City Status

Robin Hanson wonders whether cities are places for high-status men and the women who seek them, with low-status men relegated to the hinterlands:

I’ve heard that polygamous sects are often run this way today, with older men kicking out young men when they come of age. But re-reading Montaillou on rural 1300 France makes me realize that humanity has long has related harem-like gender patterns.

Back in 1300 France, centrality gave status. The biggest cities were at the top, above towns and then villages. At the bottom were woodcutters and shepards, all male, who spent most of their time wandering far from villages or towns. Along with soldiers and sailors, these men lived dangerous low-status high-mobility lives in sparse areas. They sometimes tempted women into liaisons, or made it rich enough to start a family in a village. Such mating strategies may explain why such men moved so often even they were poor and moving is expensive.

Back in the high status centers, there remained a few high status men and women, many low status women, but fewer low status men. The lower status women were often servants to high status males, and often had affairs with them.

In the US today, the states with the most men relative to women are Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah, and Montana — mostly harsher low density areas. In contrast, the states with the most women relative to men are District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, near some of our biggest high status cities. Most big US cities have more women than men. The exceptions are San Jose, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Austin, Seattle, San Diego, places with new booming, mostly tech, industries. Men are more willing to move to try new often-harsher industries and places.

We hear college-educated women complain today that there aren’t enough college-educated men to go around, either during college itself or afterward. Of course there are plenty of other men around, but these women mostly consider such men beneath them. Seems to me this isn’t that different from 1300 France; women are more eager to locate near high status people. They focus on high status men, and lament there aren’t enough to go around.

Is it consistent or inconsistent with the theory that New Zealand has regular farmer balls, in which townie girls head out to the countryside to find rural husbands? The Middlemarch Singles Ball was even given theatrical treatment. Here's the play's premise:

The premise is really good: the hard-up committee discovers to its horror that all the singles coming to the next ball are female: there are no wifeless farmers left. So it is clear that men must be brought in, from the big cities if necessary, and to save Middlemarch's reputation, they must be taught before the ball to behave like real farmers, hard southern men.

Perhaps farmers in New Zealand are high status?

The Status of Status Games

I don't worry too much about notions that consumption is driven by status-seeking. Not because it isn't - it would be surprising if at least some consumption weren't status-driven. Rather, because status-seeking affects just about everything, from consumption to not consuming to leisure to exercise and more. 

The richest entrepreneurs got that way by coming up with new goods and services to make the rest of us better off; in earlier eras, they'd have sought fame and renown through displays of prowess in killing people in battles. I prefer today's version.

Here's Hanson on the status of status-games.

But if you start to learn that many people you know are starting to see conspicuous authenticity as just another way that posers vie for status, then of course your community will come to not accept that as giving real status. No, you’ll start to see some new kinds of behavior as the sort of thing that people do who don’t care about status, but are just being “real”.

Then you’ll start to become aware that other people that you know agree with this new attitude of yours. You’ll get more comfortable with saying that you approve of these sorts of behavior in others, with hearing others say the same thing, and you’ll notice that you feel good when other people credit you with such behavior. You and your associates will all feel good about themselves, knowing they they are all good people who deserve respect because they do these behaviors, behaviors that they all know are not about status seeking.

At which point these new behaviors will have become your new status game. You see, status-seeking behavior must be a respected behavior that isn’t seen as overtly status seeking. Because we all agree that we don’t respect behavior that is done mainly to gain status. Even though we do, we do, we very much do.

Wellington has some major authenticity hipster beard-quality status-games going on in which I refuse to play a part.

In related news, a quarter of all Welshmen are descended from 20 men who won a particularly nasty status game fifteen-hundred years ago. Bill Gates has nothin' on them. [Update: Thomas Lumley, to whom I defer in such things, calls bogus on this particular stat.]

Previously:

• Status: multidimensional or unitary?
• Subjective and objective status: health effects
• Status and the nerd/jock theory of history
• Prestige and dominance hierarchies
• Etiquette as status game [and again].

Nerd Pride

Tyler Cowen reminds us of a Hanson point: politics is about status.

I was disappointed but not surprised by this passage by Gary Silverman:

What I like about Obamacare is that it shows some respect for “those people” – as Hudson called them in Giant – who are good enough to work the fields and mow the lawns, and build the roads and sew the clothes, and diaper the babies and wash the dishes, but somehow aren’t good enough to see a doctor from time to time to make sure there is nothing wrong inside.

That is in fact what most of politics is about, namely debates over which groups should enjoy higher social status and which groups should receive lower social status. Of course critics of Obamacare have their own versions of desired status reallocation, typically involving higher status for the economically productive.

...

The deeper point is that virtually all of us argue this way, albeit with more subtlety. A lot of the more innocuous-sounding arguments we use all the time come perilously close to committing the same fallacies as do these quite transparent and I would say quite obnoxious mistaken excerpts. One of the best paths for becoming a good reader of economics and politics blog posts (and other material) is to learn when you are encountering these kinds of arguments in disguised form.

I agree.

And so we come to Noah Smith's article wishing for higher nerd status, or at least an end to nerd-bashing.

Seriously, America. The nerd-bashing has gone too far. Sure, there is a grain of truth in all of the criticisms of the tech industry -- but only a grain. Yes, startups are riskier than many founders realize; but founders are people with good skills who will never go hungry. Yes, San Francisco rents are out of control, but this is more about development policy and NIMBYism than Google and Apple. Yes, inequality is increasing, but it’s increasing across all industries and classes, and bashing Silicon Valley isn't going to stop the march of automation. Yes, big American companies and corporate governance need to improve, but bashing “disruptive” startups isn't going to help the situation. Yes, some tech companies ignore the public interest when pushing for deregulation, but show me an industry that doesn’t do that. Yes, there are sociopaths and wackos among the ranks of tech entrepreneurs, but they’re certainly a tiny minority. (The only tech industry problem that really seems to live up to the hype is the sexism.)

...

We’re looking for rich, successful people to bash. And Silicon Valley happens to be where the rich, successful people are right now. So we’ve turned on the nerds.

... 

Still, I’m irked. I’m a child of the 1980s, when jocks ruled the high schools, and nerds were confined to the basement while the good ol’ boys slapped backs and made deals. When the bespectacled Bill Gates became the world’s richest person, something changed for the better, and I don’t want to go back to the old days. The tech backlash is just another situation where America needs to put aside its urge to turn inward and demonize some subset of the population. We should work to fix the problems associated with the industry, of course, but vitriol isn't the way to do it. The nerds are not the hosts of Mordor.

 Bryan Caplan arguably predicted much of this in his nerd/jock theory of history:

Notice: For financial success, the main measure where nerds now excel, governments make quite an effort to equalize differences. But on other margins of social success, where many nerds still struggle, laissez-faire prevails.

It's suspicious - and if you combine the Jock/Nerd Theory with some evolutionary psych, it makes sense. When the best hunter in the tribe gets rich, his neighbors will probably ask nicely for a share, if they dare to ask at all. But if the biggest nerd in the tribe gets rich, how long will it take before the jocks show up and warn him that "You'd better share and share alike"?

Punchline: Through the lens of the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, the welfare state doesn't look like a serious effort to "equalize outcomes." It looks more like a serious effort to block the "revenge of the nerds" - to keep them from using their financial success to unseat the jocks on every dimension of social status.

I'd love to see a version of Piketty that looks at inequality in dating success for those aged 16-25. Has that inequality gotten larger or smaller over time? Does anyone know? Does anyone other than the nerds care?

It wouldn't be hard to build a stylised case that social changes from the 1960s through to present that decoupled dating from marriage-search for the first decade of dating strongly benefited the jocks at the expense of the nerds. But we have no empirics on it. How would a Herfindahl dating concentration index change over time? Or a Gini coefficient?

Which inequalities matter is more interesting than what's going on on any particular margin of inequality.

Darwinian Politics and risk-seeking behaviour

I love Paul Rubin's "Darwinian Politics". Rubin argues that existing political preferences around things like fairness, inequality, altruism, and group affiliation can really be traced back to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - the 50,000 years or so that modern-form humans spent in the Pleistocene. I often teach the book as part of my graduate-level public choice class.

Jason Collins reviews the book here and notes the one part of the book with which I disagreed:

Rubin’s least libertarian finding, apart from his implied support of restrictions on polygamy, relates to restrictions on drugs and other “anti-social” activities. Rubin argues that if consumption of these goods and activities is a form of competition between young males to signal status, restrictions on their use will be required to prevent above optimal use. While Rubin considers that the need to maintain a society’s prime age men at fighting strength is weaker than in our evolutionary past, a case can still be made for this form of control. It was interesting that Rubin chose to use a signaling argument at this point as he does not address the role of signaling in most of his analysis, such as in his discussion of “altruistic” gifts of game in ancestral societies or donations to charity.

I find this argument wholly unsatisfying. I agree with Rubin that the age-profile of risk preference looks like it's set in the EEA. But the policy implications of that are a lot less obvious than Rubin makes out. If we're hardwired to demonstrate ability to bear risk when we're in our mid to late teens, then banning one form of risk-taking is very likely to push risk-taking demonstrations over onto other margins. It's then manifestly unclear whether we improve or worsen outcomes when we ban youth access to consumption activities whose risks are relatively well understood and the use of which is at least relatively well socialised as it depends onto what other margins the kids switch. If everybody switches to bungee jumping, that's probably better; if everybody switches to car surfing, that's worse.

Where at least some youth alcohol demand is derived from an underlying preference for demonstrating fitness to bear risk, we have to worry about the other margins on which the underlying preference can be expressed if we want to push down on one part of the balloon.

I worry for similar reasons about Veblen-themed arguments about reducing status competition through income taxes. If we're hard-wired to be status-seeking animals, isn't it better that that status-seeking is channelled into productive outlets, like earning money by working hard to meet the needs of others, than less productive or downright harmful alternatives, like jousting, tournaments, or feats of military valour? As I'd wondered a few years ago after Robin Hanson provided some data on the relative positionality of different types of activities:

If humans are status-seekers, which seems highly likely given how sexual selection works, then high marginal tax rates just push status-seeking onto the other dimensions identified by Hanson. Which then gives us some testable hypotheses: do countries with heavy income redistribution see greater spending on education, more time investment in sport, more money and time spent on personal beauty and exercise (all normalized for income, of course)? I wouldn't know where to start looking for the data, but I'd be keen to see the results.

I'll have to dig around a bit to see whether that kind of cross-national data exists: potentially another topic for the future honours projects file.

Science Status

One way of breaking out of the Great Stagnation: raise the social status of scientists such that more folks pick science over, say, law. Here's the Forbes piece on Cowen from last year:

Raising the social status of scientists

Cowen’s only concrete recommendation to improve the great stagnation is to “raise the social status of scientists”.  He says: “I don’t want a bunch of extra science prizes given out by the White House; what I want is that most people really care about science and view scientific achievement as a pinnacle of our best qualities as leaders of Western civilization.”

Such a raise in status is devoutly to be wished, particularly the rise in the status of scientists relative to overpaid executives in the financial sector. However such a rise in status is unlikely to have any immediate impact on innovation or growth.

Innovation depends not on how many scientific ideas are out there. It depends on how quickly the already abundant ideas are implemented in the marketplace.

New Zealand columnist Rosemary McLeod also points to the problem, although without any concrete solution:

By contrast to Deen, I doubt very much that any women pant after Stephen Wolfram, the balding and totally average-looking maths genius, now middle-aged, who wrote his first book on particle physics at the age of 14 and had a PhD at 20.

I mention this because somewhere in the great system of evolution there is a definite glitch that needs to be explained in a hurry if our species is to work out how to survive in this world we currently make such a mess of.

It is the likes of Wolfram we should be aiming our simpering selves at, surely, rather than an average Joe with a single, rather common ability that requires almost no IQ.

We should be wanting to breed - if sex still has any relation to reproduction - with blokes who are not only clever, but also rich.

We should thrill to words like "cosmology" and "quantum field theory", then, for the very good reason that we haven't a clue what they mean, but guess that they may come in handy one day.

A lot of should, but no way of getting there from here. Science, alas, isn't generally seen as all that alpha in the only metric that matters in the long run.

Rugby, on the other hand, does not lack for social approbation.

On Saturday, New Zealand learned that we had lost one of our greatest minds.  Sir Paul Callaghan, the 2011 New Zealander of the Year, held many accolades including being a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.  His list of credentials are as long as they are impressive.  However, despite this, his death and ultimate loss to New Zealand was relegated to the fourth most important news item on both One News and 3 News, something I thought was worth lamenting.

Only 11 days earlier, another Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit member passed away.  His death lead both bulletins.  This of course was Jock Hobbs: former All Black and the man who has been bestowed the honor of saving New Zealand rugby and of securing the 2011 Rugby World Cup hosting rights.

On the day the Jock Hobbs died, both networks deemed the story as being more ‘important’ (i.e. higher up in the bulletin) than news of a major breach of privacy at ACC, the conflict in Syria, the Urewera 4 trial, Asia Air X ending its service to Christchurch, the Ports of Auckland strike and the Chris Cairns libel case.

Compare this to when Sir Paul Callaghan passed away, One News thought the return of a sporting event to Christchurch, the refit of a sports stadium and an incident involving a hot air balloon in which everyone was safe were more important. 3 News had the jailing of a Kiwi duped into smuggling cocaine in Argentina, the cost to rent a house in Auckland and President Obama’s statement about a killed teenager in Florida.

Re-read that list of stories again.  Is it not appalling?  Is it not disrespectful?  Could you go as far as asking if it’s fair, balanced or even reasonable?

It's lamentable, but perfectly understandable. Media plays to what the public wants in a competitive marketplace. And here they want rugby and mostly reckon scientists a bunch of tosser eggheads who should be forced to find real jobs. Not that it's particularly better anywhere else.

We'll know things have changed when scientists have groupies. I'm not betting on its ever happening. I remember stories about one socially obtuse grad student (a few years ahead of me in school, and who will remain nameless) who went around introducing himself to ladies saying "Hi! I just had this paper published! I wrote this!" He was, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful. But I'd expect an athlete of similarly poor social skills would have found more success by saying "Hi! Look at my MVP ring!"

Coaching

Could a good surgeon use a coach? Dr. Atul Gawande thought he might. He'd reached a performance plateau and so went out looking for help from one of his former teachers, a retired surgeon. Result?

That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes. Osteen has continued to coach me in the months since that experiment. I take his observations, work on them for a few weeks, and then get together with him again. The mechanics of the interaction are still evolving. Surgical performance begins well before the operating room, with the choice made in the clinic of whether to operate in the first place. Osteen and I have spent time examining the way I plan before surgery. I’ve also begun taking time to do something I’d rarely done before—watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.

In a Hansonean turn, Gawande then considers why coaching isn't used more often:

Osteen watched, silent and blank-faced the entire time, taking notes. My cheeks burned; I was mortified. I wished I’d never asked him along. I tried to be rational about the situation—the patient did fine. But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

This is why it will never be easy to submit to coaching, especially for those who are well along in their career. I’m ostensibly an expert. I’d finished long ago with the days of being tested and observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose myself to scrutiny and fault-finding?

I have spoken to other surgeons about the idea. “Oh, I can think of a few people who could use some coaching” has been a common reaction. Not many say, “Man, could I use a coach!” Once, I wouldn’t have, either.
...
“Most surgery is done in your head,” Osteen [the coach] likes to say. Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow. I knew that he could drive me to make smarter decisions, but that afternoon I recognized the price: exposure.

For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?

“Who’s that?” a patient asked me as she awaited anesthesia and noticed Osteen standing off to the side of the operating room, notebook in hand.

I was flummoxed for a moment. He wasn’t a student or a visiting professor. Calling him “an observer” didn’t sound quite right, either.

“He’s a colleague,” I said. “I asked him along to observe and see if he saw things I could improve.”

The patient gave me a look that was somewhere between puzzlement and alarm.

“He’s like a coach,” I finally said.

She did not seem reassured.

Every now and again, universities think it would be a good idea to send all of their profs off to take coursework in teaching. A former classmate of mine had to complete such a degree when he took a job teaching economics at Monash University several years ago; Canterbury talks about similar requirements. I would be very surprised if there were any positive return on the time investment.

But few of us seek out colleagues for constructive criticism. Exposure's not comfortable. Perhaps universities keen on improving teaching quality would do better in identifying standout teachers to assist as coaches rather than mandating completion of tertiary teaching degrees.

HT: @Isegoria

Ladders and measurement error

I'd noted yesterday a rather nice piece looking at SES and health outcomes showing that self-perceived status does more to drive health outcomes in one experiment than do objective markers of health status. The result could reflect measurement error in the objective markers or it could reflect that folks place different weights on different aspects of status when deciding on their self-perceived status.

LemmusLemmus pointed out in the comments there that the self-perceived status question was prefaced by a primer having respondents think about their income, education and occupation: "where they stand compared to other persons in the United States in terms of income, education, and occupation". So it's relatively weak support for the multiple ladders hypothesis which, if respondents took the priming seriously, would then only reflect different weightings across those three potential status components. The test isn't strong enough to distinguish much between measurement error and multiple status ladders (or, rather, differentially weighted status ladders).

So an interesting test of measurement error versus more ladders would be a repeating of the experiment but priming different respondents with different versions of the the question above. For some, no primer would be given. For others, the three above. And for a third group, a much broader set. If the no-primer or thick-primer treatments strengthened the effect of self-perceived status relative to the objective markers, then that supports the multiple ladders hypothesis. If self-perceived status does best when the primer relates directly to the objective measures (as opposed to a no primer or thick primer version), then it's probably measurement error.

Little chance the study would be repeated in this way, but at least it's testable in principle.

Status

I'd quibbled a bit with Half Sigma over here. HS argued that, even in a world with no rent seeking, value transference is unavoidable: creating a new product that increases total welfare also results in an increase in the creator's status; if status is a fixed-sum game, then the creator of value has also transferred status from other people to himself. HS recommended progressive income taxation as means of compensating folks who consequently lost status.

I suggested rather that status is properly viewed as multidimensional, with folks being able to choose in which status game they'd like to compete. Money status is only one dimension; being "#1 Dad" may be another; being able to lift heavy weights a third (see the Mandelbaums in classic Seinfeld for examples of both of those); having a maxed out World of Warcraft character yet another. There are as many status dimensions as there are activities in which folks can seek excellence. In that case, why ought we single out status transfers through value creation as being the dimension demanding transfers? Shouldn't I get a transfer whenever somebody else goes to the gym, pushing me further down on the "able to lift weights" status dimension? It all seems a nonsense.

I've seen reasonable argument that status may well wind up loading on a single dimension - basically Roissy's "alphaness" measure, your effective attractiveness to the gender of your choice. Of course, the range of corrective status taxation measures in that case would be more complicated, more comprehensive, and more ridiculous. How do we tax Brother Sharp for his fashion sense? It's not implausible that status might reduce to this single dimension, but neither is it obvious to me that it does.

HS replies, pointing to his older post arguing that World of Warcraft status isn't real status. I'd been thinking less of his post when I commented (hadn't started reading him until recently) and more of Will Wilkinson's rather nice essay of a couple years back on the multidimensionality of status; WoW is just one of the near-infinite ways folks can choose to acquire status. HS makes a false consciousness argument, clearly but forgivably not having read my prior piece with Boudreaux arguing against the notion. If folks can get happiness from upweighting the dimensions on which they do better, who are we to say that isn't real happiness?

Stressing out about poverty

An article in the most recent PNAS by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg, "Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory", argues that intergenerational transmission of poverty might be due to debilitating effects of childhood stress. The Economist provides a decent summary for those without PNAS subscriptions. The article finds that kids from low socioeconomic status backgrounds have shorter working memories than do their more affluent counterparts, and that childhood stress levels seem to do more in explaining working memory at age 17 than does duration of childhood poverty. Children with a higher allostatic loading have worse working memory when older than do others. Once allostatic load is taken into account, income no longer has explanatory power.

Nowhere does the study seem to correct for parental IQ. We have reasonable evidence that IQ and working memory correlate, though there is some debate. We also have reasonable evidence that IQ is highly heritable. Finally, we have good evidence that IQ correlates with health outcomes. Let's put that all together then. Low parental IQ transmits directly to children. At the same time, low parental IQ generates lower income households and poorer health outcomes. These health outcomes get measured as allostatic loading. Blood pressure and BMI are half of the allostatic loading measure, with the other half being stress-related hormone levels. The Gottfredson paper linked above shows that IQ correlates with physical fitness, preference for low-fat low-sugar diets, and (negatively with) obesity; it also predicts psychological resilience in high stress environments. So everything in the allostatic loading measure is dependent on g.

The current study finds kids with high childhood allostatic loadings have poorer working memories as adults, but both could be driven primarily by differences in parental IQ. If parental IQ has a stronger effect on kids' allostatic loadings than does parental income, but both are correlated with IQ, then we'd expect allostatic loadings to explain more than income. That's how omitted variable bias works: whatever's most closely related to the omitted variable picks up the variance that ought to be attributed to the missing variable.

I'm sure the actual causal mechanism is pretty complicated. Low parental IQ will simultaneously provide kids with genes predisposing them to low IQ and with environments to which they're least likely to show resilience. Leaving parental IQ out of the mix doesn't seem a great start to an answer though. Without it, there's no way of disentangling the separate and (likely) augmentative effects of genetically-transmitted IQ and low status/higher stress childhood environments.