fiction

I finally have a published paper.

pnrj personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 12 JDN 2459773

Here it is, my first peer-reviewed publication: “Imperfect Tactic Collusion and Asymmetric Price Transmission”, in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Due to the convention in economics that authors are displayed alphabetically, I am listed third of four, and will be typically collapsed into “Bulutay et. al.”. I don’t actually think it should be “Julius et. al.”; I think Dave Hales did the most important work, and I wanted it to be “Hales et. al.”; but anything non-alphabetical is unusual in economics, and it would have taken a strong justification to convince the others to go along with it. This is a very stupid norm (and I attribute approximately 20% of Daron Acemoglu’s superstar status to it), but like any norm, it is difficult to dislodge.

I thought I would feel different when this day finally came. I thought I would feel joy, or at least satisfaction. I had been hoping that satisfaction would finally spur me forward in resubmitting my single-author paper, “Experimental Public Goods Games with Progressive Taxation”, so I could finally get a publication that actually does have “Julius (2022)” (or, at this rate, 2023, 2024…?). But that motivating satisfaction never came.

I did feel some vague sense of relief: Thank goodness, this ordeal is finally over and I can move on. But that doesn’t have the same motivating force; it doesn’t make me want to go back to the other papers I can now hardly bear to look at.

This reaction (or lack thereof?) could be attributed to circumstances: I have been through a lot lately. I was already overwhelmed by finishing my dissertation and going on the job market, and then there was the pandemic, and I had to postpone my wedding, and then when I finally got a job we had to suddenly move abroad, and then it was awful finding a place to live, and then we actually got married (which was lovely, but still stressful), and it took months to get my medications sorted with the NHS, and then I had a sudden resurgence of migraines which kept me from doing most of my work for weeks, and then I actually caught COVID and had to deal with that for a few weeks too. So it really isn’t too surprising that I’d be exhausted and depressed after all that.

Then again, it could be something deeper. I didn’t feel this way about my wedding. That genuinely gave me the joy and satisfaction that I had been expecting; I think it really was the best day of my life so far. So it isn’t as if I’m incapable of these feelings under my current state.

Rather, I fear that I am becoming more permanently disillusioned with academia. Now that I see how the sausage is made, I am no longer so sure I want to be one of the people making it. Publishing that paper didn’t feel like I had accomplished something, or even made some significant contribution to human knowledge. In fact, the actual work of publication was mostly done by my co-authors, because I was too overwhelmed by the job market at the time. But what I did have to do—and what I’ve tried to do with my own paper—felt like a miserable, exhausting ordeal.

More and more, I’m becoming convinced that a single experiment tells us very little, and we are being asked to present each one as if it were a major achievement when it’s more like a single brick in a wall.

But whatever new knowledge our experiments may have gleaned, that part was done years ago. We could have simply posted the draft as a working paper on the web and moved on, and the world would know just as much and our lives would have been a lot easier.

Oh, but then it would not have the imprimatur of peer review! And for our careers, that means absolutely everything. (Literally, when they’re deciding tenure, nothing else seems to matter.) But for human knowledge, does it really mean much? The more referee reports I’ve read, the more arbitrary they feel to me. This isn’t an objective assessment of scientific merit; it’s the half-baked opinion of a single randomly chosen researcher who may know next to nothing about the topic—or worse, have a vested interest in defending a contrary paradigm.

Yes, of course, what gets through peer review is of considerably higher quality than any randomly-selected content on the Internet. (The latter can be horrifically bad.) But is this not also true of what gets submitted for peer review? In fact, aren’t many blogs written by esteemed economists (say, Krugman? Romer? Nate Silver?) of considerably higher quality as well, despite having virtually none of the gatekeepers? I think Krugman’s blog is nominally edited by the New York Times, and Silver has a whole staff at FiveThirtyEight (they’re hiring, in fact!), but I’m fairly certain Romer just posts whatever he wants like I do. Of course, they had to establish their reputations (Krugman and Romer each won a Nobel). But still, it seems like maybe peer-review isn’t doing the most important work here.

Even blogs by far less famous economists (e.g. Miles Kimball, Brad DeLong) are also very good, and probably contribute more to advancing the knowledge of the average person than any given peer-reviewed paper, simply because they are more readable and more widely read. What we call “research” means going from zero people knowing a thing to maybe a dozen people knowing it; “publishing” means going from a dozen to at most a thousand; to go from a thousand to a billion, we call that “education”.

They all matter, of course; but I think we tend to overvalue research relative to education. A world where a few people know something is really not much better than a world where nobody does, while a world where almost everyone knows something can be radically superior. And the more I see just how far behind the cutting edge of research most economists are—let alone most average people—the more apparent it becomes to me that we are investing far too much in expanding that cutting edge (and far, far too much in gatekeeping who gets to do that!) and not nearly enough in disseminating that knowledge to humanity.

I think maybe that’s why finally publishing a paper felt so anticlimactic for me. I know that hardly anyone will ever actually read the damn thing. Just getting to this point took far more effort than it should have; dozens if not hundreds of hours of work, months of stress and frustration, all to satisfy whatever arbitrary criteria the particular reviewers happened to use so that we could all clear this stupid hurdle and finally get that line on our CVs. (And we wonder why academics are so depressed?) Far from being inspired to do the whole process again, I feel as if I have finally emerged from the torture chamber and may at last get some chance for my wounds to heal.

Even publishing fiction was not this miserable. Don’t get me wrong; it was miserable, especially for me, as I hate and fear rejection to the very core of my being in a way most people do not seem to understand. But there at least the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the process is almost universally acknowledged. Agents and editors don’t speak of your work being “flawed” or “wrong”; they don’t even say it’s “unimportant” or “uninteresting”. They say it’s “not a good fit” or “not what we’re looking for right now”. (Journal editors sometimes make noises like that too, but there’s always a subtext of “If this were better science, we’d have taken it.”) Unlike peer reviewers, they don’t come back with suggestions for “improvements” that are often pointless or utterly infeasible.

And unlike peer reviewers, fiction publishers acknowledge their own subjectivity and that of the market they serve. Nobody really thinks that Fifty Shades of Grey was good in any deep sense; but it was popular and successful, and that’s all the publisher really cares about. As a result, failing to be the next Fifty Shades of Grey ends up stinging a lot less than failing to be the next article in American Economic Review. Indeed, I’ve never had any illusions that my work would be popular among mainstream economists. But I once labored under the belief that it would be more important that it is true; and I guess I now consider that an illusion.

Moreover, fiction writers understand that rejection hurts; I’ve been shocked how few academics actually seem to. Nearly every writing conference I’ve ever been to has at least one seminar on dealing with rejection, often several; at academic conferences, I’ve literally never seen one. There seems to be a completely different mindset among academics—at least, the successful, tenured ones—about the process of peer review, what it means, even how it feels. When I try to talk with my mentors about the pain of getting rejected, they just… don’t get it. They offer me guidance on how to deal with anger at rejection, when that is not at all what I feel—what I feel is utter, hopeless, crushing despair.

There is a type of person who reacts to rejection with anger: Narcissists. (Look no further than the textbook example, Donald Trump.) I am coming to fear that I’m just not narcissistic enough to be a successful academic. I’m not even utterly lacking in narcissism: I am almost exactly average for a Millennial on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I score fairly high on Authority and Superiority (I consider myself a good leader and a highly competent individual) but very low on Exploitativeness and Self-Sufficiency (I don’t like hurting people and I know no man is an island). Then again, maybe I’m just narcissistic in the wrong way: I score quite low on “grandiose narcissism”, but relatively high on “vulnerable narcissism”. I hate to promote myself, but I find rejection devastating. This combination seems to be exactly what doesn’t work in academia. But it seems to be par for the course among writers and poets. Perhaps I have the mind of a scientist, but I have the soul of a poet. (Send me through the wormhole! Please? Please!?)

Selectivity is a terrible measure of quality

pnrj market failure, science and academia , , , , , , , , ,

May 23 JDN 2459358

How do we decide which universities and research journals are the best? There are a vast number of ways we could go about this—and there are in fact many different ranking systems out there, though only a handful are widely used. But one primary criterion which seems to be among the most frequently used is selectivity.

Selectivity is a very simple measure: What proportion of people who try to get in, actually get in? For universities this is admission rates for applicants; for journals it is acceptance rates for submitted papers.

The top-rated journals in economics have acceptance rates of 1-7%. The most prestigious universities have acceptance rates of 4-10%. So a reasonable ballpark is to assume a 95% chance of not getting accepted in either case. Of course, some applicants are more or less qualified, and some papers are more or less publishable; but my guess is that most applicants are qualified and most submitted papers are publishable. So these low acceptance rates mean refusing huge numbers of qualified people.


Selectivity is an objective, numeric score that can be easily generated and compared, and is relatively difficult to fake. This may accouunt for its widespread appeal. And it surely has some correlation with genuine quality: Lots of people are likely to apply to a school because it is good, and lots of people are likely to submit to a journal because it is good.

But look a little bit closer, and it becomes clear that selectivity is really a terrible measure of quality.


One, it is extremely self-fulfilling. Once a school or a journal becomes prestigious, more people will try to get in there, and that will inflate its selectivity rating. Harvard is extremely selective because Harvard is famous and high-rated. Why is Harvard so high-rated? Well, in part because Harvard is extremely selective.

Two, it incentivizes restricting the number of applicants accepted.

Ivy League schools have vast endowments, and could easily afford to expand their capacity, thus employing more faculty and educating more students. But that would require reducing their acceptance rates and hence jeopardizing their precious selectivity ratings. If the goal is to give as many people as possible the highest quality education, then selectivity is a deeply perverse incentive: It specifically incentivizes not educating too many students.

Similarly, most journals include something in their rejection letters about “limited space”, which in the age of all-digital journals is utter nonsense. Journals could choose to publish ten, twenty, fifty times as many papers as they currently do—or half, or a tenth. They could publish everything that gets submitted, or only publish one paper a year. It’s an entirely arbitrary decision with no real constraints. They choose what proportion of papers to publish entirely based primarily on three factors that have absolutely nothing to do with limited space: One, they want to publish enough papers to make it seem like they are putting out regular content; two, they want to make sure they publish anything that will turn out to be a major discovery (though they honestly seem systematically bad at predicting that); and three, they want to publish as few papers as possible within those constraints to maximize their selectivity.

To be clear, I’m not saying that journals should publish everything that gets submitted. Actually I think too many papers already get published—indeed, too many get written. The incentives in academia are to publish as many papers in top journals as possible, rather than to actually do the most rigorous and ground-breaking research. The best research often involves spending long periods of time making very little visible progress, and it does not lend itself to putting out regular publications to impress tenure committees and grant agencies.

The number of scientific papers published each year has grown at about 5% per year since 1900. The number of peer-reviewed journals has grown at an increasing rate, from about 3% per year for most of the 20th century to over 6% now. These are far in excess of population growth, technological advancement, or even GDP growth; this many scientific papers is obviously unsustainable. There are now 300 times as many scientific papers published per year as there were in 1900—while the world population has only increased by about 5-fold during that time. Yes, the number of scientists has also increased—but not that fast. About 8 million people are scientists, publishing an average of 2 million articles per year—one per scientist every four years. But the number of scientist jobs grows at just over 1%—basically tracking population growth or the job market in general. If papers published continue to grow at 5% while the number of scientists increases at 1%, then in 100 years each scientist will have to publish 48 times as many papers as today, or about 1 every month.


So the problem with research journals isn’t so much that journals aren’t accepting enough papers, as that too many people are submitting papers. Of course the real problem is that universities have outsourced their hiring decisions to journal editors. Rather than actually evaluating whether someone is a good teacher or a good researcher (or accepting that they can’t and hiring randomly), universities have trusted in the arbitrary decisions of research journals to decide whom they should hire.

But selectivity as a measure of quality means that journals have no reason not to support this system; they get their prestige precisely from the fact that scientists are so pressured to publish papers. The more papers get submitted, the better the journals look for rejecting them.

Another way of looking at all this is to think about what the process of acceptance or rejection entails. It is inherently a process of asymmetric information.

If we had perfect information, what would the acceptance rate of any school or journal be? 100%, regardless of quality. Only the applicants who knew they would get accepted would apply. So the total number of admitted students and accepted papers would be exactly the same, but all the acceptance rates would rise to 100%.

Perhaps that’s not realistic; but what if the application criteria were stricter? For instance, instead of asking you your GPA and SAT score, Harvard’s form could simply say: “Anyone with a GPA less than 4.0 or an SAT score less than 1500 need not apply.” That’s practically true anyway. But Harvard doesn’t have an incentive to say it out loud, because then applicants who know they can’t meet that standard won’t bother applying, and Harvard’s precious selectivity number will go down. (These are far from sufficient, by the way; I was valedictorian and had a 1590 on my SAT and still didn’t get in.)

There are other criteria they’d probably be even less willing to emphasize, but are no less significant: “If your family income is $20,000 or less, there is a 95% chance we won’t accept you.” “Other things equal, your odds of getting in are much better if you’re Black than if you’re Asian.”

For journals it might be more difficult to express the criteria clearly, but they could certainly do more than they do. Journals could more strictly delineate what kind of papers they publish: This one only for pure theory, that one only for empirical data, this one only for experimental results. They could choose more specific content niches rather than literally dozens of journals all being ostensibly about “economics in general” (the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, the European Economic Review, the International Economic Review, Economic Inquiry… these are just the most prestigious). No doubt there would still have to be some sort of submission process and some rejections—but if they really wanted to reduce the number of submissions they could easily do so. The fact is, they want to have a large number of submissions that they can reject.

What this means is that rather than being a measure of quality, selectivity is primarily a measure of opaque criteria. It’s possible to imagine a world where nearly every school and every journal accept less than 1% of applicants; this would occur if the criteria for acceptance were simply utterly unknown and everyone had to try hundreds of places before getting accepted.


Indeed, that’s not too dissimilar to how things currently work in the job market or the fiction publishing market. The average job opening receives a staggering 250 applications. In a given year, a typical literary agent receives 5000 submissions and accepts 10 clients—so about one in every 500.

For fiction writing I find this somewhat forgivable, if regrettable; the quality of a novel is a very difficult thing to assess, and to a large degree inherently subjective. I honestly have no idea what sort of submission guidelines one could put on an agency page to explain to authors what distinguishes a good novel from a bad one (or, not quite the same thing, a successful one from an unsuccessful one).

Indeed, it’s all the worse because a substantial proportion of authors don’t even follow the guidelines that they do include! The most common complaint I hear from agents and editors at writing conferences is authors not following their submission guidelines—such basic problems as submitting content from the wrong genre, not formatting it correctly, having really egregious grammatical errors. Quite frankly I wish they’d shut up about it, because I wanted to hear what would actually improve my chances of getting published, not listen to them rant about the thousands of people who can’t bother to follow directions. (And I’m pretty sure that those people aren’t likely to go to writing conferences and listen to agents give panel discussions.)

But for the job market? It’s really not that hard to tell who is qualified for most jobs. If it isn’t something highly specialized, most people could probably do it, perhaps with a bit of training. If it is something highly specialized, you can restrict your search to people who already have the relevant education or training. In any case, having experience in that industry is obviously a plus. Beyond that, it gets much harder to assess quality—but also much less necessary. Basically anyone with an advanced degree in the relevant subject or a few years of experience at that job will probably do fine, and you’re wasting effort by trying to narrow the field further. If it is very hard to tell which candidate is better, that usually means that the candidates really aren’t that different.

To my knowledge, not a lot of employers or fiction publishers pride themselves on their selectivity. Indeed, many fiction publishers have a policy of simply refusing unsolicited submissions, relying upon literary agents to pre-filter their submissions for them. (Indeed, even many agents refuse unsolicited submissions—which raises the question: What is a debut author supposed to do?) This is good, for if they did—if Penguin Random House (or whatever that ludicrous all-absorbing conglomerate is calling itself these days; ah, what was it like in that bygone era, when anti-trust enforcement was actually a thing?) decided to start priding itself on its selectivity of 0.05% or whatever—then the already massively congested fiction industry would probably grind to a complete halt.

This means that by ranking schools and journals based on their selectivity, we are partly incentivizing quality, but mostly incentivizing opacity. The primary incentive is for them to attract as many applicants as possible, even knowing full well that they will reject most of these applicants. They don’t want to be too clear about what they will accept or reject, because that might discourage unqualified applicants from trying and thus reduce their selectivity rate. In terms of overall welfare, every rejected application is wasted human effort—but in terms of the institution’s selectivity rating, it’s a point in their favor.

Social construction is not fact—and it is not fiction

pnrj core principles , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 30, JDN 2457965

With the possible exception of politically-charged issues (especially lately in the US), most people are fairly good at distinguishing between true and false, fact and fiction. But there are certain types of ideas that can’t be neatly categorized into fact versus fiction.

First, there are subjective feelings. You can feel angry, or afraid, or sad—and really, truly feel that way—despite having no objective basis for the emotion coming from the external world. Such emotions are usually irrational, but even knowing that doesn’t make them automatically disappear. Distinguishing subjective feelings from objective facts is simple in principle, but often difficult in practice: A great many things simply “feel true” despite being utterly false. (Ask an average American which is more likely to kill them, a terrorist or the car in their garage; I bet quite a few will get the wrong answer. Indeed, if you ask them whether they’re more likely to be shot by someone else or to shoot themselves, almost literally every gun owner is going to get that answer wrong—or they wouldn’t be gun owners.)

The one I really want to focus on today is social constructions. This is a term that has been so thoroughly overused and abused by postmodernist academics (“science is a social construction”, “love is a social construction”, “math is a social construction”, “sex is a social construction”, etc.) that it has almost lost its meaning. Indeed, many people now react with automatic aversion to the term; upon hearing it, they immediately assume—understandably—that whatever is about to follow is nonsense.

But there is actually a very important core meaning to the term “social construction” that we stand to lose if we throw it away entirely. A social construction is something that exists only because we all believe in it.

Every part of that definition is important:

First, a social construction is something that exists: It’s really there, objectively. If you think it doesn’t exist, you’re wrong. It even has objective properties; you can be right or wrong in your beliefs about it, even once you agree that it exists.

Second, a social construction only exists because we all believe in it: If everyone in the world suddenly stopped believing in it, like Tinker Bell it would wink out of existence. The “we all” is important as well; a social construction doesn’t exist simply because one person, or a few people, believe in it—it requires a certain critical mass of society to believe in it. Of course, almost nothing is literally believed by everyone, so it’s more that a social construction exists insofar as people believe in it—and thus can attain a weaker or stronger kind of existence as beliefs change.

The combination of these two features makes social constructions a very weird sort of entity. They aren’t merely subjective beliefs; you can’t be wrong about what you are feeling right now (though you can certainly lie about it), but you can definitely be wrong about the social constructions of your society. But we can’t all be wrong about the social constructions of our society; once enough of our society stops believing in them, they will no longer exist. And when we have conflict over a social construction, its existence can become weaker or stronger—indeed, it can exist to some of us but not to others.

If all this sounds very bizarre and reminds you of postmodernist nonsense that might come from the Wisdom of Chopra randomizer, allow me to provide a concrete and indisputable example of a social construction that is vitally important to economics: Money.

The US dollar is a social construction. It has all sorts of well-defined objective properties, from its purchasing power in the market to its exchange rate with other currencies (also all social constructions). The markets in which it is spent are social constructions. The laws which regulate those markets are social constructions. The government which makes those laws is a social construction.

But it is not social constructions all the way down. The paper upon which the dollar was printed is a physical object with objective factual existence. It is an artifact—it was made by humans, and wouldn’t exist if we didn’t—but now that we’ve made it, it exists and would continue to exist regardless of whether we believe in it or even whether we continue to exist. The cotton from which it was made is also partly artificial, bred over centuries from a lifeform that evolved over millions of years. But the carbon atoms inside that cotton were made in a star, and that star existed and fused its carbon billions of years before any life on Earth existed, much less humans in particular. This is why the statements “math is a social construction” and “science is a social construction” are so ridiculous. Okay, sure, the institutions of science and mathematics are social constructions, but that’s trivial; nobody would dispute that, and it’s not terribly interesting. (What, you mean if everyone stopped going to MIT, there would be no MIT!?) The truths of science and mathematics were true long before we were even here—indeed, the fundamental truths of mathematics could not have failed to be true in any possible universe.

But the US dollar did not exist before human beings created it, and unlike the physical paper, the purchasing power of that dollar (which is, after all, mainly what we care about) is entirely socially constructed. If everyone in the world suddenly stopped accepting US dollars as money, the US dollar would cease to be money. If even a few million people in the US suddenly stopped accepting dollars, its value would become much more precarious, and inflation would be sure to follow.

Nor is this simply because the US dollar is a fiat currency. That makes it more obvious, to be sure; a fiat currency attains its value solely through social construction, as its physical object has negligible value. But even when we were on the gold standard, our currency was representative; the paper itself was still equally worthless. If you wanted gold, you’d have to exchange for it; and that process of exchange is entirely social construction.

And what about gold coins, one of the oldest form of money? There now the physical object might actually be useful for something, but not all that much. It’s shiny, you can make jewelry out of it, it doesn’t corrode, it can be used to replace lost teeth, it has anti-inflammatory properties—and millennia later we found out that its dense nucleus is useful for particle accelerator experiments and it is a very reliable electrical conductor useful for making microchips. But all in all, gold is really not that useful. If gold were priced based on its true usefulness, it would be extraordinarily cheap; cheaper than water, for sure, as it’s much less useful than water. Yet very few cultures have ever used water as currency (though some have used salt). Thus, most of the value of gold is itself socially constructed; you value gold not to use it, but to impress other people with the fact that you own it (or indeed to sell it to them). Stranded alone on a desert island, you’d do anything for fresh water, but gold means nothing to you. And a gold coin actually takes on additional socially-constructed value; gold coins almost always had seignorage, additional value the government received from minting them over and above the market price of the gold itself.

Economics, in fact, is largely about social constructions; or rather I should say it’s about the process of producing and distributing artifacts by means of social constructions. Artifacts like houses, cars, computers, and toasters; social constructions like money, bonds, deeds, policies, rights, corporations, and governments. Of course, there are also services, which are not quite artifacts since they stop existing when we stop doing them—though, crucially, not when we stop believing in them; your waiter still delivered your lunch even if you persist in the delusion that the lunch is not there. And there are natural resources, which existed before us (and may or may not exist after us). But these are corner cases; mostly economics is about using laws and money to distribute goods, which means using social constructions to distribute artifacts.

Other very important social constructions include race and gender. Not melanin and sex, mind you; human beings have real, biological variation in skin tone and body shape. But the concept of a race—especially the race categories we ordinarily use—is socially constructed. Nothing biological forced us to regard Kenyan and Burkinabe as the same “race” while Ainu and Navajo are different “races”; indeed, the genetic data is screaming at us in the opposite direction. Humans are sexually dimorphic, with some rare exceptions (only about 0.02% of people are intersex; about 0.3% are transgender; and no more than 5% have sex chromosome abnormalities). But the much thicker concept of gender that comes with a whole system of norms and attitudes is all socially constructed.

It’s one thing to say that perhaps males are, on average, more genetically predisposed to be systematizers than females, and thus men are more attracted to engineering and women to nursing. That could, in fact, be true, though the evidence remains quite weak. It’s quite another to say that women must not be engineers, even if they want to be, and men must not be nurses—yet the latter was, until very recently, the quite explicit and enforced norm. Standards of clothing are even more obviously socially-constructed; in Western cultures (except the Celts, for some reason), flared garments are “dresses” and hence “feminine”; in East Asian cultures, flared garments such as kimono are gender-neutral, and gender is instead expressed through clothing by subtler aspects such as being fastened on the left instead of the right. In a thousand different ways, we mark our gender by what we wear, how we speak, even how we walk—and what’s more, we enforce those gender markings. It’s not simply that males typically speak in lower pitches (which does actually have a biological basis); it’s that males who speak in higher pitches are seen as less of a man, and that is a bad thing. We have a very strict hierarchy, which is imposed in almost every culture: It is best to be a man, worse to be a woman who acts like a woman, worse still to be a woman who acts like a man, and worst of all to be a man who acts like a woman. What it means to “act like a man” or “act like a woman” varies substantially; but the core hierarchy persists.

Social constructions like these ones are in fact some of the most important things in our lives. Human beings are uniquely social animals, and we define our meaning and purpose in life largely through social constructions.

It can be tempting, therefore, to be cynical about this, and say that our lives are built around what is not real—that is, fiction. But while this may be true for religious fanatics who honestly believe that some supernatural being will reward them for their acts of devotion, it is not a fair or accurate description of someone who makes comparable sacrifices for “the United States” or “free speech” or “liberty”. These are social constructions, not fictions. They really do exist. Indeed, it is only because we are willing to make sacrifices to maintain them that they continue to exist. Free speech isn’t maintained by us saying things we want to say; it is maintained by us allowing other people to say things we don’t want to hear. Liberty is not protected by us doing whatever we feel like, but by not doing things we would be tempted to do that impose upon other people’s freedom. If in our cynicism we act as though these things are fictions, they may soon become so.

But it would be a lot easier to get this across to people, I think, if folks would stop saying idiotic things like “science is a social construction”.

Games as economic simulations—and education tools

pnrj cognitive science, development economics, futurism, macroeconomics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 5, JDN 2457818 [Sun]

Moore’s Law is a truly astonishing phenomenon. Now as we are well into the 21st century (I’ve lived more of my life in the 21st century than the 20th now!) it may finally be slowing down a little bit, but it has had quite a run, and even this could be a temporary slowdown due to economic conditions or the lull before a new paradigm (quantum computing?) matures. Since at least 1975, the computing power of an individual processor has doubled approximately every year and a half; that means it has doubled over 25 times—or in other words that it has increased by a factor of over 30 million. I now have in my pocket a smartphone with several thousand times the processing speed of the guidance computer of the Saturn V that landed on the Moon.

This meteoric increase in computing power has had an enormous impact on the way science is done, including economics. Simple theoretical models that could be solved by hand are now being replaced by enormous simulation models that have to be processed by computers. It is now commonplace to devise models with systems of dozens of nonlinear equations that are literally impossible to solve analytically, and just solve them iteratively with computer software.

But one application of this technology that I believe is currently underutilized is video games.

As a culture, we still have the impression that video games are for children; even games like Dragon Age and Grand Theft Auto that are explicitly for adults (and really quite inappropriate for children!) are viewed as in some sense “childish”—that no serious adult would be involved with such frivolities. The same cultural critics who treat Shakespeare’s vagina jokes as the highest form of art are liable to dismiss the poignant critique of war in Call of Duty: Black Ops or the reflections on cultural diversity in Skyrim as mere puerility.

But video games are an art form with a fundamentally greater potential than any other. Now that graphics are almost photorealistic, there is really nothing you can do in a play or a film that you can’t do in a video game—and there is so, so much more that you can only do in a game.
In what other medium can we witness the spontaneous emergence and costly aftermath of a war? Yet EVE Online has this sort of event every year or so—just today there was a surprise attack involving hundreds of players that destroyed thousands of hours’—and dollars’—worth of starships, something that has more or less become an annual tradition. A few years ago there was a massive three-faction war that destroyed over $300,000 in ships and has now been commemorated as “the Bloodbath of B-R5RB”.
Indeed, the immersion and interactivity of games present an opportunity to do nothing less than experimental macroeconomics. For generations it has been impossible, or at least absurdly unethical, to ever experimentally manipulate an entire macroeconomy. But in a video game like EVE Online or Second Life, we can now do so easily, cheaply, and with little or no long-term harm to the participants—and we can literally control everything in the experiment. Forget the natural resource constraints and currency exchange rates—we can change the laws of physics if we want. (Indeed, EVE‘s whole trade network is built around FTL jump points, and in Second Life it’s a basic part of the interface that everyone can fly like Superman.)

This provides untold potential for economic research. With sufficient funding, we could build a game that would allow us to directly test hypotheses about the most fundamental questions of economics: How do governments emerge and maintain security? How is the rule of law sustained, and when can it be broken? What controls the value of money and the rate of inflation? What is the fundamental cause of unemployment, and how can it be corrected? What influences the rate of technological development? How can we maximize the rate of economic growth? What effect does redistribution of wealth have on employment and output? I envision a future where we can directly simulate these questions with thousands of eager participants, varying the subtlest of parameters and carrying out events over any timescale we like from seconds to centuries.

Nor is the potential of games in economics limited to research; it also has enormous untapped potential in education. I’ve already seen in my classes how tabletop-style games with poker chips can teach a concept better in a few minutes than hours of writing algebra derivations on the board; but custom-built video games could be made that would teach economics far better still, and to a much wider audience. In a well-designed game, people could really feel the effects of free trade or protectionism, not just on themselves as individuals but on entire nations that they control—watch their GDP numbers go down as they scramble to produce in autarky what they could have bought for half the price if not for the tariffs. They could see, in real time, how in the absence of environmental regulations and Pigovian taxes the actions of millions of individuals could despoil our planet for everyone.

Of course, games are fundamentally works of fiction, subject to the Fictional Evidence Fallacy and only as reliable as their authors make them. But so it is with all forms of art. I have no illusions about the fact that we will never get the majority of the population to regularly read peer-reviewed empirical papers. But perhaps if we are clever enough in the games we offer them to play, we can still convey some of the knowledge that those papers contain. We could also update and expand the games as new information comes in. Instead of complaining that our students are spending time playing games on their phones and tablets, we could actually make education into games that are as interesting and entertaining as the ones they would have been playing. We could work with the technology instead of against it. And in a world where more people have access to a smartphone than to a toilet, we could finally bring high-quality education to the underdeveloped world quickly and cheaply.

Rapid growth in computing power has given us a gift of great potential. But soon our capacity will widen even further. Even if Moore’s Law slows down, computing power will continue to increase for awhile yet. Soon enough, virtual reality will finally take off and we’ll have even greater depth of immersion available. The future is bright—if we can avoid this corporatist cyberpunk dystopia we seem to be hurtling toward, of course.