Category Archives: Culture

The Value of IR to the Citizen

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Steve Saideman recently blogged about how he conceived of his teaching mission, when teaching undergraduates: adding to an informed citizenry. This is is a noble endeavor.

It is precisely the need to be a better informed citizen that sent me on a now an 8 year journey towards a change of career, all inspired by Charles Hill’s excerpt from Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order in the Review Section of the Wall Street Journal.

After reading that article, I realized I was too ignorant to be an effective citizen of the republic in matters of war and peace and trade. And after learning he taught in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a non-degree program for training diplomats and would-be heads of state, a quick Google search yielded the syllabus for the program and I began to read.

The intellectual joy in studying the grand themes of the literature in IR had me thinking about a career change, which meant collecting a credential. Thus, I landed at Troy University for a masters degree and now University of Leicester for a PhD. My research interest, peacekeeping and civil war, came out of two courses at Troy. One on international organizations, a requirement, and one on Sub Saharan Africa.

I whole-heartedly agree with the value of undergraduate education in international relations, I wish I had been forced to take IR as part of breadth requirements as an undergraduate. UCSB at the time required a US government course in Political Science, but nothing dealing with relations among states.

Digression: If I had one criticism of the Brady-Johnson Program, it is that the syllabus I read from was too heavy on the diplomatic history approach and too light on theories. What I found most useful at Troy were the introductory course and the required ‘theory and ideology’ course, which prepared us for the exit exam. Those two courses gave me a large toolbox with which to conceptualize a given issue. (International political economy was less useful, mainly because I already had a background in micro and macro economics, accounting, finance, trade, supply chain management, and banking from an MBA. Although, I did appreciate the way the professor stressed the contradictions built into canonical developmental economics and the consequences for individual liberty in the standard policy prescriptions–i.e., Easterly’s critique.)

Diplomatic history is useful for context, but in the hands of policy maker–exactly whom they are training–it can lead to dangerous facile analogies. This is not to say that a policy maker needs Theory with a capital T, which is mostly useless academic abstraction, but an understanding of the claims of realism, liberalism, constructivism–although that ‘magic idea wand’ (Snyder 2002) can be rather dangerous in the hands of policy maker–will provide ways of conceptualizing issues.

Digression 2: The Brady-Johnson Program syllabus did include a book that became one of the most influential on my own thought: Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which included a really helpful typology for understanding American foreign policy.

Higher Education for the Mid Career Professional

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Earning three masters degrees and a graduate certificate in four different subjects and currently completing a PhD as a mid career professional, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best way to deal with the very real phenomenon of credential inflation.  At some point in your career you will likely be faced with one of two issues: (1) a particular credential is needed for career advancement (e.g., an MBA) or (2) a desire or need to change careers (e.g., you want to start teaching in higher education or technological change has wiped out the industry you are in).  How do you go about getting the required credential and retraining/education while still employed?

Fortunately there are lots of options: night and weekend programs, MOOCs, online degree programs, blended programs.  Assuming that you are paying for education and not your employer there are some things to consider.

First, higher ed is expensive.  From a pure accounting perspective, does the net present value (NPV) of future cashflows justify the cash spent on the education?  This raises the issue of prestige.  Prestigious degrees are expensive.  If you’re looking at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, it is likely that the NPV is negative.  As a mid career professional, you are unlikely to see large enough increases in salary to justify spending $100,000-$200,000 for a masters degree.  Your payback period may be longer than the length of your career still ahead of you.  If you are merely acquiring a required credential, skip the prestige if you are footing the bill.  If a career change is in order, then prestige may be valuable in opening doors, but realize that the you will never get the return on investment in accounting terms, only in increased social status due to the prestigious qualification.  You can impress people with that Harvard sheepskin on the wall.

Second, will you learn something?  As I discovered in my own sojourn through higher ed, price does not equate to quality.  Of every university I have attended–University of California, Santa Barbara (BA), Gratz College (MA), Diablo Valley College (business school prerequisites), Oxford University Extension (archaeology classes for fun), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (MBA), Regent University (Certificate in New Testament, mainly to learn Koine Greek), Troy University (MS), and University of Leicester (PhD in progress)–the best education I received was at Troy University, a big state school in Montgomery Alabama whose mission is mainly teaching.  The training I received in International Relations there was top notch.  The strongest parts were the training in theories of international relations and in research methods, which are crucial for later success at the PhD level.  Second place has to go to the junior college on the list, Diablo Valley College.  Because DVC’s mission is teaching not research, the faculty are truly invested in student success.

Third, study what you don’t know.  This was advice I received from Rick Kreysar, former US professional soccer player and senior executive at Computer Associates.  Since I was getting my MBA as a required credential for advancement (or even a lateral move since at my level computerized resume screens weed out candidates without one), he suggested that study something I didn’t already know.  It was great advice.  I spent a decade in IT, sales and marketing.  Instead of studying sales and marketing, I studied finance for my MBA.  It gave me tools to (a) stop paying for financial advice, (b) increase risk adjusted returns of my retirement plan, and (c) taught me mathematical tools I apply regularly in my current role outside of finance.

So you need to learn something and do it on the cheap, how do you succeed?  Start with a self assessment.  Have you been out of school a really long time?  Academic work can be challenging at first.  Consider baby steps at a junior college.  I remember utterly flaming out on my first research paper at Gratz College because I was so inexperienced at ‘playing the game’ after 10 years out of school.  Are you a self starter or do you need to be coached and/or prodded to do things?  Distance education, MOOCs, and the UK tutorial system, require you to be very self-disciplined.  Do the reading, get the work done, stick to a schedule.  I frankly sucked at this as a 18-22 year old undergraduate, but was absolutely able to be disciplined as a 35 year old.  

A word about MOOCs: MOOCs open up education to the masses at a very low cost, but I personally found that the very low cost is an impediment to finishing.  The penalty for blowing off a class and not completing is low.  You’ve gotta really want it and not be easily distracted by life (work and family obligations especially).  It is hard to tell your spouse or kids you can’t do something because you have to study, when that class was $30 and not $1500.  That is at least my $0.02 on the subject.

My General Advice on choosing a distance program

Comparison shop.  Higher education is expensive, but you can find bargains.  Many big state schools in the Midwest and South offer in-state or discounted tuition for out-of-state students.

Choose a school people will have heard of.  To an extent reputation matters.  When I was looking at MBA programs, I narrowed my list of schools according to budget and eliminated schools that nobody has heard of.  For example, if all else being equal you’ve got a short list of a small liberal arts college, a directional school (universities with North, South, East, or West in the name) and a big school people have heard of, choose the bigger name.  It helps with the job applications, casual conversations and leveraging an alumni network.

I am a huge fan of accelerated programs.  Programs that cram 15 weeks of material into 9 or 10 weeks are a boon for somebody who works.  They will kill you on the reading and research papers are stressful due to time constraints, but I found that the drawbacks are more than offset by the benefits including: making progress while taking one class at the same time, which aids focus; fewer discussion board postings/problem sets per term; if the class sucks, you’re stuck with it for 33% less time.  I found that by going to school year round, it was easier to stay on the tread mill and finish.  Both Troy and Nebraska were accelerated: Troy 5 semester terms per year, Nebraska had 4 semester terms per year.

Accreditation matters.  Make sure any university in the US has regional accreditation if going for an MA or MS.  There are degree mills that prey on uninformed consumers.  Furthermore, avoid any MBA program that is not AACSB accredited.  Internationally, it isn’t a real MBA unless it is AACSB accredited.  Those schools offering one under their standard regional education are not conferring a real MBA.  It is the same deal with unaccredited law schools, by the way.  If it is not ABA accredited, you just wasted your money.

International programs

International education is fraught with peril but can be tremendously rewarding.  I did some exploration here, and for a US resident there are some gotchas.  First, while every nation has its own standards for accreditation, for a US resident, you should always consult the list of foreign schools eligible for student loans from the US Department of Education.  A qualification from a school on the list is likely to be considered a real qualification, when it comes time to evaluate it.  Most large US employers and all education institutions will use a transcript service to scrutinize your education to see if it meets the standard of the degree claimed.  You won’t have much trouble with degrees from the developed world, but you may with degrees from the Third World.  Furthermore, professional societies may have additional hoops to jump through for licensure.  Take law as an example.  In the United States you will take a 4 year undergraduate degree, then go to 3 years of law school, and sit for your state BAR exam.  In the UK, however, a law degree is an undergraduate qualification.  Plus you will still need to learn US law by completing an LLM degree in the US to learn US law before you sit for the BAR exam.  (Hint: this may be the cheaper and shorter option.)

Transfer from one system to another can also be almost impossible.  In the UK for example, for a bachelors degree there isn’t the US equivalent of general education requirements.  BA degrees are 3 year degrees in your field, not 4 years with half your course work outside your major area as in the US.  You study a subject for three years at two different levels, roughly equivalent to US lower division and upper division course work.  The actual number of modules studied is much lower since the modules themselves are much bigger in scope.  Thus transfer is almost impossible without either substantial bureaucratic hassles or almost starting over with a qualification or testing out of stuff with CLEP tests.

The way education is conducted is also very different.  It is a culture shock going from the US system to the UK system.  The first shock is that the quantity of work produced is much lower.  For example, in the US, written assignments have minimum word counts, in the UK, they have maximum word counts.  In the US prolixity is rewarded, but in the UK it is punished.  I actually found it very difficult to scale down arguments to fit the word counts.    There are also fewer assignments.  A typical module may have one seen and one unseen paper of less than 5,000 words.  Contrast that with a typical course in International Relations at Troy that had 2 or 3 seen papers of 7,500 words or more plus weekly question responses of 400 words or more.  Frankly, I am thankful that International Relations at Troy had an arduous exit exam process, because it prepared me for the type of unseen papers I would encounter in the UK.

Also, the UK makes a big distinction between research degrees and taught degrees.  Graduate school in the US has very different aims.  An MA or MS in the US is taught degree.  You do a bunch of course work, at least 30 semester units of it, and then do a small research project or, in the case of some MS degrees, more coursework and maybe an exit exam.  An MPhil is a research degree.  You are learning how to do research and along the way mastering the basics of a field.  It is a very different concept.  Think of the US and the Henry Ford model of graduate education and the UK as offering an artisanal model of higher education.  If you need structure, look to the US.  If you want freedom, look to the UK.

PhDs

The PhD is the way you enter the higher education guild and is also a required credential for some fields–e.g., policy work in Washington D.C. pretty much requires a PhD, working as a research scientist in industry requires a PhD.  Here is where reputation matters.  If you want to be a professor at a tier 1 research university your chances of being hired into a tenure track position is much greater with a prestigious degree (Ivy League, a ‘public Ivy’, Stanford, or Oxford/Cambridge).  For jobs in industry, what your research was and who you did it under is more important than reputation.

The PhD means you will most likely have to quit your job, although there are a small set of programs, mainly in professions like business and psychology, that are part-time.  Furthermore, there are more and more part time programs in the humanities and social sciences being launched in order to attract enrollment, even at really good schools.

I am currently doing a part-time low residency PhD in Politics and International Relations at University of Leicester in the UK, which was one of four programs in International Relations that I found: Manchester Metropolitan University, Birmingham, Leicester, and King’s College London.  King’s College London was my first choice because they have a famous expert in international peacekeeping, Mats Berdal, whom I wanted as my supervisor, but he was full up with students.  Because you are admitted on the strength of the research proposal in the UK (see below), you can get into disputes over relevant literature and methods (which nixed MMU).  That left Birmingham and Leicester.  Leicester was more eager to have me.  

The PhD is very, very, very different in the US and the UK.  In the UK, they are minting a person who knows how to do a substantive and original piece of research, full stop.  In the US, they are certifying you as an expert in the field, who also knows how to do research, hence 90 additional semester units of course work and comprehensive exams are required before you can even think of starting your research (essentially you will be doing two+ masters degrees worth of coursework before doing research).  Admission in the UK is based primarily on the strength of a research proposal and whether they have resources to supervise your research.  If you plan on returning to the US to work in US higher education, you will be more heavily scrutinized, because of the difference in the qualifications.  A UK PhD is generally looked down upon in the US, partly due to cultural factors–you haven’t ‘paid your dues’ in suffering through the sadistic US system–and partly because there is suspicion that you haven’t mastered your field.  

Let’s assume that already hold a masters degree or two.  In the US, you will likely not be able to transfer units from other schools (the reason cited will be ‘we issue {Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, …} degrees here’), you will suffer through 3-4 additional years of coursework on top of what you have already done, sit for your comprehensive exams, then they will look for supervision for you in the department with no guarantee of continuing (it being contingent on their being space in a lab for you or a supervisor available; I know more than one person who got to this point and exited with an MPhil or MA because there was no supervision or lab available).  You write your research proposal and only then start your research.  Tack on a couple more years at a minimum for research and writing and you are finally done.  Except perhaps in Mathematics where the dissertation is usually short, this is a Bataan death march, doubly so in the humanities.  I remember having teaching assistants in classes at UCSB having already spent 7-8 years and weren’t done yet.

Contrast that with the UK: gain admission, which be definition means they have supervision for you and you have a decent research proposal; you take whatever modules you need to be able to be successful in your research, which at a minimum is a required research training module and required research ethics training (I’ve not had to register for modules beyond the required due to my own background and mainly do short seminars in skills I need); go before an internal review board after a year or two to show your progress to date and a finalized research proposal; they either accept is as worthy of a PhD and can be completed in a timely fashion or not.  Then you are advanced to do your research, you do it, write it up and an outside examination committee reviews the dissertation, examines you orally (the feared viva), and decides whether to confer the degree.  (External examiners are also a big difference between the US and UK systems.  It is how they ensure quality in the UK.)  You are done much faster with less pain, assuming you have quality supervision.  But you’ve got to be confident that you can work in this less structured environment to complete it.  

I chose the UK route because I already held 3 masters degrees and wasn’t going to waste time with the equivalent of 2 more, I was over 40, and needed a required credential for policy wonk work.  (Dream job is at RAND Corporation.)  There is a ton of unacknowledged age discrimination in the US.  US programs don’t want people past their 30s and certainly nobody who would be 50 when finished.  It makes sense from the perspective of the  guild because they will be investing resources in minting a new member of the higher education guild.  They want to make sure that you have a lot of time left in the guild before retirement, at least 30 years.  I did not encounter any of that in applications in the UK.  UC Berkeley and Stanford on the other hand–as they say in New York fuhgettaboutit.

I also lucked out in my supervision.  My supervisor himself is a non-traditional student who came back to higher ed mid career in order to make a career change and got his PhD in his 40s.  Since I am not trying to get a tenure track position in the US after graduation, I am less concerned about how a UK PhD is viewed.  Be advised, if you go the UK route and you are looking for a tenure track position in the US, I suggest you stick with Oxford/Cambridge due to reputation concerns, make sure you also teach undergraduate modules, network heavily in professional societies, and publish, publish, publish.  You’ll get interviews based on your reputation not the school’s.

Check back in with me at the end of 2020 to see how my UK PhD experience went at the end of the journey.

Forming an Informed Opinion on an Issue

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There has been a lot of research on the way mass opinion is formed.  The research typically falls into two buckets: (1) diffusion models where opinion makers (elites) set informed opinion, which diffuses through the populace based on its persuasiveness and how supported the opinion is, and (2) interaction models where people hold independent opinions with varying levels of confidence, which are either reinforced or changed based on interactions with others.

There are variations on these two models that explore details, for example, the role of extremist views and clustering of like-minded people into opinion ghettoes.  There is a growing body of work on the impact of Internet social networks on the process of opinion formation.

At root, this research is all about how to influence public opinion.  It is instrumental.  How can I, as an elite, leverage the process to achieve my political ends?

I would like to take a slightly different take on this.  Why is it so many would-be opinion makers fail to do their homework and make so many errors of fact?  Members of the media are theoretically supposed to do the homework before reporting, yet, errors creep in all the time.  Is the error willful, laziness, the effects of time pressure, shrinking editorial resources, inability to detect “Astroturfing,” or that the Internet has made us stupid?

Willful Errors

An opinion maker (or informed agent who transmits information) willfully spread falsehoods or exaggerations in order to achieve some higher goal. Gun control is an issue area beset with claims on both sides that are factually inaccurate and uses ad hominem as a rhetorical technique.

Laziness

Presented with an issue, we formulate an opinion of that issue based on a combination of prior learning (stored knowledge) and through a process of categorization according to temperament and experience. The process is short circuited and we immediately “jump to a conclusion” in this model. It leads to error, because no effort was expended in investigation.

Time Pressure

In a 24-hour news cycle at Internet speed, opinion makers and informed agents in media operate under extreme time pressure which produces the same effect as laziness, although, not because the agent refuses to expend the time and energy in investigation, but because there isn’t time to do the investigation. The net effect is the same, bad information.

Shrinking Editorial Resources

I see this in my local paper. Basic errors that should have been caught by editors slip through to the printed page, and unlike the Web page, a printed paper cannot be corrected after the fact.

Inability to Detect Astroturfing

Organizations with agendas have weaponized the research on mass opinion formation and are very, very good at manufacturing opinion in a given issue area. This process is called Astroturfing (as opposed to authentic grass roots movements). Detection of Astroturfing is difficult. There are a few strategies, like hearing the same vocabulary from multiple sources, the use of ad hominem (attacking the characteristics of the opponent), and genetic arguments (attacking the source of the argument). The way Astroturfing works is to make an opinion seem more widespread, and therefore more influential, than it is. Make it seem to be generally held common sense and people will be more persuaded.

The Internet Makes Us Stupid

The Internet is a tremendous store of data and information. The Millennials and the iGen are the first to have grown up with instant access to huge stores of information available at a key stroke. Acquisition of knowledge requires effort. Reading at that level is work. Since there is so much information available for recall, it is merely practical that a person would just use Google as memory. The problem with this approach is that in the process of knowledge acquisition, a person learns a set of skills to evaluate information presented: such as logic and rhetoric for fallacy detection, synthesis through typologies and analogies, use of statistics, and experimental design.  Without the effort expended in knowledge acquisition a person is crippled in the ability to form informed opinion, and temperament takes over.

In an ideal world, a person presented with an issue would first search his/her existing store of knowledge and, having a motivation to learn, would conduct a search of existing information, filter that information based on the merits, while using the meta-self (self-criticism) to assess personal bias, coming to an informed conclusion.

Instead what seems to happen is one of two methods:

First, when presented with an issue, a person searches the existing store of knowledge, finding none, merely formulates an uninformed opinion or accepts an argument from authority as long as it conforms with the person’s temperament.

Or there may be a failure to apply a bias failure if there is indeed a desire to learn.

In this era of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” Astroturfing, and opinion ghettoes, how can we as a citizenry address this problem? Do the work is one. For example, it has been reliably shown that handwriting notes is superior to typing.  Learn how to read a book.  Bring back the study of rhetoric.  Second, be curious and skeptical, but temper skepticism with common sense. Radical skepticism, the root of academic schools of thought labeled Critical and Theory, with a capital C or T, does not lead to knowledge but destroys it. It is corrosive to positive knowledge. It is solipsistic. When I take the epistemological position that only what is in my own mind is “real” and there is no objective reality, then “alternative facts” are no longer “fake.”

Thomas Reid, a philosopher in the Scottish common sense tradition, wrote: “It is so irksome to reason with those who deny first principles, that wise men commonly decline it.” Some skeptical criticism of positivism (the philosophical position that positive objective knowledge is possible) is valid. Positivism cannot answer every question—e.g., metaphysical questions are a misapplication of positivism—but it can answer many questions. Radical skepticism denies the ability to gain positive knowledge on first principles. However, radical skepticism fails the lamp post test. Were we to take the position that the senses are unreliable and therefore no reality exists outside my own mind, then we would forever be walking into lamp posts, since they are unreal. Advice: Be skeptical of the radical skeptics and decline to adopt their first principles.

A Final Note

There is no denying the challenge of knowledge specialization. So much new knowledge is produced in narrow specialized areas that the average person is not capable of synthesizing it due to lack of context and knowledge. Based on that fact, a person of average intelligence is now required to accept arguments from authority. However, the person of average intelligence can be armed with certain tools for evaluation. For example, publication bias is a real phenomenon. Only surprising findings make it into print. Scientific confirmation of common sense is viewed as proving the apodictic and never makes it into print. Furthermore, negative findings never make it into print, so do not assume that one study makes an established fact.

Be extremely suspicious of epidemiological studies. Unless there is miraculously a “natural experiment,” where all other plausible causal factors except the one under investigation are controlled for, these studies are highly suspect. They rely typically on self-reported data, possibly non-random samples, and assumptions of population homogeneity. Epidemiological studies are the beginning of the formulation of a research question, not the end. Correlation is not necessarily causation. Without controlled experiment and establishing a causal chain, findings are an unconfirmed hypothesis as to causation. This is why government diet advice flip-flops so much—don’t eat too many eggs, because they cause heart disease—oops, my bad—you can eat eggs again.

In social science, do not make the assumption that an empirical finding is reliable. Social phenomena are complex and any study applies a theoretical approach that defines the model (a simplification of reality) to explain a phenomenon. The theoretical approach defines what variables will be omitted in a study. Correlations without a strong argument for causation are just that, a correlation. The model chosen can determine the result. Take for example the debate over IQ and life outcomes. When statistical regression is chosen as a tool for analysis, you’ve just made the assumption that factors do not interact, unless you create interaction terms a priori. The variables are independent causal factors that are pitted against one another for statistical significance according to an arbitrary threshold (the conventional test is a less than 5% chance that the result is in fact accident). Thus, there are two sides of the debate: People doing parsimonious (few variables) regression models who say that IQ and not upbringing is highly determinative of life outcomes (the quantitative researchers) and people who take an “intersectional” approach that say that multiple causal factors interact in non-linear and possibly incommensurable, ways to produce the measured effect (the qualitative researchers).

Skepticism, Cynicism and the Trolls

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Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the activities of a Russian influence activities on the Internet before attempting to influence the election in 2016:

While it is impossible to be sure what was in the minds of Russians tweeting false stories in 2014 and 2015—which also included tales of contaminated water, terrorist attacks and a chemical-plant explosion—these experts say it is as if the Russians were testing to see how much they could get Americans to believe.

Americans seem pretty gullible, willingly believing Internet hoaxes spread via social media.  Part of the problem is technology itself.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al. do not encourage thoughtful reflection.  But what truly accounts for the gullibility?

For decades, public education curricula have been built around the concept of ‘critical thinking’ skills.  Universities, since the 1980s in the liberal arts curriculum, have emphasized radical skepticism.  Is it possible that these education interventions have actually made Americans more gullible?  I contend they have.

First, the critical thinking skills taught are for evaluating arguments.  For example, my ten-year-old is being taught how to separate opinion from fact in non-fiction writing and how to argue from evidence this year.  They are not taught, however, how to recognize coordinated media manipulation.

Second, skepticism takes two forms, radical and methodological.  Radical skepticism cuts to the heart of how we know what we know.  Going back to David Hume, if the senses are not a diaphanous veil, then we have reason to distrust experience and certainly to distrust hearsay.  Radical skepticism presents a problem because it leads to many paradoxes.  Like in The Matrix, is reality real, or are we all plugged into a machine producing our experience of reality? The common sense philosophical tradition stresses that we must live as if reality is real.  To do otherwise, we would be forever walking into lamp posts.  Methodological skepticism is the core of the scientific method.  In order to establish positive knowledge, the research must doubt his beliefs, posit a hypothesis that is falsifiable with which to challenge those beliefs, and construct an experiment to test the hypothesis.  The great challenge in the scientific method is that there is no absolute certainty since any theory (a hypothesis established as contingently true based on experiment) is subject to falsification.  Confirmed enough times, theories become laws.  There are very few scientific laws.

Radical skepticism actually disarms people from being able to tell fact from fiction.  Once all claims to knowledge are merely competing narratives, only those that confirm one’s own biases are likely to be accepted.

Skepticism is destructive when cynical.  The political influence operation run by the Russians leverages cynicism regarding political institutions.  Democracy relies on a belief that the individual citizen is sovereign.  Trust in public institutions has been on the decline since the 1960s.  When radical skepticism combines with distrust of political institutions, the average Americans become ripe for conspiratorial thinking, denial of narratives that don’t confirm their own beliefs, and to believe the worst of institutions.  Now add the amplifying effects of social media shaped by trolls and you’ve got a highly effective way to destabilize an open society.

What we need is not more training in critical thinking, but three things: more methodological skepticism applied to one’s own beliefs, less radical skepticism, i.e., philosophically bypass it because it leads to absurdities and therefore invalid, and less cynicism.  While psychology research has shown that negative affect improves the ability of a person to detect falsehood, it doesn’t mean that a person needs to believe every negative narrative. Instead interrogate those narratives.  Does the tweet use inflammatory language?  Does the tweet impugn motives without denying accuracy of claims?  Does the same language appear over and over again in multiple sources?  These are all indicators of media manipulation.

You may think you have a good BS detector, but how is your Astroturf detector?

 

Boomers Seeking Prestige

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The Wall Street Journal has an article today about late cohort Baby Boomers returning to “fellowship” programs at prestigious universities before embarking on a late stage career change.  As a GenX-er who has completed 3 masters degrees–one for me, one to further my career, and one to set me up for a career change for the second half–and who has been admitted to University of Leicester for a PhD starting in 2018, I can’t help but think that these Baby Boomers are wasting money in non-degree programs at Harvard and Stanford.

These people are already accomplished.  They are not 25 year-olds, needing the prestigious name.  They should be preparing themselves for a second act, cost-effectively.  For example, when I went shopping for an MBA at age 41, I settled on University of Nebraska, because: (a) it is a D1 football school everybody has heard of, (b) it had a program that was outside of my area of expertise from work, Finance (why study something you already know?), and (c) I could do the degree for less than $35,000 while keeping my day job.

I did my degree in International Relations at Troy University in Alabama, because it was cost effective and provided an excellent education in the field.  It is true that it is a school only known regionally, but was a stepping stone towards a PhD (the required credential for policy work in D.C.).

I settled on a UK-based PhD, because it was cost effective and short.  US-based PhD programs were 4 times more costly in money and 50% more costly in time.  As a holder of 3 masters degrees and previous employment as a scientist, I didn’t need the course work equivalent of two more.  What I needed was research training and supervision in my field, hence the UK.

Most of these people would probably be better served at Oxford, Cambridge, King’s College, or Aberdeen than in a non-degree program at full freight private university in the US.

Culture and Wealth

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I’ve received a promotion and been busy with the Coast Guard Auxiliary and graduate school in addition to work, so I apologize for my tardiness on getting a post up.  That said, I’d like to treat you to a quantitative analysis I recently conducted on the relationship between a country’s wealth and its culture.

The purpose of the analysis was to attempt a identify what characteristics of a culture contribute to a nation’s wealth.  I first looked at Hofstede’s dimensions and the data set on his website, however, I deemed it not usable since it lacked completeness.  Many countries did not have data across all five dimensions.  I then chose the GLOBE Project data set which is similar to Hofstede’s dimensions.  I downloaded the 2004 GLOBE Phase 2 data set for Society Cultural Scales.

I combined the GLOBE Project data (the Practice dimensions only, not the Values dimensions) with Polity IV Polity Index for the 57 countries in the data set.  I chose Polity because it was a good single value proxy for the variable I am really after, which whether the country has a government that functions on Weber’s rational-legal authority type.  A key control for whether the state is wealthy because it has good government, or whether the state is wealthy because it has a culture that makes it wealthy.  Thus I built my set of 10 independent variables (Polity plus nine dimensions from the GLOBE Project).

For the response variable I created a dichotomous variable from the World Bank’s estimates for states’ income.  The states classified as “high income” were coded 1 and the states with lower incomes were coded 0.

I then ran a logit regression in R.  results of which are below:


> summary(globe_glm_1)

Call:
glm(formula = Income ~ Polity + UASP + FOSP + PDSP + C1SPIC +
HOSP + POSP + C2SPIGC + GESP + ASP, family = binomial(),
data = dat)

Deviance Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-2.47623 -0.40988 -0.03516 0.30218 1.83126

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) 32.5330 18.3861 1.769 0.0768 .
Polity 0.1036 0.1125 0.920 0.3574
UASP 1.1436 1.5992 0.715 0.4745
FOSP 0.2514 1.8538 0.136 0.8921
PDSP -0.4908 1.5613 -0.314 0.7532
C1SPIC 4.1808 2.2206 1.883 0.0597 .
HOSP -3.3569 1.4078 -2.385 0.0171 *
POSP -3.2482 2.7042 -1.201 0.2297
C2SPIGC -3.3308 1.3347 -2.496 0.0126 *
GESP -1.6019 1.5218 -1.053 0.2925
ASP -1.0237 1.7447 -0.587 0.5574
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)

Null deviance: 80.336 on 57 degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 35.193 on 47 degrees of freedom
AIC: 57.193

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 7

>

The model reduces the deviance more than the NULL model. An analysis of variance of the model terms also shows the important coefficients.

> summary(globe_anova_1)
Df Deviance Resid. Df Resid. Dev
Min. :1 Min. : 0.1141 Min. :47.0 Min. :35.19
1st Qu.:1 1st Qu.: 0.5720 1st Qu.:49.5 1st Qu.:41.63
Median :1 Median : 2.7185 Median :52.0 Median :64.87
Mean :1 Mean : 4.5143 Mean :52.0 Mean :56.83
3rd Qu.:1 3rd Qu.: 7.5384 3rd Qu.:54.5 3rd Qu.:67.39
Max. :1 Max. :15.0461 Max. :57.0 Max. :80.34
NA's :1 NA's :1
Pr(>Chi)
Min. :0.0001049
1st Qu.:0.0122373
Median :0.1073930
Mean :0.2366209
3rd Qu.:0.4799755
Max. :0.7354827
NA's :1
>

The results indicate that the Humane Orientation Societal Practices and the Collectivism II Societal Practices (In-Group Collectivism) with both significant at the 0.05 level and negatively related to the odds of being wealthy society. What this indicates is that societies that are individualistic and competitive are more likely to be wealthy.

Furthermore, the Collectivism I Societal Practices (Institutional Collectivism) is significant at the 0.1 level and positively associated with the odds of being a wealthy society. What this means is that solidarity with employers is also associated with wealth–i.e., cultures like Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Interestingly, the Polity Index did not contribute more to the model. An investigation of outliers revealed that both Kuwait and Qatar, Gulf oil kingdoms, have negative polity scores–i.e., are authoritarian. All others are Polity 10’s, which is the highest score on the strength of democratic institutions and lack of authoritarian tendencies. Thus, there is an identity in this data set between wealth and liberal governance. Oil kingdoms appear to be a class all their own.

You know you are old when…

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There is a whole genre a jokes around the theme: you know you are old when…

One of my favorites has been:

You know you are old when the music you listened to is now called classic rock.

Or another of my favorites:

You know you are old when kids start calling you mister.

The other night, while watching TV, I came up with another:

You know you are old when Target stops marketing to your demographic.

Cheers!

Reflections on the Cubs

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The Chicago cubs, after 108 years of futility, won the World Series. As a San Francisco Giants fan since birth, I had no rooting interest in either team. I had considered backing the Cubs, since I consider the designated hitter in the American League an abomination. Every player should be required to play on both offense and defense as a matter of fairness. Plus, Madison Bumgarner, in the tradition of Giants starting pitchers who could hit, like Rick Reuschel and Don “Caveman” Robinson, put on a commercial this year for allowing pitchers to hit. (We’ll leave aside the other Giants tradition of pitchers hopeless at the plate—e.g., Atlee Hammaker.)

I also flirted with the idea that I should root for the Indians, since the great Giant second baseman and now broadcaster Duane Kuiper was an Indian. But it was National Review’s Jonah Goldberg who solidified my choice in rooting for the Indians.  He wrote:

I want the Cubs to lose… for the same reason I wanted the Red Sox to lose in 2004: I like curses. No I don’t mean in the sense of giving someone the evil eye so that they give birth to a duck or anything like that. I like curses because they are romantic, in the anti-Enlightenment sense. They defy the machine thinking of the Scientific Revolution.

…

[I]f the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted, a game more attached to superstition than any other I can think of will be somewhat diminished.

Giants fans will recall Aubrey Huff’s “rally thong” as a prime example of baseball’s enduring and endearing superstitions. Therefore the “conservative” position is to root against the Cubs.

Jonah continues:

As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t know—and sometimes can’t know.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.

Jonah is on the right track but fails in the detail. The scientific method can answer the what and the how of a phenomenon, but not the why. I’ll paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski on the enduring nature of myth. Positivism, which is the philosophical ground of the scientific method, is incapable of addressing questions of teleology and providence, hence the necessity of myth to provide meaning to unconditioned experience.

The victory of the Cubs is unfortunately yet another very slight step in the demythologization of society’s institutions. Let us feel happy for the long-suffering Cubs fans, but also lament the diminishment of baseball.

 

Federalist 10 and the UBI

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction as an idea among the reformicon/technocratic Right in the United States. For example, Charles Murray recently wrote a lengthy piece on the cover of the Review section of the Wall Street Journal on the subject. The concept of the UBI as a replacement for the welfare state on the Right has been mainly on the libertarian wing, where the UBI promotes poverty reduction without restricting liberty as much as the typical welfare state alternatives of conditional grants. The reason for the Right’s new found love of UBI is the risk that automation poses to the social fabric of society. When 47% of today’s jobs are subject to automation over the next 20 years, issues of morality and equity are presented front and center.

With half the nation not only unemployed, but unemployable, what does it do to an American polity that has the poster child for Weber’s Protestant Ethic? What Murray does no appreciate in his article is the risk to the constitutional order that a UBI poses. The dangers of faction, something Madison warned about and sold the Constitution as a solution for in Federalist 10, will be acute.

Madison described two dangers of faction: (1) tyranny of the minority (mainly a propertied ruling class) and (2) tyranny of a majority (mob rule). The new constitution was meant to tame faction through the mechanisms of divided and limited government, an independent judiciary, and representative and deliberative democracy.

Madison’s primary concern were with violent factions composed of land owners and the unpropertied, creditors and debtors, and geographic diversity (large versus small states and North vs. South). UBI carries tremendous risks for abuse through the democratic process. First, while the numbers proposed by Murray (an annual basic income of $30,000 with elimination of UBI at $40,000 of private income) will likely erode the likelihood of entering the workforce for those who could be employable, who is to say that the “dolists” who live off the UBI will not become the new unpropertied faction that will seek to exert their political influence to increase that dole to a more generous amount over time. Electoral politics is built around campaign promises and log rolling. It is unlikely the current institutions could restrain electoral majorities in the quest for “soaking the rich.”

Any UBI introduction will likely have to be via Constitutional amendment with anti-democratic protections installed to make it work. Otherwise, faction could tear the republic apart. It may also have to change the way the government funds itself. The repeal of an income tax and a substitution of a tax on capital may need to be implemented—i.e., tax the owners of the robots rather than the workers. The challenge there, is that it is essentially a tax on productivity gains, which will limit the increase in prosperity over time. Technology has not made republicanism obsolete, but it does pose challenges for the 21st century.

Loaning a Loan Word

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There is an all-purpose word for chaos, mess, tumult, or commotion in modern Hebrew: balagan. It passed into my everyday vocabulary when I lived in Israel. For example, my wife and I use it to describe the state of the household after the grandparents have visited and spun up the kids. The word just rolls off the tongue: ba-la-gan. I have caught myself using the word even with people who don’t speak Hebrew, much to their confusion.

Today, I was surprised to see it used in the headline of an AP story in Yahoo! News.  The story is about how the Israeli security establishment views the latest developments in the Syrian Civil War.  Does the use of the word in a headline portend  the passing of the word into English as a loan word?

The word itself is not originally Hebrew.  This article from Haaretz describes the travels of this wonderful word.   It passed into modern Hebrew via Russian to describe the temporary dwellings used by traveling puppet shows. The word’s origin is actually in Persian, meaning a yurt. Passing into English would make it a loan of a loan of a loan word. The word will have changed hands more times than a sub-prime mortgage in 2007.