. For some reason, we have decided as a society that you should be expected to pay 10%-20% of the cost of a home up front, or else you never deserve to earn any equity in your home whatsoever. This is one of many ways that being rich makes it easier to get richer—but it is probably the most important one holding back most of the middle class of the First World. And make no mistake, that’s what this is: It’s a social norm. There is no deep economic reason why a down payment needs to be anything in particular—or even why down payments in general are necessary. There is some evidence that higher down payments are associated with less risk of default, but it’s not as strong as many people seem to think. The big HUD study on the subject found that one percentage point of down payment reduces default risk by about as much as 5 points of credit rating: So you should prefer to offer a mortgage to someone with an 800 rating and no down payment than someone with a 650 rating and a 20% down payment. Also, it’s not as if mortgage lenders are unprotected from default (unlike, say, credit card lenders). Above all, they can foreclose on the house. So why is it so important to reduce the risk of default in the first place? Why do you need extra collateral in the form of a down payment, when you’ve already got an entire house of collateral? It may be that this is actually a good opportunity for financial innovation, a phrase that should in general strike terror in one’s heart. Most of the time “financial innovation” means “clever ways of disguising fraud”. Previous attempts at “innovating” mortgages have resulted in such monstrosities as “interest-only mortgages” (a literal oxymoron, since by definition a mortgage must have a termination date—a date at which the debt “dies”), “balloon payments”, and “adjustable rate mortgages”—all of which increase risk of default while as far as I can tell accomplishing absolutely nothing. “Subprime” lending created many excuses for irresponsible or outright predatory lending—and then, above all, securitization of mortgages allowed banks to offload the risk they had taken on to third parties who typically had no idea what they were getting. Volcker was too generous when he said that the last great financial innovation was the ATM; no, that was an innovation in electronics (and we’ve had plenty of those). The last great financial innovation I can think of is the joint-stock corporation in the 1550s. But I think a new type of mortgage contract that minimizes default risk without requiring large up-front payments might actually qualify as a useful form of financial innovation. It would also be useful to have mortgages that make it easier to move, perhaps by putting payments on hold while the home is up for sale. That way people wouldn’t have to make two mortgage payments at once as they move from one place to another, and the bank will see that money eventually—paid for by new buyer and their mortgage. Indeed, ideally I’d like to eliminate foreclosure as well, so that no one has to be kicked out of their homes. How might we do that? Well, as a pandemic response measure, we should have simply instituted a freeze on all evictions and foreclosures for the duration of the pandemic. Some states did, in fact—but many didn’t, and the federal moratoria on evictions were limited. This is the kind of emergency power that government should have, to protect people from a disaster. So far it appears that the number of evictions was effectively reduced from tens of millions to tens of thousands by these measures—but evicting anyone during a pandemic is a human rights violation. But as a long-term policy, simply banning evictions wouldn’t work. No one would want to lend out mortgages, knowing that they had no recourse if the debtor stopped paying. Even buyers with good credit might get excluded from the market, since once they actually received the house they’d have very little incentive to actually make their payments on time. But if there are no down payments and no foreclosures, that means mortgage lenders have no collateral. How are they supposed to avoid defaults? One option would be wage garnishment. If you have the money and are simply refusing to pay it, the courts could simply require your employer to send the money directly to your creditors. If you have other assets, those could be garnished as well. And what if you don’t have the money, perhaps because you’re unemployed? Well, then, this isn’t really a problem of incentives at all. It isn’t that you’re choosing not to pay, it’s that you can’t pay. Taking away such people’s homes would protect banks financially, but at a grave human cost. One option would be to simply say that the banks should have to bear the risk: That’s part of what their huge profits are supposed to be compensating them for, the willingness to take on risks others won’t. The main downside here is the fact that it would probably make it more difficult to get a mortgage and raise the interest rates that you would need to pay once you do. Another option would be some sort of government program to make up the difference, by offering grants or guaranteed loans to homeowners who can’t afford to pay their mortgages. Since most such instances are likely to be temporary, the government wouldn’t be on the hook forever—just long enough for people to get back on their feet. Here the downside would be the same as any government spending: higher taxes or larger budget deficits. But honestly it probably wouldn’t take all that much; while the total value of all mortgages is very large, only a small portion are in default at any give time. Typically only about 2-4% of all mortgages in the US are in default. Even 4% of the$10 trillion total value of all US mortgages is about $400 billion, which sounds like a lot—but the government wouldn’t owe that full amount, just whatever portion is actually late. I couldn’t easily find figures on that, but I’d be surprised if it’s more than 10% of the total value of these mortgages that would need to be paid by the government.$40 billion is about 1% of the annual federal budget.

Reforms to our healthcare system would also help tremendously, as medical expenses are a leading cause of foreclosure in the United States (and literally nowhere else—every other country with the medical technology to make medicine this expensive also has a healthcare system that shares the burden). Here there is virtually no downside: Our healthcare system is ludicrously expensive without producing outcomes any better than the much cheaper single-payer systems in Canada, the UK, and France.

All of this sounds difficult and complicated, I suppose. Some may think that it’s not worth it. But I believe that there is a very strong moral argument for universal homeownership and ending eviction: Your home is your own, and no one else’s. No one has a right to take your home away from you.

This is also fundamentally capitalist: It is the private ownership of capital by its users, the acquisition of wealth through ownership of assets. The system of landlords and renters honestly doesn’t seem so much capitalist as it does feudal: We even call them “lords”, for goodness’ sake!

As an added bonus, if everyone owned their own homes, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to worry about “gentrification”, since rising property values would always benefit residents.

# What I think “gentrification” ought to mean

Mar7 JDN 2459281

A few years back I asked the question: “What is gentrification?”

The term evokes the notion of a gentrya landed upper class who hoards wealth and keeps the rest of the population in penury and de facto servitude. Yet the usual meaning of the term really just seems to mean “rich people buying houses in poor areas”. Where did we get the idea that rich people buying houses in poor areas constitutes the formation of a landed gentry?

In that previous post I argued that the concept of “gentrification” as usually applied is not a useful one, and we should instead be focusing directly on the issues of poverty and housing affordability. I still think that’s right.

But it occurs to me that there is something “gentrification” could be used to mean, that would actually capture some of the original intended meaning. It doesn’t seem to be used this way often, but unlike the usual meaning, this one actually has some genuine connection with the original concept of a gentry.

Here goes: Gentrification is the purchasing of housing for the purpose of renting it out.

Why this definition in particular? Well, it actually does have an effect similar in direction (though hardly in magnitude) to the formation of a landed gentry: It concentrates land ownership and makes people into tenants instead of homeowners. It converts what should have been a one-time transfer of wealth from one owner to another into a permanent passive income stream that typically involves the poor indefinitely paying to the rich.

Because houses aren’t very fungible, the housing market is one of monopolistic competition: Each house is its own unique commodity, only partially substitutable with others, and this gives market power to the owners of houses. When it’s a permanent sale, that market power will be reflected in the price, but it will also effectively transfer to the new owner. When it’s a rental, that market power remains firmly in the hands of the landlord. The more a landlord owns, the more market power they can amass: A large landholding corporation like the Irvine Company can amass an enormous amount of market power, effectively monopolizing an entire city. (Now that feels like a landed gentry! Bend the knee before the great and noble House Irvine.)

Compare this to two other activities that are often called “gentrification”: Rich people buying houses in poor areas for the purpose of living in them, and developers building apartment buildings and renting them out.

When rich people buy houses for the purpose of living in them, they are not concentrating land ownership. They aren’t generating a passive income stream. They are simply doing the same thing that other people do—buying houses to live in them—but they have more money with which to do so. This is utterly unproblematic, and I think people need to stop complaining about it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying a house because you want to live in it, and if it’s a really expensive house—like Jeff Bezos’ $165 million mansion—then the problem isn’t rich people buying houses, it’s the massive concentration of wealth that made anyone that rich in the first place. No one should be made to feel guilty for spending their own money on their own house. Every time “gentrification” is used to describe this process, it just makes it seem like “gentrification” is nothing to worry about—or maybe even something to celebrate. What about developers who build apartments to rent them out? Aren’t they setting up a passive income stream from the poor to the rich? Don’t they have monopolistic market power? Yes, that’s all true. But they’re also doing something else that buying houses in order to rent them doesn’t: They are increasing the supply of housing. What are the two most important factors determining the price of housing? The same two factors as anything else: Supply and demand. If prices are too high, the best way to fix that is to increase supply. Developers do that. Conversely, buying up a house in order to rent it is actually reducing the supply of housing—or at least the supply of permanent owner-occupied housing. Whereas developers buy land that has less housing and build more housing on it, gentrifiers (as I’m defining them) buy housing that already exists and rent it out to others. Indeed, it’s really not clear to me that rent is a thing that needs to exist. Obviously people need housing. And it certainly makes sense to have things like hotels for very short-term stays and dorms for students who are living in an area for a fixed number of years. But it’s not clear to me that we really needed to have a system where people would own other people’s houses and charge them for the privilege of living in them. I think the best argument for it is a libertarian one: If people want to do that, why not let them? Yet I think the downsides of renting are clear enough: People get evicted and displaced, and in many cases landlords consistently fail to provide the additional services that they are supposed to provide. (I wasn’t able to quickly find good statistics on how common it is for landlords to evade their responsibilities like this, but anecdotal evidence would suggest that it’s not uncommon.) The clearest upside is that security deposits are generally cheaper than down payments, so it’s generally easier to rent a home than to buy one. But why does this have to be the case? Indeed, why do banks insist on such large down payments in the first place? It seems to be only social norms that set the rate of down payments; I’m not aware of any actual economic arguments for why a particular percentage of the home’s value needs to be paid in cash up front. It’s commonly thought that large down payments somehow reduce the risk of defaulting on a mortgage; but I’m not aware of much actual evidence of this. Here’s a theoretical model saying that down payments should matter, but it’s purely theoretical. Here’s an empirical paper showing that lower down payments are associated with higher interest rates—but it may be the higher interest rates that account for the higher defaults, not the lower down payments. There is also a selection bias, where buyers with worse credit get worse loan terms (which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy). The best empirical work I could find on the subject was a HUD study suggesting that yes, lower down payments are associated with higher default risk—but their effect is much smaller than lots of other things. In particular, one percentage point of down payment was equivalent to about 5 points of credit score. So someone with a credit score of 750 and a down payment of 0% is no more likely to default than someone with a credit score of 650 and a down payment of 20%. Or, to use an example they specifically state in the paper: “For example, to have the same probability of default as a prime loan, a B or C [subprime] loan needs to have a CLTV [combined loan-to-value ratio] that is 11.9 percentage points lower than the CLTV of an otherwise identical prime loan.” A combined loan-to-value ratio 12 percentage points lower is essentially the same thing as a down payment that is 12 percentage points larger—and 12% of the median US home price of$300,000 is $36,000, not an amount of money most middle-class families can easily come up with. I also found a quasi-experimental study showing that support from nonprofit housing organizations was much more effective at reducing default rates than higher down payments. So even if larger down payments do reduce defaults, there are better ways of doing so. The biggest determinant of whether you will default on your mortgage is the obvious one: whether you have steady income large enough to afford the mortgage payment. Typically when people default it’s because their adjustable interest rate surged or they lost their job. When housing prices decline and you end up “underwater” (owing more than the house’s current price), strategic default can theoretically increase your wealth; but in fact it’s relatively rare to take advantage of this, because it’s devastating to your credit rating. Only about 20% of all mortgage defaults in the crisis were strategic—the other 80% were people who actually couldn’t afford to pay. Another potential upside is that it may be easier to move from one place to another if you rent your home, since selling a home can take a considerable amount of time. But I think this benefit is overstated: Most home leases are 12 months long, while selling a house generally takes 60-90 days. So unless you are already near the end of your lease term when you decide to move, you may actually find that you could move faster if you sold your home than if you waited for your lease to end—and if you end your lease early, the penalties are often substantial. Your best-case scenario is a flat early termination fee; your worst-case scenario is being on the hook for all the remaining rent (at which point, why bother?). Some landlords instead require you to cover rent until a new tenant is found—which you may recognize as almost exactly equivalent to selling your own home. I think the main reason that people rent instead of buying is simply that they can’t come up with a down payment. If it seems too heavy-handed or risky to simply cap down payments, how about we offer government-subsidized loans (or even grants!) to first-time home buyers to cover their down payments? This would be expensive, but no more so than the mortgage interest deduction—and far less regressive. For now, we can continue to let people rent out homes. When developers do this, I think the benefits generally outweigh the harms: Above all, they are increasing the supply of housing. A case could be made for policies that incentivize the construction of condos rather than rentals, but above all, policy should be focusing on incentivizing construction. However, when someone buys an existing house and then rents it out, they are doing something harmful. It probably shouldn’t be illegal, and in some cases there may be no good alternatives to simply letting people do it. But it’s a harmful activity nonetheless, and where legal enforcement is too strict, social stigma can be useful. And for that reason, I think it might actually be fair to call them gentrifiers. # Why I am not an anarchist Feb 28 JDN 2459274 I read a post on social media not long ago which was remarkably thoughtful and well-written, considering that it contained ideas that would, if consistently followed, probably destroy human civilization as we know it. It was an argument in favor of the radical view “ACAB” (for “All Cops Are Bastards”), pointing out that police officers swear an oath to uphold all laws, not only just laws, and therefore are willfully participating in a system of oppression. This isn’t entirely wrong. Police officers do swear such an oath, and it does seem morally problematic. But if you stop and think for a moment, what was the alternative? Should we have police officers only swear an oath to uphold the laws they believe are just? Then you have just eliminated the entire purpose of having laws. If police officers get to freely choose which laws they want to uphold and which ones they don’t, we don’t have laws; we just have police officers and their own opinions. In place of the republican system of electing representatives to choose laws, we have a system where the only democratic power lies in choosing the governor and the mayor, and from that point on downward everything is appointments that the public has no say in. Or should we not have police officers at all? Anyone who chants “ACAB” evidently believes so. But without police officers—or at least some kind of law enforcement mechanism, which would almost certainly have to involve something very much like police officers—we once again find that laws no longer have any real power. Government ceases to exist as a meaningful institution. Laws become nothing more than statements of public disapproval. The logical conclusion of “ACAB” is nothing less than anarchism. Don’t get me wrong; statements of public disapproval can be useful in themselves. Most international law has little if any enforcement mechanism attached to it, yet most countries follow most international laws most of the time. But for one thing, serious violations of international law are frequent—even by countries that are ostensibly “good citizens”; and for another, international politics does have some kind of enforcement mechanism—if your reputation in the international community gets bad enough, you will often face trade sanctions or even find yourself invaded. Indeed, it is widely recognized by experts in international relations that more international law enforcement would be a very good thing—perhaps one of the very best things that could possibly happen, in fact, given its effect on war, trade, and the catastrophic risks imposed by nuclear weapons and climate change. The problem with international governance is not that it is undesirable, but that it seems infeasible; we can barely seem to get the world’s major power to all agree on international human rights, much less get them to sign onto a pact that would substantially limit their sovereignty against a global government. The UN is toothless precisely because most of the countries that have the power to control UN policy prefer it that way. At the national and sub-national scale, however, we already have law enforcement; and while it certainly has significant flaws and is in need of various reforms, it does largely succeed at its core mission of reducing crime. Indeed, the exceptions prove the rule: The one kind of crime that is utterly rampant in the First World, with impacts dwarfing all others, is white-collar crime—the kind that our police almost never seem to care about. It’s unclear exactly how much worse crime would be if law enforcement did not exist. Most people, I’m sure, would be unlikely to commit rape or murder even if it were legal to do so. Indeed, it’s not clear how effective law enforcement is at actually deterring rape or murder, since rape is so underreported and most murders are one-off crimes of passion. So, a bit ironically, removing law enforcement for the worst crimes might actually have a relatively small effect. But there are many other crimes that law enforcement clearly does successfully deter, such as aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, burglary, and car theft. Even controlling for the myriad other factors that affect crime, effective policing has been shown to reduce overall crime by at least 10 percent. Policing has the largest effects on so-called “street crime”, crimes like robbery and auto theft that occur in public places where police can be watching. Moreover, I would contend that these kinds of estimates should be taken as a lower bound. They are comparing the marginal effect of additional policing—not the overall effect of having police at all. If the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns applies, the marginal benefit of the first few police officers would be very high, while beyond a certain point adding more cops might not do much. At the extremes this is almost certainly correct, in fact: A country where 25% of all citizens were police officers probably wouldn’t actually have zero crime, but it would definitely be wasting enormous amounts of resources on policing. Dropping that all the way down to 5% or even 1% could be done essentially without loss. Meanwhile—and this is really the relevant question for anarchism—a country with no police officers at all would probably be one with vastly more crime. I can’t be certain, of course. No country has ever really tried going without police. What there have been are police strikes: And yes, it turns out that most police strikes don’t result in substantially increased crime. But there are some important characteristics of police strikes that make this result less convincing than it might seem. First of all, police can’t really strike the way most workers can—it’s almost always illegal for police to strike. So instead what happens is a lot of them call in sick (“blue flu”), or they do only the bare minimum requirements of their duties (“work-to-rule”). Often slack in the police force is made up by deploying state or federal officers. So the “strike” is more of a moderate reduction in policing, rather than a complete collapse of policing as the word “strike” would seem to imply. Moreover, police strikes are almost always short—the NYPD strike in the 1970s lasted only a week. A lot can still happen even in that time: The Murray-Hill riot as a result of a police strike in Montreal led to hundreds of thefts, millions of dollars in damage, and several deaths—all in a single night. (In Canada!) But even when things turn out okay after a week of striking, as they did in New York, that doesn’t really tell us what would happen if the police were gone for a month, or a year, or a decade. Most crime investigations last months or years anyway, so police going on strike for a week isn’t really that different from, say, economists going on strike for a week: It doesn’t much matter, because most of the work happens on a much longer timescale than that. Speaking as a graduate student, I’ve definitely had whole weeks where I did literally no useful work and nobody noticed. There’s another problem as well, which is that we don’t actually know how much crime happens. We mainly know about crime from two sources: Reporting, which is directly endogenous to police activity(if the police are known to be useless, nobody reports to them) and surveys, which are very slow (usually they are conducted annually or so). With reporting, we can’t really trust how the results change when policing changes; with surveys, we don’t actually see the outcome for months or years after the policing change. Indeed, it is a notorious fact in criminology that we can’t even really reliably compare crime rates in different times and places because of differences in reporting and survey methods; the one thing we feel really confident comparing is homicide rates (dead is pretty much dead!), which are known to not be very responsive to policing for reasons I already discussed. I suppose we could try conducting an actual experiment where we declare publically that there will be no police action whatsoever for some interval of time (wasn’t there a movie about this?), and see what happens. But this seems very dangerous: If indeed the pessimistic predictions of mass crime waves are accurate, the results could be catastrophic. The more realistic approach would be to experiment by reducing police activity, and see if crime increases. We would probably want to do this slowly and gradually, so that we have time to observe the full effect before going too far. This is something we can—and should—do without ever needing to go all the way to being anarchists who believe in abolishing all policing. Even if you think that police are really important and great at reducing crime, you should be interested in figuring out which police methods are most cost-effective, and experimenting with different policing approaches is the best way to do that. I understand the temptation of anarchism. Above all, it’s simple. It feels very brave and principled. I even share the temperament behind it: I am skeptical of authority in general and agree that the best world would be one where every person (or at least every adult of sound mind) had the full autonomy to make their own choices. But that world just doesn’t seem to be feasible right now, and perhaps it never will be. Police reform is absolutely necessary. Reductions in policing should be seriously tried and studied. But anarchy is just too dangerous—and that is why we shouldn’t be getting rid of police any time soon. # In search of reasonable conservatism Feb 21JDN 2459267 This is a very tumultuous time for American politics. Donald Trump, not once, but twice was impeached—giving him the dubious title of having been impeached as many times as the previous 45 US Presidents combined. He was not convicted either time, not because the evidence for his crimes was lacking—it was in fact utterly overwhelming—but because of obvious partisan bias: Republican Senators didn’t want to vote against a Republican President. All 50 of the Democratic Senators, but only 7 of the 50 Republican Senators, voted to convict Trump. The required number of votes to convict was 67. Some degree of partisan bias is to be expected. Indeed, the votes looked an awful lot like Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which all Democrats and only a handful of Republicans voted to acquit. But Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was nowhere near as open-and-shut as Donald Trump’s. He was being tried for perjury and obstruction of justice, over lies he told about acts that were unethical, but not illegal or un-Constitutional. I’m a little disappointed that no Democrats voted against him, but I think acquittal was probably the right verdict. There’s something very odd about being tried for perjury because you lied about something that wasn’t even a crime. Ironically, had it been illegal, he could have invoked the Fifth Amendment instead of lying and they wouldn’t have been able to touch him. So the only way the perjury charge could actually stick was because it wasn’t illegal. But that isn’t what perjury is supposed to be about: It’s supposed to be used for things like false accusations and planted evidence. Refusing to admit that you had an affair that’s honestly no one’s business but your family’s really shouldn’t be a crime, regardless of your station. So let us not imagine an equivalency here: Bill Clinton was being tried for crimes that were only crimes because he lied about something that wasn’t a crime. Donald Trump was being tried for manipulating other countries to interfere in our elections, obstructing investigations by Congress, and above all attempting to incite a coup. Partisan bias was evident in all three trials, but only Trump’s trials were about sedition against the United States. That is to say, I expect to see partisan bias; it would be unrealistic not to. But I expect that bias to be limited. I expect there to be lines beyond which partisans will refuse to go. The Republican Party in the United States today has shown us that they have no such lines. (Or if there are, they are drawn far too high. What would he have to do, bomb an American city? He incited an invasion of the Capitol Building, for goodness’ sake! And that was after so terribly mishandling a pandemic that he caused roughly 200,000 excess American deaths!) Temperamentally, I like to compromise. I want as many people to be happy as possible, even if that means not always getting exactly what I would personally prefer. I wanted to believe that there were reasonable conservatives in our government, professional statespersons with principles who simply had honest disagreements about various matters of policy. I can now confirm that there are at most 7 such persons in the US Senate, and at most 10 such persons in the US House of Representatives. So of the 261 Republicans in Congress, no more than 17 are actually reasonable statespersons who do not let partisan bias override their most basic principles of justice and democracy. And even these 17 are by no means certain: There were good strategic reasons to vote against Trump, even if the actual justice meant nothing to you. Trump’s net disapproval rating was nearly the highest of any US President ever. Carter and Bush I had periods where they fared worse, but overall fared better. Johnson, Ford, Reagan, Obama, Clinton, Bush II, and even Nixon were consistently more approved than Trump. Kennedy and Eisenhower completely blew him out of the water—at their worst, Kennedy and Eisenhower were nearly 30 percentage points above Trump at his best. With Trump this unpopular, cutting ties with him would make sense for the same reason rats desert a sinking ship. And yet somehow partisan loyalty won out for 94% of Republicans in Congress. Politics is the mind-killer, and I fear that this sort of extreme depravity on the part of Republicans in Congress will make it all too easy to dismiss conservatism as a philosophy in general. I actually worry about that; not all conservative ideas are wrong! Low corporate taxes actually make a lot of sense. Minimum wage isn’t that harmful, but it’s also not that beneficial. Climate change is a very serious threat, but it’s simply not realistic to jump directly to fully renewable energy—we need something for the transition, probably nuclear energy. Capitalism is overall the best economic system, and isn’t particularly bad for the environment. Industrial capitalism has brought us a golden age. Rent control is a really bad idea. Fighting racism is important, but there are ways in which woke culture has clearly gone too far. Indeed, perhaps the worst thing about woke culture is the way it denies past successes for civil rights and numbs us with hopelessness. Above all, groupthink is incredibly dangerous. Once we become convinced that any deviation from the views of the group constitutes immorality or even treason, we become incapable of accepting new information and improving our own beliefs. We may start with ideas that are basically true and good, but we are not omniscient, and even the best ideas can be improved upon. Also, the world changes, and ideas that were good a generation ago may no longer be applicable to the current circumstances. The only way—the only way—to solve that problem is to always remain open to new ideas and new evidence. Therefore my lament is not just for conservatives, who now find themselves represented by craven ideologues; it is also for liberals, who no longer have an opposition party worth listening to. Indeed, it’s a little hard to feel bad for the conservatives, because they voted for these maniacs. Maybe they didn’t know what they were getting? But they’ve had chances to remove most of them, and didn’t do so. At best I’d say I pity them for being so deluded by propaganda that they can’t see the harm their votes have done. But I’m actually quite worried that the ideologues on the left will now feel vindicated; their caricatured view of Republicans as moustache-twirling cartoon villains turned out to be remarkably accurate, at least for Trump himself. Indeed, it was hard not to think of the ridiculous “destroying the environment for its own sake” of Captain Planet villains when Trump insisted on subsidizing coal power—which by the way didn’t even work. The key, I think, is to recognize that reasonable conservatives do exist—there just aren’t very many of them in Congress right now. A significant number of Americans want low taxes, deregulation, and free markets but are horrified by Trump and what the Republican Party has become—indeed, at least a few write for the National Review. The mere fact that an idea comes from Republicans is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. Indeed, I’m going to say something even stronger: The mere fact that an idea comes from a racist or a bigot is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. If the idea itself is racist or bigoted, yes, that’s a reason to think it is wrong. But even bad people sometimes have good ideas. The reasonable conservatives seem to be in hiding at the moment; I’ve searched for them, and had difficulty finding more than a handful. Yet we must not give up the search. Politics should not appear one-sided. # What happened with GameStop? Feb 7 JDN 2459253 No doubt by now you’ve heard about the recent bubble in GameStop stock that triggered several trading stops, nearly destroyed a hedge fund, and launched a thousand memes. What really strikes me about this whole thing is how ordinary it is: This is basically the sort of thing that happens in our financial markets all the time. So why are so many people suddenly paying so much attention to it? There are a few important ways this is unusual: Most importantly, the bubble was triggered by a large number of middle-class people investing small amounts, rather than by a handful of billionaires or hedge funds. It’s also more explicitly collusive than usual, with public statements in writing about what stocks are being manipulated rather than hushed whispers between executives at golf courses. Partly as a consequence of these, the response from the government and the financial industry has been quite different as well, trying to halt trading and block transactions in a way that they would never do if the crisis had been caused by large financial institutions. If you’re interested in the technical details of what happened, what a short squeeze is and how it can make a hedge fund lose enormous amounts of money unexpectedly, I recommend this summary by KQED. But the gist of it is simple enough: Melvin Capital placed huge bets that GameStop stock would fall in price, and a coalition of middle-class traders coordinated on Reddit to screw them over by buying a bunch of GameStop stock and driving up the price. It worked, and now Melvin Capital lost something on the order of$3-5 billion in just a few days.

The particular kind of bet they placed is called a short, and it’s a completely routine practice on Wall Street despite the fact that I could never quite understand why it is a thing that should be allowed.

The essence of a short is quite simple: When you short, you are selling something you don’t own. You “borrow” it (it isn’t really even borrowing), and then sell it to someone else, promising to buy it back and return it to where you borrowed it from at some point in the future. This amounts to a bet that the price will decline, so that the price at which you buy it is lower than the price at which you sold it.

Doesn’t that seem like an odd thing to be allowed to do? Normally you can’t sell something you have merely borrowed. I can’t borrow a car and then sell it; car title in fact exists precisely to prevent this from happening. If I were to borrow your coat and then sell it to a thrift store, I’d have committed larceny. It’s really quite immaterial whether I plan to buy it back afterward; in general we do not allow people to sell things that they do not own.

Now perhaps the problem is that when I borrow your coat or your car, you expect me to return that precise object—not a similar coat or a car of equivalent Blue Book value, but your coat or your car. When I borrow a share of GameStop stock, no one really cares whether it is that specific share which I return—indeed, it would be almost impossible to even know whether it was. So in that way it’s a bit like borrowing money: If I borrow $20 from you, you don’t expect me to pay back that precise$20 bill. Indeed you’d be shocked if I did, since presumably I borrowed it in order to spend it or invest it, so how would I ever get it back?

But you also don’t sell money, generally speaking. Yes, there are currency exchanges and money-market accounts; but these are rather exceptional cases. In general, money is not bought and sold the way coats or cars are.

What about consumable commodities? You probably don’t care too much about any particular banana, sandwich, or gallon of gasoline. Perhaps in some circumstances we might “loan” someone a gallon of gasoline, intending them to repay us at some later time with a different gallon of gasoline. But far more likely, I think, would be simply giving a friend a gallon of gasoline and then not expecting any particular repayment except perhaps a vague offer of providing a similar favor in the future. I have in fact heard someone say the sentence “Can I borrow your sandwich?”, but it felt very odd when I heard it. (Indeed, I responded something like, “No, you can keep it.”)

And in order to actually be shorting gasoline (which is a thing that you, too, can do, perhaps even right now, if you have a margin account on a commodities exchange), it isn’t enough to borrow a gallon with the expectation of repaying a different gallon; you must also sell that gallon you borrowed. And now it seems very odd indeed to say to a friend, “Hey, can I borrow a gallon of gasoline so that I can sell it to someone for a profit?”

The usual arguments for why shorting should be allowed are much like the arguments for exotic financial instruments in general: “Increase liquidity”, “promote efficient markets”. These arguments are so general and so ubiquitous that they essentially amount to the strongest form of laissez-faire: Whatever Wall Street bankers feel like doing is fine and good and part of what makes American capitalism great.

In fact, I was never quite clear why margin accounts are something we decided to allow; margin trading is inherently high-leverage and thus inherently high-risk. Borrowing money in order to arbitrage financial assets doesn’t just seem like a very risky thing to do, it has been one way or another implicated in virtually every financial crisis that has ever occurred. It would be an exaggeration to say that leveraged arbitrage is the one single cause of financial crises, but it would be a shockingly small exaggeration. I think it absolutely is fair to say that if leveraged arbitrage did not exist, financial crises would be far rarer and further between.

Indeed, I am increasingly dubious of the whole idea of allowing arbitrage in general. Some amount of arbitrage may be unavoidable; there may always be people people who see that prices are different for the same item in two different markets, and then exploit that difference before anyone can stop them. But this is a bit like saying that theft is probably inevitable: Yes, every human society that has had a system of property ownership (which is most of them—even communal hunter-gatherers have rules about personal property), has had some amount of theft. That doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do to reduce theft, or that we should simply allow theft wherever it occurs.

The moral argument against arbitrage is straightforward enough: You’re not doing anything. No good is produced; no service is provided. You are making money without actually contributing any real value to anyone. You just make money by having money. This is what people in the Middle Ages found suspicious about lending money at interest; but lending money actually is doing something—sometimes people need more money than they have, and lending it to them is providing a useful service for which you deserve some compensation.

A common argument economists make is that arbitrage will make prices more “efficient”, but when you ask them what they mean by “efficient”, the answer they give is that it removes arbitrage opportunities! So the good thing about arbitrage is that it stops you from doing more arbitrage?

And what if it doesn’t stop you? Many of the ways to exploit price gaps (particularly the simplest ones like “where it’s cheap, buy it; where it’s expensive, sell it”) will automatically close those gaps, but it’s not at all clear to me that all the ways to exploit price gaps will necessarily do so. And even if it’s a small minority of market manipulation strategies that exploit gaps without closing them, those are precisely the strategies that will be most profitable in the long run, because they don’t undermine their own success. Then, left to their own devices, markets will evolve to use such strategies more and more, because those are the strategies that work.

That is, in order for arbitrage to be beneficial, it must always be beneficial; there must be no way to exploit price gaps without inevitably closing those price gaps. If that is not the case, then evolutionary pressure will push more and more of the financial system toward using methods of arbitrage that don’t close gaps—or even exacerbate them. And indeed, when you look at how ludicrously volatile and crisis-prone our financial system has become, it sure looks an awful lot like an evolutionary equilibrium where harmful arbitrage strategies have evolved to dominate.

A world where arbitrage actually led to efficient pricing would be a world where the S&P 500 rises a steady 0.02% per day, each and every day. Maybe you’d see a big move when there was actually a major event, like the start of a war or the invention of a vaccine for a pandemic. You’d probably see a jump up or down of a percentage point or two with each quarterly Fed announcement. But daily moves of even five or six percentage points would be a very rare occurrence—because the real expected long-run aggregate value of the 500 largest publicly-traded corporations in America is what the S&P 500 is supposed to represent, and that is not a number that should change very much very often. The fact that I couldn’t really tell you what that number is without multi-trillion-dollar error bars is so much the worse for anyone who thinks that financial markets can somehow get it exactly right every minute of every day.

Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine how we might close price gaps without simply allowing people to exploit them. There could be a bunch of economists at the Federal Reserve whose job it is to locate markets where there are arbitrage opportunities, and then a bundle of government funds that they can allocate to buying and selling assets in order to close those price gaps. Any profits made are received by the treasury; any losses taken are borne by the treasury. The economists would get paid a comfortable salary, and perhaps get bonuses based on doing a good job in closing large or important price gaps; but there is no need to give them even a substantial fraction of the proceeds, much less all of it. This is already how our money supply is managed, and it works quite well, indeed obviously much better than an alternative with “skin in the game”: Can you imagine the dystopian nightmare we’d live in if the Chair of the Federal Reserve actually received even a 1% share of the US money supply? (Actually I think that’s basically what happened in Zimbabwe: The people who decided how much money to print got to keep a chunk of the money that was printed.)

I don’t actually think this GameStop bubble is all that important in itself. A decade from now, it may be no more memorable than Left Shark or the Macarena. But what is really striking about it is how little it differs from business-as-usual on Wall Street. The fact that a few million Redditors can gather together to buy a stock “for the lulz” or to “stick it to the Man” and thereby bring hedge funds to their knees is not such a big deal in itself, but it is symptomatic of much deeper structural flaws in our financial system.

# The paperclippers are already here

Jan 24 JDN 2459239

Imagine a powerful artificial intelligence, which is comprised of many parts distributed over a vast area so that it has no particular location. It is incapable of feeling any emotion: Neither love nor hate, neither joy nor sorrow, neither hope nor fear. It has no concept of ethics or morals, only its own programmed directives. It has one singular purpose, which it seeks out at any cost. Any who aid its purpose are generously rewarded. Any who resist its purpose are mercilessly crushed.

The Less Wrong community has come to refer to such artificial intelligences as “paperclippers”; the metonymous singular directive is to maximize the number of paperclips produced. There’s even an online clicker game where you can play as one called “Universal Paperclips“. The concern is that we might one day invent such artificial intelligences, and they could get out of control. The paperclippers won’t kill us because they hate us, but simply because we can be used to make more paperclips. This is a far more plausible scenario for the “AI apocalypse” than the more conventional sci-fi version where AIs try to kill us on purpose.

But I would say that the paperclippers are already here. Slow, analog versions perhaps. But they are already getting out of control. We call them corporations.

A corporation is probably not what you visualized when you read the first paragraph of this post, so try reading it again. Which parts are not true of corporations?

Perhaps you think a corporation is not an artificial intelligence? But clearly it’s artificial, and doesn’t it behave in ways that seem intelligent? A corporation has purpose beyond its employees in much the same way that a hive has purpose beyond its bees. A corporation is a human superorganism (and not the only kind either).

Corporations are absolutely, utterly amoral. Their sole directive is to maximize profit. Now, you might think that an individual CEO, or a board of directors, could decide to do something good, or refrain from something evil, for reasons other than profit; and to some extent this is true. But particularly when a corporation is publicly-traded, that CEO and those directors are beholden to shareholders. If shareholders see that the corporation is acting in ways that benefit the community but hurt their own profits, shareholders can rebel by selling their shares or even suing the company. In 1919, Dodge successfully sued Ford for the “crime” of setting wages too high and prices too low.

Humans are altruistic. We are capable of feeling, emotion, and compassion. Corporations are not. Corporations are made of human beings, but they are specifically structured to minimize the autonomy of human choices. They are designed to provide strong incentives to behave in a particular way so as to maximize profit. Even the CEO of a corporation, especially one that is publicly traded, has their hands tied most of the time by the desires of millions of shareholders and customers—so-called “market forces”. Corporations are entirely the result of human actions, but they feel like impersonal forces because they are the result of millions of independent choices, almost impossible to coordinate; so one individual has very little power to change the outcome.

Why would we create such entities? It almost feels as though we were conquered by some alien force that sought to enslave us to its own purposes. But no, we created corporations ourselves. We intentionally set up institutions designed to limit our own autonomy in the name of maximizing profit.

Part of the answer is efficiency: There are genuine gains in economic efficiency due to the corporate structure. Corporations can coordinate complex activity on a vast scale, with thousands or even millions of employees each doing what they are assigned without ever knowing—or needing to know—the whole of which they are a part.

But a publicly-traded corporation is far from the only way to do that. Even for-profit businesses are not the only way to organize production. And empirically, worker co-ops actually seem to be about as productive as corporations, while producing far less inequality and far more satisfied employees.

Thus, in order to explain the primacy of corporations, particularly those that are traded on stock markets, we must turn to ideology: The extreme laissez- faire concept of capitalism and its modern expression in the ideology of “shareholder value”. Somewhere along the way enough people—or at least enough policymakers—became convinced that the best way to run an economy was to hand over as much as possible to entities that exist entirely to maximize their own profits.

This is not to say that corporations should be abolished entirely. I am certainly not advocating a shift to central planning; I believe in private enterprise. But I should note that private enterprise can also include co-ops, partnerships, and closely-held businesses, rather than publicly traded corproations, and perhaps that’s all we need. Yet there do seem to be significant advantages to the corporate structure: Corporation seem to be spectacularly good at scaling up the production of goods and providing them to a large number of customers. So let’s not get rid of corporations just yet.

Instead, let us keep corporations on a short leash. When properly regulated, corporations can be very efficient at producing goods. But corporations can also cause tremendous damage when given the opportunity. Regulations aren’t just “red tape” that gets in the way of production. They are a vital lifeline that protects us against countless abuses that corporations would otherwise commit.

These vast artificial intelligences are useful to us, so let’s not get rid of them. But never for a moment imagine that their goals are the same as ours. Keep them under close watch at all times, and compel them to use their great powers for good—for, left to their own devices, they can just as easily do great evil.

# Hyper-competition

Dec13 JDN 2459197

This phenomenon has been particularly salient for me the last few months, but I think it’s a common experience for most people in my generation: Getting a job takes an awful lot of work.

Over the past six months, I’ve applied to over 70 different positions and so far gone through 4 interviews (2 by video, 2 by phone). I’ve done about 10 hours of test work. That so far has gotten me no offers, though I have yet to hear from 50 employers. Ahead of me I probably have about another 10 interviews, then perhaps 4 of what would have been flyouts and in-person presentations but instead will be “comprehensive interviews” and presentations conducted online, likely several more hours of test work, and then finally, maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get a good offer or two. If I’m unlucky, I won’t, and I’ll have to stick around for another year and do all this over again next year.

Aside from the limitations imposed by the pandemic, this is basically standard practice for PhD graduates. And this is only the most extreme end of a continuum of intensive job search efforts, for which even applying to be a cashier at Target requires a formal application, references, and a personality test.

This wasn’t how things used to be. Just a couple of generations ago, low-wage employers would more or less hire you on the spot, with perhaps a resume or a cursory interview. More prestigious employers would almost always require a CV with references and an interview, but it more or less stopped there. I discussed in an earlier post how much of the difference actually seems to come from our chronic labor surplus.

Is all of this extra effort worthwhile? Are we actually fitting people to better jobs this way? Even if the matches are better, are they enough better to justify all this effort?

It is a commonly-held notion among economists that competition in markets is good, that it increases efficiency and improves outcomes. I think that this is often, perhaps usually, the case. But the labor market has become so intensely competitive, particularly for high-paying positions, that the costs of this competitive effort likely outweigh the benefits.

How could this happen? Shouldn’t the free market correct for such an imbalance? Not necessarily. Here is a simple formal model of how this sort of intensive competition can result in significant waste.

Note that this post is about a formal mathematical model, so it’s going to use a lot of algebra. If you are uninterested in such things, you can read the next two paragraphs and then skip to the conclusions at the end.

The overall argument is straightforward: If candidates are similar in skill level, a complicated application process can make sense from a firm’s perspective, but be harmful from society’s perspective, due to the great cost to the applicants. This can happen because the difficult application process imposes an externality on the workers who don’t get the job.

All right, here is where the algebra begins.

I’ve included each equation as both formatted text and LaTeX.

Consider a competition between two applicants, X and Z.

They are each asked to complete a series of tasks in an application process. The amount of effort X puts into the application is x, and the amount of effort Z puts into the application is z. Let’s say each additional bit of effort has a fixed cost, normalized to 1.

Let’s say that their skills are similar, but not identical; this seems quite realistic. X has skill level hx, and Z has skill level hz.

Getting hired has a payoff for each worker of V. This includes all the expected benefits of the salary, benefits, and working conditions. I’ll assume that these are essentially the same for both workers, which also seems realistic.

The benefit to the employer is proportional to the worker’s skill, so letting h be the skill level of the actually hired worker, the benefit of hiring that worker is hY. The reason they are requiring this application process is precisely because they want to get the worker with the highest h. Let’s say that this application process has a cost to implement, c.

Who will get hired? Well, presumably whoever does better on the application. The skill level will amplify the quality of their output, let’s say proportionally to the effort they put in; so X’s expected quality will be hxx and Z’s expected output will be hzz.

Let’s also say there’s a certain amount of error in the process; maybe the more-qualified candidate will sleep badly the day of the interview, or make a glaring and embarrassing typo on their CV. And quite likely the quality of application output isn’t perfectly correlated with the quality of actual output once hired. To capture all this, let’s say that having more skill and putting in more effort only increases your probability of getting the job, rather than actually guaranteeing it.

In particular, let’s say that the probability of X getting hired is P[X] = hxx/(hxx + hzz).

$P[X] = \frac{h_x}{h_x x + h_z z}$

This results in a contest function, a type of model that I’ve discussed in some earlier posts in a rather different context.

The expected payoff for worker X is:

E[Ux] = hxx/(hxx + hzz) V – x

$E[U_x] = \frac{h_x x}{h_x x + h_z z} V – x$

Maximizing this with respect to the choice of effort x (which is all that X can control at this point) yields:

hxhzz V = (hxx + hzz)2

$h_x h_z x V = (h_x x + h_z z)^2$

A similar maximization for worker Z yields:

hxhzx V = (hxx + hzz)2

$h_x h_z z V = (h_x x + h_z z)^2$

It follows that x=z, i.e. X and Z will exert equal efforts in Nash equilibrium. Their probability of success will then be contingent entirely on their skill levels:

P[X] = hx/(hx + hz).

$P[X] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_y}$

Substituting that back in, we can solve for the actual amount of effort:

hxhzx V = (hx + hz)2x2

$h_x h_z x V = (h_x + h_z)^2 x^2$

x = hxhzV/(hx + hz)2

$x = \frac{h_x h_z}{h_x + h_z} V$

Now let’s see what that gives for the expected payoffs of the firm and the workers. This is worker X’s expected payoff:

E[Ux] = hx/(hx + hz) V – hxhzV/(hx + hz)2 = (hx/(hx + hz))2 V

$E[U_x] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z} V – \frac{h_x h_z}{(h_x + h_z)^2} V = \left( \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V$

Worker Z’s expected payoff is the same, with hx and hz exchanged:

E[Uz] = (hz/(hx + hz))2 V

$E[U_z] = \left( \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V$

What about the firm? Their expected payoff is the the probability of hiring X, times the value of hiring X, plus the probability of hiring Z, times the value of hiring Z, all minus the cost c:

E[Uf] = hx/(hx + hz) hx Y + hz/(hx + hz) hz Y – c= (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – c

$E[U_f] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z} h_x Y + \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z} h_z Y – c = \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} Y – c$

To see whether the application process was worthwhile, let’s compare against the alternative of simply flipping a coin and hiring X or Z at random. The probability of getting hired is then 1/2 for each candidate.

Expected payoffs for X and Z are now equal:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

$E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2}$

The expected payoff for the firm can be computed the same as before, but now without the cost c:

E[Uf] = 1/2 hx Y + 1/2 hz Y = (hx + hz)/2 Y

$E[U_f] = \frac{1}{2} h_x Y + \frac{1}{2} h_z Y = \frac{h_x + h_z}{2} Y$

This has a very simple interpretation: The expected value to the firm is just the average quality of the two workers, times the overall value of the job.

Which of these two outcomes is better? Well, that depends on the parameters, of course. But in particular, it depends on the difference between hx and hz.

Consider two extremes: In one case, the two workers are indistinguishable, and hx = hz = h. In that case, the payoffs for the hiring process reduce to the following:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/4

$E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{4}$

E[Uf] = h Y – c

$E[U_f] = h Y – c$

Compare this against the payoffs for hiring randomly:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

$E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2}$

E[Uf] = h Y

$E[U_f] = h Y$

Both the workers and the firm are strictly better off if the firm just hires at random. This makes sense, since the workers have identical skill levels.

Now consider the other extreme, where one worker is far better than the other; in fact, one is nearly worthless, so hz ~ 0. (I can’t do exactly zero because I’d be dividing by zero, but let’s say one is 100 times better or something.)

In that case, the payoffs for the hiring process reduce to the following:

E[Ux] = V

E[Uz] = 0

$E[U_x] = V$

$E[U_z] = 0$

X will definitely get the job, so X is much better off.

E[Uf] = hx Y – c

$E[U_f] = h_x Y – c$

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

$E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2}$

E[Uf] = hY/2

$E[U_f] = \frac{h}{2} Y$

As long as c < hY/2, both the firm and the higher-skill worker are better off in this scenario. (The lower-skill worker is worse off, but that’s not surprising.) The total expected benefit for everyone is also higher in this scenario.

Thus, the difference in skill level between the applicants is vital. If candidates are very different in skill level, in a way that the application process can accurately measure, then a long and costly application process can be beneficial, not only for the firm but also for society as a whole.

In these extreme examples, it was either not worth it for the firm, or worth it for everyone. But there is an intermediate case worth looking at, where the long and costly process can be worth it for the firm, but not for society as a whole. I will call this case hyper-competition—a system that is so competitive it makes society overall worse off.

This inefficient result occurs precisely when:
c < (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – (hx + hz)/2 Y < c + (hx/(hx + hz))2 V + (hz/(hx + hz))2 V

$c < \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} Y – \frac{h_x + h_z}{2} Y < c + \left( \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V + \left( \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V$

This simplifies to:

c < (hx – hz)2/(2hx + 2hz) Y < c + (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz)2 V

$c < \frac{(h_x – h_z)^2}{2 (h_x + h_z)} Y < c + \frac{(h_x^2 + h_z^2)}{(h_x+h_z)^2} V$

If c is small, then we are interested in the case where:

(hx – hz)2 Y/2 < (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) V

$\frac{(h_x – h_z)^2}{2} Y < \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} V$

This is true precisely when the difference hx – hz is small compared to the overall size of hx or hz—that is, precisely when candidates are highly skilled but similar. This is pretty clearly the typical case in the real world. If the candidates were obviously different, you wouldn’t need a competitive process.

For instance, suppose that hx = 10 and hz = 8, while V = 180, Y = 20 and c = 1.

Then, if we hire randomly, these are the expected payoffs:

E[Uf] = (hx + hz)/2 Y = 180

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2 = 90

If we use the complicated hiring process, these are the expected payoffs:

E[Ux] = (hx/(hx + hz))2 V = 55.5

E[Uz] = (hz/(hx + hz))2 V = 35.5

E[Uf] = (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – c = 181

The firm gets a net benefit of 1, quite small; while the workers face a far larger total expected loss of 90. And these candidates aren’t that similar: One is 25% better than the other. Yet because the effort expended in applying was so large, even this improvement in quality wasn’t worth it from society’s perspective.

This conclude’s the algebra for today, if you’ve been skipping it.

In this model I’ve only considered the case of exactly two applicants, but this can be generalized to more applicants, and the effect only gets stronger: Seemingly-large differences in each worker’s skill level can be outweighed by the massive cost of making so many people work so hard to apply and get nothing to show for it.

Thus, hyper-competition can exist despite apparently large differences in skill. Indeed, it is precisely the typical real-world scenario with many applicants who are similar that we expect to see the greatest inefficiencies. In the absence of intervention, we should expect markets to get this wrong.

Of course, we don’t actually want employers to hire randomly, right? We want people who are actually qualified for their jobs. Yes, of course; but you can probably assess that with nothing more than a resume and maybe a short interview. Most employers are not actually trying to find qualified candidates; they are trying to sift through a long list of qualified candidates to find the one that they think is best qualified. And my suspicion is that most of them honestly don’t have good methods of determining that.

This means that it could be an improvement for society to simply ban long hiring processes like these—indeed, perhaps ban job interviews altogether, as I can hardly think of a more efficient mechanism for allowing employers to discriminate based on race, gender, age, or disability than a job interview. Just collect a resume from each applicant, remove the ones that are unqualified, and then roll a die to decide which one you hire.

This would probably make the fit of workers to their jobs somewhat worse than the current system. But most jobs are learned primarily through experience anyway, so once someone has been in a job for a few years it may not matter much who was hired originally. And whatever cost we might pay in less efficient job matches could be made up several times over by the much faster, cheaper, easier, and less stressful process of applying for jobs.

Indeed, think for a moment of how much worse it feels being turned down for a job after a lengthy and costly application process that is designed to assess your merit (but may or may not actually do so particularly well), as opposed to simply finding out that you lost a high-stakes die roll. Employers could even send out letters saying one of two things: “You were rejected as unqualifed for this position.” versus “You were qualified, but you did not have the highest die roll.” Applying for jobs already feels like a crapshoot; maybe it should literally be one.

People would still have to apply for a lot of jobs—actually, they’d probably end up applying for more, because the lower cost of applying would attract more applicants. But since the cost is so much lower, it would still almost certainly be easier to do a job search than it is in the current system. In fact, it could largely be automated: simply post your resume on a central server and the system matches you with employers’ requirements and then randomly generates offers. Employers and prospective employees could fill out a series of forms just once indicating what they were looking for, and then the system could do the rest.

What I find most interesting about this policy idea is that it is in an important sense anti-meritocratic. We are in fact reducing the rewards for high levels of skill—at least a little bit—in order to improve society overall and especially for those with less skill. This is exactly the kind of policy proposal that I had hoped to see from a book like The Meritocracy Trap, but never found there. Perhaps it’s too radical? But the book was all about how we need fundamental, radical change—and then its actual suggestions were simple, obvious, and almost uncontroversial.

Note that this simplified process would not eliminate the incentives to get major, verifiable qualifications like college degrees or years of work experience. In fact, it would focus the incentives so that only those things matter, instead of whatever idiosyncratic or even capricious preferences HR agents might have. There would be no more talk of “culture fit” or “feeling right for the job”, just: “What is their highest degree? How many years have they worked in this industry?” I suppose this is credentialism, but in a world of asymmetric information, I think credentialism may be our only viable alternative to nepotism.

Of course, it’s too late for me. But perhaps future generations may benefit from this wisdom.