Thursday, June 27, 2013

Institutional design for democracies

How can we design practical, effective, and fair institutions for making the basic decisions that are needed within a democratic government? This is, of course, one of the oldest questions in democratic theory; but it is also a recent concern of Jon Elster's. Under this rubric we can investigate, for example, the ways a legislature sets its agenda and votes or the ways constitutional principles function to secure citizens' rights. Fundamentally we want to create institutions that reach good outcomes through a set of decision-making processes that minimize the workings of bias, self serving, and special interests.

Elster takes up these sorts of considerations in Securities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, Elections. Here Elster concentrates on themes expressed by Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher whom Elster regards as being badly underrated. One part of Elster's goal here is to recapture some of these overlooked insights. But he also wants to contribute to the substantive issue: what features of institutional design increase the likelihood of political outcomes that largely conform to the best interests of society (whatever those are)?


Elster endeavors to explicate Bentham’s ideas on this topic; but he is also interested in forwarding the argument in his own terms. “My purpose is to consider procedural accounts of good institutional design” (5). And further: "I shall be concerned with removing -- or blocking the effect of -- known obstacles to good decision making" (17). So we can look at this book as being both a contribution to the history of thought and a substantive, rigorous contribution to contemporary debates about institutional design. 




The fundamental point that Elster takes from Bentham is that institutions should not be considered in terms of their ideal functioning, but in terms of how they will function when populated by ordinary people subject to a range of bad motivations (self-interest, prejudice, bias in favor of certain groups, ...). This is the point of "security against misrule" -- to find mechanisms that obviate the workings of venality, bias, and self-interest on the part of the participants. In a sense, this is a return to problems of imperfect rationality that interested Elster early in his career; but this time these problems are raised in the context of collective rationality.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Institutional designs for progressive reform





  • Equal ownership rights or stratified ownership rights? (24)
  • Large firms or small firms? (27)





Thursday, June 20, 2013

Alford Young on race and sociology








Here is a link to the interview.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Causal inference and random trials

image: Tamil Nadu nutrition study




Here is a more extensive description of this idea:



Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Hacking on Kuhn

The fourth edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 2012, fifty years after its original appearance in 1962. This edition contains a very good introduction by Ian Hacking, himself a distinguished philosopher and philosopher of science. So it is very interesting to reread Kuhn's classic book with the commentary and intellectual frame that Hacking provides. (Here is an earlier post on Kuhn; link.)

Hacking's reading is somewhat deflationary, compared to the relativist and anti-rationalist interpretations that are sometimes offered of Kuhn's theories. Hacking sees a great deal of continuity between the Vienna Circle traditions of philosophy of science and Kuhn's own intellectual commitments about scientific rationality. (Hacking pursues this analogy even down to noting a parallel between Carnap's title Logical Syntax of Language and a similar description of Kuhn's later work, Logical Syntax of Scientific Language.)

According to Hacking, the scope of the concept of "paradigm" has been exaggerated by subsequent interpreters. Paradigms are not systems of thought or conceptual systems; they are not even discipline-specific sets of shared assumptions that don't get questioned in the ordinary pursuit of scientific knowledge. Instead, Hacking argues that Kuhn's intended meaning sticks fairly close to the classical meaning of the term, as an exemplar of something or other. He quotes Kuhn:
"The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of this book."  (from the Postscript, kl 213)


Hacking makes an interesting point about the scientific context in which Kuhn's ideas took shape. Physics, both classical and modern, set the standard for what was most exciting within the scientific enterprise in the 1950s and 1960s. But Hacking asks an interesting question: what if the examples of biology and the life sciences had been the backdrop against which Kuhn had formulated his theories? Molecular biology and the chemistry of DNA constituted a revolution in biology at roughly the time of the original publication of SSR. How valid are Kuhn's observations about scientific research and progress against that backdrop? Would the results have perhaps been quite different if he had concentrated on these examples?
Thus The Structure of Scientific Revolutions may be -- I do not say is -- more relevant to a past epoch in the history of science than it is to the sciences as they are practiced today. (Kl 98)
Hacking gives a very succinct summary of Kuhn's main theory of the course of science:
Here is the sequence. (1) normal science ...; (2) puzzle solving ...; (3) paradigm, a word which, when he used it, was uncommon, but which after Kuhn has become banal ... ; (4) anomaly; (5) crisis; and (6) revolution, establishing a new paradigm.  (Kl 114)
Hacking thoroughly rejects the most subjectivist aspects of many readings of Kuhn: the idea that scientists inhabiting different paradigms also literally inhabit different worlds. Hacking doesn't believe that Kuhn actually believes this, or even unambiguously asserts it.

There are many passages in Kuhn's original text that are worth pulling out again. Here is one, on the gap between observation and scientific beliefs:
These passages make it clear that Kuhn does in fact think that a scientific community possesses a set of unifying but contestable  beliefs -- what many of us now mean by a paradigm. And this seems more pervasive and comprehensive than Hacking's analysis would seem to allow.


I also understood Kuhn to hold that standards of scientific reasoning were likewise dependent on the mental frameworks of the research communities -- with the result that some disagreements among physicists or biologists could not be resolved on the basis of standards of scientific reasoning or method. There was no "paradigm-independent" scientific method, no community-neutral standard of rational preferability.

It may be that Hacking is right, and that Kuhn never intended to support these radical claims about the limits of scientific rationality. But whether he did or not, the position is an intelligible one, and thinkers as diverse as Althusser and Feyerabend have advocated it. Frederick Jameson's title, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, picturesquely captures the core idea.


Sunday, June 9, 2013

Change in peasant China

Image: Shanxi countryside

In 1978 China's government initiated a major change in the agricultural economy. It began a rapid transition from communal agriculture to the household responsibility system, which returned the responsibilities and incentives associated with farming to the farmer rather than the commune. This was the beginning of the market-friendly reforms that led to the transformation of agriculture, industry, and transport in a remarkably short time.

These market-oriented reforms have also stimulated a continuing economic revolution in China, with growth rates exceeding 10% in many years and an intensive period of infrastructure build-out (roads, high speed rail, telecommunications).

Much has transpired in the Chinese countryside since 1978. Rural incomes have risen; significant numbers of rural people have transitioned from farming into better-paying market and logistical activities; and many millions of young people have exited the countryside in search of work in manufacturing and construction. On balance, how has this tumultuous 35 years affected the quality of life for China's rural population?

In 1990 William Hinton offered his own predictions about the effects of the rural reforms in The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989. Hinton believed the future was dire for China's peasants, as they would be squeezed by market forces into even lower-productivity farming techniques and the wealth of the countryside would be extracted by urban elites. Hinton was a continuing supporter of collective agriculture because he believed it permitted economies of scale and more reliable support for the welfare of the people in the countryside. It seems that no one in China continues to advocate this view.

Deng Xiaoping took a different perspective. He believed that all of China would benefit from the accumulation of wealth created by market incentives. His famous words -- "To get rich is glorious" -- legitimated the workings of the market in creating inequalities. And he evidently believed that these processes of economic growth and market incentives would be good for the rural sector as well as the urban sector.

So how has it worked out? How has China's agricultural economy performed in the past three decades? Is China food-self-sufficient? Have rural people gained income? Is rural poverty falling significantly? What is the trend in the quality of life of China's rural populations? And what happened to the range of income inequalities in the countryside?

Here are a few important data points.

First, it appears to be true that China has made rapid progress in reducing poverty in its population. According to Li Xiaoyun's tables below, just under 13% of China's population lives in extreme poverty at incomes lower than $1.25 per day in 2011. (The next three slides are taken from an extensive presentation on China's poverty strategies by  Professor Li Xiaoyun, China Agricultural University; link.) This is a dramatic reduction from an estimate in excess of 80% at this level in the late 1970s. This means that rural incomes have risen substantially since 1978.

Moreover, there have been nationally coordinated programs of poverty alleviation that have been supported by meaningful levels of central and provincial resources.

The central government has attempted to target its poverty alleviation efforts towards the most backward regions in the country. 

Here is a very interesting poverty map for Yunnan Province in the southeast part of the country (link):

Second, it is also true that China's income inequalities have increased sharply during the same period. The share of income flowing to the poorest 40% has fallen from 20% to 14% from 1990 to 2009. Studies indicate that the Gini coefficient for income inequality has risen sharply during that time. It seems likely that wealth inequalities have increased even more. Here are charts documenting the rise of income inequalities in China from the 2005 China Human Development Report (link):

The following figure documents the overall rise in urban/rural income inequalities in China since 1997 extending the data represented in Fig. 2.2 above through 2010 (Liu M., link). Interestingly, this graph suggests that urban/rural inequalities leveled off in about 2003.

Third, food security has improved. China is a net exporter of rice (link) and has substantially increasing its production of pigs and poultry, and it has not suffered famine or extensive malnutrition since the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959. Nutritional levels throughout poor areas have improved in the past twenty years, although there are still significant levels of underweight or stunted children under 5 (fig. 3.14, CHDR 2005).

What has been less visible to the western public is the dynamics of life quality that these changes have created in the countryside. What is needed is disaggregated studies of quality-of-life indicators like education, health, nutrition, and longevity. World Bank reports and China's own major statistical reports do not highlight these kinds of data. However, the UNDP has prepared six triennial reports on China's performance with respect to the Human Development Index (link), and it turns out that Chinese researchers are in fact doing careful work on the task of measuring these characteristics in rural areas. Three leading Chinese scholars focused on poverty alleviation (Wu Guobao, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Liu Minquan, Peking Univerisity; Li Xiaoyun, China Agricultural University) provide a good snapshot into a world of policy research currently underway in China.

How are the government's pronouncements about poverty alleviation viewed by the Chinese public? I had a very interesting conversation with a man in his thirties in Taiyuan, Shanxi on this question. He is employed in a semi-professional job. His view was very skeptical. He believes the government says it is working toward helping the poor and reducing inequalities, but he doesn't think these efforts are very broad. His view is that anti-poverty programs are directed towards just a few locations and a relatively small part of the rural population. And he thinks it is very unfair that the inequalities between rich and poor are increasing so rapidly. When I asked him what he thought the greatest problems were that China faces, he listed these: a one-party state that gives ordinary people no voice in the issues they care about; a lack of freedom of expression; and the unfairness of increasing inequalities between rich and poor. This was a very frank assessment by one person which perhaps sheds some light on how many young people are thinking in China today.

(Here is a 2003 volume on poverty alleviation in China published by the Development Studies Network in Australia, including a number of valuable research articles on the subject; link. The China Health and Nutrition Survey conducted by the Carolina Population Center and the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is also a valuable data source; link.)

Friday, June 7, 2013

Total information awareness?








Sunday, June 2, 2013

Lack of character?

image: Stanford prison experiment


Situationism is the competing view that maintains that people's actions are more sensitive to features of the situation of action than to enduring underlying traits. Doris largely endorses situationism -- for example, he cites experiments showing that subjects make different choices when confronted with a situation of a need for help by another person, depending on whether or not the subject recently found a small amount of money. Apparently situations that induce a "good mood" make a large difference in benevolent behavior. Rachana Kamtekar does a good job of explaining situationism as presented by moral philosophers such as Gilbert Harman; link. Kamtekar summarizes situationism in these terms:

It isn't Doris's view that there are no personality traits at all, but rather that they are small and context-specific in contrast to the general character traits cited in the literature of virtue ethics. "I allow for the possibility of temporally stable, situation-particular, 'local' traits that are associated with important individual differences in behavior" (25). In particular, he takes issue with the "globalism" of many theories of moral virtues and character. Those theories typically make three important assumptions about the virtues of character that Doris finds to be contradicted by the evidence of empirical research in psychology:

What Doris doesn't provide is any kind of theory of the actor of his own. He doesn't favor the idea that actors possess character traits; but we are left in the dark about how he thinks our actions actually proceed. Is it a form of calculation? Is it the result of intuition and snap judgment (along the lines of Daniel Kahneman's arguments in Thinking, Fast and Slow)? Doris doesn't offer an alternative theory of how the actor processes a situation and arrives at an action. And in fact, it's somewhat difficult to see how we would characterize any human behavior without recourse to something like character traits and dispositions. Is every moment a new occasion for spontaneous choice or rational calculation? Is action at a moment simply the result of unconscious prior stimulation and a little bit of cognition about the current situation?

Doris discusses a possible solution to this worry, the theory of "social cognitivism" (76 ff.).
[Social cognitivists] understand behavior as a function of each person's "cognitive-affective personality system": the organization of beliefs, feelings, goals, competencies, and strategies that is supposed to support "stable and distinctive patterns of intraindividual variability in behavior". (77)

Here is Rachana Kamtekar's most fundamental objection to the kinds of arguments offered by Doris and others:
Pure situationism seems to run deeply contrary to our ordinary, commonsense understandings of how and why people behave as they do. Doris doesn't have too much regard for commonsense when it comes to understanding behavior, though he does address the topic. But if we think about the people we've observed most closely in professional contexts, personal life, and politics, it seems hard to avoid the sober conclusion that these individuals do indeed have "character", for better or worse, and that their characters differ. This one can be counted on to deflect responsibility for bad outcomes in his or her division; that one is solidly committed to his spouse; and that one is forever expedient in appealing for votes. People differ in these ways in our ordinary experience; so it is difficult to find the experiments of Milgram or Zimbardo sufficient to erase our reliance on the idea of persistent character traits in ordinary people. (Could we design experiments that seek to evaluate characteristics like "avoids responsibility," "honors familial commitments," "acts out of devotion to principle"?)

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Unexpected linkages

One of the things that I find most interesting in social development is the discovery of unexpected linkages between innovations in one field and outcomes in another.

Here is a somewhat hypothetical example. Improvement of long distance banking transactions in Qing China produces an increase in the frequency of rebellion. How so? Because the long distance transport of merchant silver created a sub-culture of rural bandits preying on merchant travelers. The creation of letters of credit reduced these opportunities, and under-employed bandit gangs were more easily recruited into rebel forces. (This corresponds loosely to arguments offered by Liz Perry in Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 concerning the dialectic between predation and rebellion, though I've speculated a bit about the banking part.)

The general idea here is that large changes in social systems of interaction -- roads, railways, telegraph systems, etc. -- often create new opportunities for social actors that were not anticipated by designers but that have large social consequences.

Here are some examples of these kinds of effects. Discovery of diamonds in a region leads to severe deforestation (as diamonds stimulate violent conflict, leading to large refugee flows, leading to new destructive uses of forests). Extension of trolleys in the Boston suburbs leads to an increase in the frequency of spikes in disease mortality (as carriers move around the region more frequently). Growth of the electric power grid in Pennsylvania results in a decline in church attendance (as young people find other social options in well-lit towns and cities).

I am led to think about these kinds of effects because of the rapidity of system change in China today. The train system, the extension of video surveillance, changes in social security provisions, the ever-growing population of internal migrants -- all these processes are likely to have unexpected and novel consequences. And as complexity theory tells us, systems with multiple interlinked causal processes are vulnerable to abrupt changes of state as causal factors stimulate unexpected behaviors. This is familiar in ecological research, but it seems equally applicable to the social world.

One consequence of this line of thought is that we need to be cautious about predictions of the future that depend on smooth extrapolations of existing trends. In the case of China, perhaps the most confident prediction we can make is that there will be many surprises in the coming decades.