Sunday, November 20, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
How To Offend a Microeconomist
Interview with Daniel Hamermesh:
Here is one of the questions I wanted to ask you, with regards to Heilbroner’s book. With the economics profession, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, being somewhat in disrepute…
Stop! Stop, stop, stop. The economics profession is not in disrepute. Macroeconomics is in disrepute. The micro stuff that people like myself and most of us do has contributed tremendously and continues to contribute. Our thoughts have had enormous influence. It just happens that macroeconomics, firstly, has been done terribly and, secondly, in terms of academic macroeconomics, these guys are absolutely useless, most of them. Ask your brother-in-law. I’m sure he thinks, as do 90% of us, that most of what the macro guys do in academia is just worthless rubbish. Worthless, useless, uninteresting rubbish, catering to a very few people in their own little cliques.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
"Objective" News Stories
Even the most casual observers of the media realize the entire concept of an "objective" news story is bunk. Reporters don't practice objectivity; they practice neutrality. Side A says X, Side B says Y, and we leave it to you to decide. This creates the illusion of arguments with equal merit when any "objective" person could conclude one is clearly stronger than the other.
An equally pernicious distortion of the news lurks behind the scenes--reporters and editors have tremendous power to shift the public narrative in the subtle ways they can frame a story. Although reporters will often cling to their Journalism 101 ethics manuals and disclaim all responsibility for their stories when they're writing "just the facts", one shouldn't overlook how they can easily express a particular view without taking any explicit views in a story at all.
Here's an example. City council passes an ordinance banning residents from wearing green pants on Mondays. Local newspaper has the resources to write only one story about it. Among the potential angles are:
Story 1: Just-the-facts story on tickets given to people wearing green pants.
Story 2: Just-the-facts story on people the reporter personally found violating the law by wearing green pants.
Story 3: Just-the-facts story about police giving tickets to some people wearing green pants but not others (essentially a combination of stories 1 and 2).
Story 4: Story about the merits of the green pants law, quoting the mayor saying the green pants are a blight on society, and a concerned citizen worried about his free speech rights being abridged, even though not one person other than the mayor supports the law.
Story 5: Story about the merits of the green pants law, quoting the mayor saying blue pants are blight on society, and nine concerned citizens worried about free speech rights being abridge, because not one person other than the mayor supports the law.
Story 6: Story about how the mayor's third cousin runs the biggest blue pants factory in town.
Story 7: Story about how the mayor was emotionally wounded as a child because of the Monday in elementary school when he was harassed because his parents sent him in green pants.
Most people would agree that (with the exception of perhaps Story 5) all of these would meet the classic definition of "objective" reporting. But isn't it also quite clear that decision to publish a story on this law (or none, or 12) makes a pretty big statement, and how the newspaper frames it makes an even bigger one? The idea that just writing an descriptive story somehow divorces the newspaper from taking a view is absurd.
Do I think most journalists are knowingly skew stories toward their own policy preferences? In most cases, no*. But even if they're making story choices based solely on what they believe is "newsworthy" it will endorse a particular worldview (even if the reporter doesn't realize he's doing it). Implicit stories in stories like 1 and 2 is the reporter's disapproval of the conduct the law punishes; implicit in stories like 3 is the reporter's belief that the police are acting improperly (even though journalists could write this about almost any law, because 100% enforcement is rare). Even within the stories themselves tone could matter--A reporter could portray the mayor in Story 7 as megalomaniac bent on destroying people's rights, or as a sympathetic character still recovering from a traumatic incident.
This isn't to say the descriptive stories are all bad. Certainly there is a role for reporters that expose the facts in any given situation so that other people can form opinions on them. But it also suggests reporters need to take more care in how they frame their stories. And also be more honest with readers about how they do it.
* Trust me, most reporters aren't thinking hard enough to do that.
An equally pernicious distortion of the news lurks behind the scenes--reporters and editors have tremendous power to shift the public narrative in the subtle ways they can frame a story. Although reporters will often cling to their Journalism 101 ethics manuals and disclaim all responsibility for their stories when they're writing "just the facts", one shouldn't overlook how they can easily express a particular view without taking any explicit views in a story at all.
Here's an example. City council passes an ordinance banning residents from wearing green pants on Mondays. Local newspaper has the resources to write only one story about it. Among the potential angles are:
Story 1: Just-the-facts story on tickets given to people wearing green pants.
Story 2: Just-the-facts story on people the reporter personally found violating the law by wearing green pants.
Story 3: Just-the-facts story about police giving tickets to some people wearing green pants but not others (essentially a combination of stories 1 and 2).
Story 4: Story about the merits of the green pants law, quoting the mayor saying the green pants are a blight on society, and a concerned citizen worried about his free speech rights being abridged, even though not one person other than the mayor supports the law.
Story 5: Story about the merits of the green pants law, quoting the mayor saying blue pants are blight on society, and nine concerned citizens worried about free speech rights being abridge, because not one person other than the mayor supports the law.
Story 6: Story about how the mayor's third cousin runs the biggest blue pants factory in town.
Story 7: Story about how the mayor was emotionally wounded as a child because of the Monday in elementary school when he was harassed because his parents sent him in green pants.
Most people would agree that (with the exception of perhaps Story 5) all of these would meet the classic definition of "objective" reporting. But isn't it also quite clear that decision to publish a story on this law (or none, or 12) makes a pretty big statement, and how the newspaper frames it makes an even bigger one? The idea that just writing an descriptive story somehow divorces the newspaper from taking a view is absurd.
Do I think most journalists are knowingly skew stories toward their own policy preferences? In most cases, no*. But even if they're making story choices based solely on what they believe is "newsworthy" it will endorse a particular worldview (even if the reporter doesn't realize he's doing it). Implicit stories in stories like 1 and 2 is the reporter's disapproval of the conduct the law punishes; implicit in stories like 3 is the reporter's belief that the police are acting improperly (even though journalists could write this about almost any law, because 100% enforcement is rare). Even within the stories themselves tone could matter--A reporter could portray the mayor in Story 7 as megalomaniac bent on destroying people's rights, or as a sympathetic character still recovering from a traumatic incident.
This isn't to say the descriptive stories are all bad. Certainly there is a role for reporters that expose the facts in any given situation so that other people can form opinions on them. But it also suggests reporters need to take more care in how they frame their stories. And also be more honest with readers about how they do it.
* Trust me, most reporters aren't thinking hard enough to do that.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Meritocracy
But in a sense the James Murdochs of the world are more common than we might think. In fact the most popular way to find a job is through family and friends. That holds true for all of us, but it is immensely more likely for the kids of the very rich. Look at this picture from a research paper that a colleague and I published in the Journal of Labor Economics (available here if you really want all the details).Link
The bottom line is that about 40% of us have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed our fathers. But if dad’s earnings put him in the top 25% these chances are above average, they start taking off if dad was in the top 5%, and reach the stratosphere for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top earning dads had a job with his employer.
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Dude
Why'd Michigan push this guy out? I like what he has to say. Although I'm guessing this isn't a popular view at Board of Regents meetings.
“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Tradeoffs and Criminal Law
Early in the term, the Supreme Court has already heard arguments in two cases related to issues of great importance in criminal law: the use of eyewitness testimony and the use GPS without a warrant. Evaluating these issues individually, the answers, from a policy perspective at least, seem pretty simple. If eyewitness testimony isn't reliable we shouldn't use it; and our privacy interests should trump such 1984-style investigations by the police*. But once we start evaluating these positions as companions, it reveals in an interesting tension.
The more we learn about eyewitness testimony, the less reliable we find it. Indeed, Prof. Garrett's study of the first 250 wrongfully-convicted people exonerated with DNA evidence found that 190 of 250 cases involved faulted eyewitness testimony. Not surprisingly, pressure against using it has increased--the New Jersey Supreme Court, for instance, just mandated a number of procedural safeguards it will now require when its used in criminal trials.
If we start discounting the value of eyewitness testimony, though, we have no reason not apply similar scrutiny to other forms of evidence. And once we do that, we'll probably find out much of it is also unreliable. The could easily dismantle the entire facade of the litigation process.
Without the use of traditional forms of evidence, police will push for the ability to use technology that lets them access quite reliable forms of it. They can, for instance, monitor e-mails or use a GPS to track our every move. But clearly this raises privacy concerns.
Taken to its conclusion, then, this puts the legal system in a rather perilous position. If we want privacy, we lose reliability. If we want reliability, we lose privacy. And if we want reliability and privacy, we lose a functioning legal system.**
* I suppose one could have a reasonable debate about this point, but I'd imagine most liberals would err on the side of protecting privacy. Even if the justices don't necessarily agree the Constitution protects against these police actions, they all seemed troubled by the idea of extended periods of round-the-clock surveillance by GPS.
** Again, this sort of depends on your view underlying views of a legal system. This would essentially prevent the government from every depriving citizens of rights at the cost of losing its ability to protect the rights of citizens from being deprived by other citizens.
The more we learn about eyewitness testimony, the less reliable we find it. Indeed, Prof. Garrett's study of the first 250 wrongfully-convicted people exonerated with DNA evidence found that 190 of 250 cases involved faulted eyewitness testimony. Not surprisingly, pressure against using it has increased--the New Jersey Supreme Court, for instance, just mandated a number of procedural safeguards it will now require when its used in criminal trials.
If we start discounting the value of eyewitness testimony, though, we have no reason not apply similar scrutiny to other forms of evidence. And once we do that, we'll probably find out much of it is also unreliable. The could easily dismantle the entire facade of the litigation process.
Without the use of traditional forms of evidence, police will push for the ability to use technology that lets them access quite reliable forms of it. They can, for instance, monitor e-mails or use a GPS to track our every move. But clearly this raises privacy concerns.
Taken to its conclusion, then, this puts the legal system in a rather perilous position. If we want privacy, we lose reliability. If we want reliability, we lose privacy. And if we want reliability and privacy, we lose a functioning legal system.**
* I suppose one could have a reasonable debate about this point, but I'd imagine most liberals would err on the side of protecting privacy. Even if the justices don't necessarily agree the Constitution protects against these police actions, they all seemed troubled by the idea of extended periods of round-the-clock surveillance by GPS.
** Again, this sort of depends on your view underlying views of a legal system. This would essentially prevent the government from every depriving citizens of rights at the cost of losing its ability to protect the rights of citizens from being deprived by other citizens.
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