Happy New Year

New Year's resolutions had always seemed a little silly to me: If something is worth doing, why would you need to make a resolution about it? But publicly proclaiming your intentions to do better can constrain you against doing worse. Others can observe your actions and judge your failures.

New Year's resolutions make it a little bit harder to give into temptation. And those wanting even stronger constraints can always choose them: promising a big donation to the charity of choice for anyone catching you breaking your resolutions can do the trick.

These kinds of resolutions work because there are always friends or family who want to help you to help yourself. Finding ways of breaking the spirit of the resolution while keeping to its letter doesn’t work when someone who knows you well is monitoring things.

As much as the government likes to tut-tut individuals’ private choices about whether to eat, drink and be merry, the government has a harder time than we do in tying its own hands.

From my column in 23 December's NBR (ungated here). I suggest a couple of resolutions the government might consider, and ways of making them stick:

Most importantly, it should resolve to restore Auckland’s housing affordability. Although this is a matter of zoning decisions and infrastructure provision, Auckland Council operates within rules and incentives created by central government – as Mr Key recognised in 2007.

Resolving that the price of the median house in Auckland would not be more than, say, nine times median household income next year, with a declining ratio from there, would be a start. Setting up the infrastructure and zoning policies that would automatically be triggered if housing affordability were not restored would make the resolution credible.

Prime Minister Bill English should commit his government to two further resolutions, both drawing on his experience as minister of finance. His was only one voice of many in the cabinet. If another minister put forward a proposal with a weak regulatory impact statement or poor cost-benefit assessment, Mr English had to pick his battles.

But as prime minister, he could resolve that the cabinet will no longer consider proposals with inadequate support. Ultimately, ministries’ rigour in preparing documentation in support of policies depends on whether the cabinet has any demand for rigour. Providing that demand should be a New Year's resolution against ministerial excesses.

Finally, the government should resolve to embed the changes Mr English started as finance minister: testing the effects of welfare policies to see which work and measuring outcomes against long-term fiscal liabilities.

The Treasury recently put up an excellent Outcomes Catalogue Tool showing the government’s initiatives, the outcomes those initiatives target and how those outcomes are measured. Resolving to make that an annual release, along with the figures showing whether things are on track, would be an excellent way of making these changes last.

We all face temptations. Individuals have lots of ways of overcoming these, even if the government is often a bit too dismissive of our ability to do so. It’s time the government took its own self-control issues seriously and made a few resolutions for a better 2017.

Apologies for the break in posting. I took a Christmas holiday with the family up to Tauranga and then to New Plymouth and didn't bring a computer along. Pokemon Level 32: Achieved. I think one of my Pokemon is still on a gym up there.

I was to have been back on deck this Monday, but came down with some kind of plague Friday night from which I'm recovering. High fever in the middle of the night brings interesting dreams though:

'Murder, She DeathNote': Angela Lansbury travels from town to town, 'solving' the murders her cursed typewriter scripts. #4amFeverDreams

— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) January 7, 2017

Unfortunately, I woke up before I could tell whether there were really a shinigami involved or just a standard cursed typewriter.

Self-control

I read the behavioural literature as a meta form of self-help. Here are some standard ways that people can screw things up; here are some heuristics they use that work on average but can yield failures when applied to the wrong domain; here are some strategies for applying the right heuristic at the right time and for avoiding applying the wrong one; here are some common spots where people need to be extra-vigilant to avoid making errors.

Gareth Morgan tweets a link to a write-up of the standard Wansink findings around food:

Why most people don’t have control over how much they eat http://t.co/Cf6lyT1RHt
— Gareth Morgan (@garethmorgannz) February 23, 2014

Sure, in field experiments, you can induce overeating by making people think that they've eaten less than they have (for example, by surreptitiously filling the bowl from below). But does that mean that they're irrational and always subject to error? Or might it mean that people eat until one of two conditions are met: satiation, or end of current portion? If the latter typically comes before the former, people stop eating at the end of the bowl. If the former tends to come before the latter, they'll leave some behind. What interest would a restaurant have in supplying you with more food than you'd really want when doing so might make you less likely to order dessert and will make you more likely to linger longer at the table?

The linked piece also takes a self-help approach to the findings: Try using smaller bowls or smaller plates; don't go for "value" deals if that isn't what you really want to eat.

And so Matt Nolan replied to Gareth:

@garethmorgannz Control still comes from the fact that people can precommit by purchasing smaller packets/portions http://t.co/eI50VkKJdV
— TVHE (@TVHE) February 23, 2014

Morgan replied,

@TVHE You are assuming perfect information
— Gareth Morgan (@garethmorgannz) February 23, 2014

This kind of line really bugs me; it reminds me of the kind of thing that non-economists will come out with when criticising economics. Imperfect information hardly seems to be what's driving food choices. And, perfect knowledge is hardly necessary to make precommitment viable. You just need to know that you often screw up particular kinds of choices.

Odysseus didn't need perfect information about just how lovely the Sirens' call was in order to have the sailors bind him to the mast; he just needed to know that the temptation had proved too tempting for many others. I've never played World of Warcraft, but that doesn't mean that I've erred in deciding never ever to start playing multiplayer online games. I definitely don't have perfect information about it - I've never played it! But I know that I'd find it hard to avoid spending too much time playing online games if I had the added pressure of friends wanting me to come help them on a raid. So I just don't play. Imperfect information has led me to consume what's likely too little gaming relative to an ideal: you don't need to assume perfect information to get precommitment.

Control Yourself

My column on the economics of self-control is up at CANTA. A few choice excerpts:

If the psychologists and the behavioural economists are right, then we effectively have warring factions inside our head, all the time. There's the me who wants to check Twitter rather than finish this column and the me who wants to finish the column so I can get on to other things. They're currently yelling at each other. The same battle plays out in diverse forms for most of us. The preferences revealed then by our actions are the emergent outcomes of the minor battles inside our heads for control.

Some critics of individual choice take this as reason for government intervention to favour one faction over the other in our internal battlefields. In these models, we help smokers by taxing cigarettes and help the obese by forcing them away from food. But remember Baby Pareto's crying: if you really do prefer to stop the short-term hedonist in your head from harming your longer-term interests, some clever entrepreneur can profit. And indeed, when we go out in search of self-disciplining mechanisms, we find that the market provides. There are myriad programmes to block you from surfing the web when you should be working. Problems sticking to an exercise regimen? Hire a personal trainer to mock your lack of effort. If you want to quit drinking, you can get a prescription for a drug that will make you violently nauseous if you do drink.

...

Should we ban Twitter when you can buy the Twitter-blocking programme Freedom for $10 with a 90-day money-back guarantee? Hardly.

Further, people often want excuses for doing embarrassing or disapproved things. While it's true that people are more likely to engage in risky sex after a night out drinking, they're also more likely to report positive sexual experiences after drinking. Should we conclude that drinking made them go out and do bad things, or that people sometimes drink to give themselves an excuse?

If we want to help people exercise self-control and make good choices, we should encourage the use of the readily available market solutions that work to those ends: voluntarily chosen constraints are far less likely to make Baby Pareto cry than are those paternalisms imposed from on-high. We otherwise require government to choose sides in the war inside your head when non-interventionism is likely best. 

Nudge thyself

The Atlantic points out the many ways we now can nudge ourselves. Your smartphone can become your Skinner Box, with operant conditioning apps to mould you to the You your meta-preferences have always wanted you to be.

But, there's a problem.

Of course, none of these tools would have much of a future if the public continued to harbor the kind of Big Brother paranoia that smeared Skinner’s reputation. Should we be wary of utilities that try to shift our energy use or health insurers that try to change our diets? Skinner would have celebrated these efforts, for their capacity to change society on a grand scale. But at what point does the interest of the individual diverge from the interest of corporations or the government—and will we even notice, if we’ve already surrendered all our choices to our iPhones?

The central irony of Skinner’s theory is that to control our behavior, we must accept a fundamental lack of control, acknowledging that our environment ultimately holds the reins. But an individual choosing to alter his environment to affect his behavior is one thing; a corporation or a government altering an individual’s environment to affect his behavior is another. The line between the two scenarios can blur. Nowadays most of us aren’t likely to wonder about the DOT’s motives when it urges us to take the light-rail instead of a cab. If it benefits the commuter, the government, and the environment, then what’s the problem? But the very definition of the Skinner box is that the inhabitant is not in control. In fact, he may not even know he’s in the box.

As opportunities to exercise our meta-preferences become more readily available, the case against considering internalities a market failure gets ever weaker. Let's just keep the apps optional.

Why we don't let the students write the syllabus

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing points to some interesting commentary on user-designed gaming levels. Writes the game designer:

• Players subconsciously calculate the cost-to-benefit ratio of content when deciding if it’s fun. For most MMO players, more reward = more fun. (This is a bitch of a lesson to learn, too. “My custom-scripted quest was so incredibly cool! Why aren’t players doing the quest? Well, yes, the reward was a little sub-par, but so what? You’re telling me they aren’t playing it because of THAT? Players can’t be THAT shallow!” Ha ha, newb.)
• Players aren’t objective reviewers. If you ask them to grade content, they will grade more rewarding content higher than other content even if it isn’t as good by other metrics (like plot, writing, annoyance factor, or originality).
• Many players spend incredible amounts of time finding ways to min-max the system so they can get more power for less effort. That’s part of the fun for many players. So there are tens of thousands of people actively looking for mistakes, loopholes, and gray areas in your game. All the time.

“Yes yes,” the other designers would say, “those lessons from the live team are interesting, but that isn’t exactly the same situation as user-created content, is it? Nobody can say for sure if user-created quests are problematic.” Maybe, just maybe, users could be convinced to grade content fairly. Maybe they would discover how fun it is to run really well-plotted quests instead of just trying to level up as fast as possible. Maybe players can change their stripes. Nope. MMORPG players are as predictable as the sunrise.

When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

Most folks recoil from Nozick's experience machine, and most folks would reckon a hack allowing a direct XP-reset as cheating, but designing and playing levels that achieve the same thing somehow counts as "earned" and fair XP. A lot of this sounds familiar in academia: just replace XP with grades and "custom-scripted quest" with "great essay topic". Things for us to keep in mind as we redesign our major, endorsement, and honours pathways.