Cristo Rey schools

The concept of having students work to earn their tuition was borne of financial necessity. Children like Muñoz are desperate to escape the gangs and low expectations of big city public schools, but few can afford the full cost of a private education.

Over the past decade, though, members of the Cristo Rey network have discovered that requiring students to work does more than keep tuition low. It teaches children that there’s life beyond high school, with its teen-centered obsessions on things that don’t matter. It teaches them that working hard can help them get ahead—a lesson students from far nicer areas than the Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood could stand to learn, too. The model has helped revive Catholic inner-city education, and it offers some lessons for education more broadly. Anyone can create one school that works. The Cristo Rey Network has hit upon one of the few education models that can actually be replicated with reasonable success. It seems to be working everywhere it’s been tried.

More from Doublethink.

In other education news:

1) How to kill charter schools

2) Privatized student loans

Engineering Jihad

Tyler Cowen points to a great paper which connects terrorism to my former profession:

We can thus conclude that among violent Islamic radicals engineers are two to four times more likely to be found than the null hypothesis would predict.

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of “monism” – ‘why argue when there is one best solution’ – and of “simplism” – ‘if only people were rational, remedies would be simple’.

... Engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics, 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot.

Further, the paper goes on to argue that engineers get dangerous when there is a lack of engineering opportunities, as is the case in most Muslim countries. Saudi Arabia is supposedly the main exception, i.e. there are plenty of opportunities there for engineers and so Saudi Arabian terrorists are not disproportionately drawn from engineers. But doesn't Saudi Arabia produce as many terrorists per capita as just about any other country? How do we explain that?

Forgiveness

An atheist friend, worldly wise and well travelled, told me there is no connection between religion and ethics. How else do we explain the Amish of Lancaster County:

Many from Nickel Mines have pointed out that forgiveness is a journey, that you need help from your community of faith and from God ... to make and hold on to a decision not to become a hostage to hostility.

When we were rational

Stuart Armstrong at OvercomingBias has a good post on my new favorite topic:

In the real world, we could always hope that the march of science could replace superstitious explanations with truer ones. But the truth is already out there in these virtual worlds, and is ignored. If these games are the shape of things to come, it might well be that the zenith of rationality is already in the past.

Here's an exerpt from my recent paper "Overcoming Selfishness: Religion and the Alternatives":

Self-deception and belief go hand in hand. It is likely that self-deception evolved as a means to create and maintain belief, because as I have argued, belief works. In his 2002 Nobel lecture, Vernon Smith discusses some of his experiments involving the trust game. He finds that reciprocity is behind cooperation, not altruism or other-regarding utility. In other words, we achieve cooperation by deluding ourselves about our own altruism.
Immediately preceding the “invisible hand” statement, Adam Smith remarks on how wealth is created through the self-deception of the wealthy:

We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and oeconomy of the great; and admire how everything is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in the complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. (TMS, IV.1.9-10)

But Adam Smith generally sees self-deception as an irrational and unsocial weakness that should be corrected:

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behavior under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavor to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavor by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so. (TMS, III.4.4)

I think Smith, and most economists who have followed him, have failed to recognize the ecological value of individually irrational self-deception, i.e. its role in facilitating beliefs which benefit the group.
Robert Trivers (2006), the evolutionary sociobiologist, claims that self-deception evolved as a way to better deceive others. But he recognizes there must be a positive side as well, referring to what McCloskey (2006) and myself would call Hope: “Life is intrinsically future oriented and mental operations that keep a positive future orientation at the forefront result in better future outcomes (though perhaps not as good as those projected). The existence of the placebo effect is another example of this principle (though it requires the cooperation of another person ostensibly dispensing medicine). It would be very valuable to integrate our understanding of this kind of positive self-deception into the larger framework of self-deceptions we have been describing.”
Again, the positive side to self-deception is that it facilitates trust. Why else would it survive the selection process, and why would it continue to be so attractive? Despite the Enlightenment, we are drawn more than ever to myth-makers, inspirational speakers, emotional politicians, and thoughtless celebrities, not scientists and skeptics. Libertarians and economists know this from experience.

Addendum: Michael Prescott shows us the superstitions of a skeptic, Susan Blackmore. (Hat tip to commenter M.C.)

The superstition economy, or how self-deception makes the world go 'round

That might just be the title of my dissertation. Tyler brings up self-deception, just as I'm working out my paper on the role of belief, often delusional belief, in securing trust. Here's the abstract:

Belief constitutes hope, and hope is essential to all entrepreneurial activity, as it enables trust. The critical belief is belief in selflessness, within yourself and others, which is self-deceptive in as much as we are naturally selfish. So it is costly to produce, maintain, and signal a credible commitment to this belief, which religion provides via sacrifice and stigma. Numerous secular institutions compete along the same dimension, and are characterized by belief, sacrifice, and stigma. Namely, government, health care, education, romantic love, and others have to some degree become substitutes for religion. However, they require more sacrifice than religion, due to the problem of monitoring, and in particular, more costly self-deception. Better information improves monitoring, and reduces self-deception. In a world of improving information, this may explain the rise of secularism. However, so long as information is less than perfect, religion will remain, as the existence of God cannot be disproved.

Remember folks, I'm trying to maintain methodological atheism here.

Stillness

So, this is the longest I've gone without posting. I sort of gave it up for Lent, or at least the obsessive-compulsive urge to post everyday. Now you'll just get extremely lengthy posts whenever I feel like it. At least during Lent. The change of format is the result of a rather exceptional experience I had this past weekend at All Saint's Sisters of the Poor, an Anglican convent in Catonsville, Maryland. For those who don't know me well, this is not my typical weekend activity. But Sammy recommended it to a group of us at church, and I'm very glad he did. I'll try to relate it to you, just the interesting parts, hopefully.

Sister Catherine Grace told us to focus on stillness, which I suppose is to be expected at a convent. She recommended we wander around the property and observe nature. Something about the place was so serene and absolutely quiet (the picture doesn't convey it). She told us how she gave up all her possessions and joined the convent 45 years ago. She talked about the different kinds of people who have come through. It was a home for disabled children, and a hospice center, and now a retreat. She talked about the three strangers who came to die there, each prejudiced against the other, and how they became inseparable friends, and died within 4 hours of each other.

The guest house was full of interesting literature. I read some of the newsletters, tucked away in a bin labeled "Christian vices." These jumped out at me:
1) curiosity
2) self-expectation
3) pride
To the extent curiosity is self-serving, it is a sin. If it interferes with one's relationship with God, it is a sin. The same goes for self-expectation and pride. Clearly, these are virtues to most people, especially academics. So are the sisters just a bunch of fringe nuts? No, I think they are living consistently with an essential element of Christianity, which is the death of self. The ultimate story of selflessness is, of course, the life of Jesus.

I'm a believer, so this has meaning for me. It effects my incentives. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. This is why I think economists should pay attention to religion. That's what I've been doing this week, while trying to keep the curiosity, self-expectation, and pride from consuming me. Are you sensing the cognitive dissonance? Larry Iannaccone says the scientific study of religion demands methodological atheism. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the mark of genius is the ability to hold simultaneously two conflicting ideas. Maybe that's why so many geniuses kill themselves. They run into their other persona and it scares the shit out of them. I don't think very many of us are geniuses, certainly not me, and I think even geniuses can't fully separate their sensibilities from their rational thoughts. Economists pretend to be objective, probably largely to signal intelligence, but it generally just results in deception and bias (see Dan Klein for more on this). However, I think figuring out the degree and the context in which people can become objective is important for economists, as that is the domain in which our models work best, and beyond which, we need to augment the theory.

Addendum: Here's what G. K. Chesterton said about it:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

A politician I don't hate

Just the opposite, I think I'm smitten, like one of those guys Tyler was talking about.
Here's some background, from the Washington Post review of her new book:

In the first scene of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a child of 5, sitting on a grass mat. Her grandmother is teaching her to recite the names of her ancestors, as all Somali children must learn to do. "Get it right," her grandmother warns. "They are your bloodline. . . . If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone."

Thus begins the extraordinary story of a woman born into a family of desert nomads, circumcised as a child, educated by radical imams in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, taught to believe that if she uncovered her hair, terrible tragedies would ensue. It's a story that, with a few different twists, really could have led to a wretched life and a lonely death, as her grandmother warned. But instead, Hirsi Ali escaped -- and transformed herself into an internationally renowned spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women.

The break began when she slipped away from her family on her way to a forced marriage in Canada and talked her way into political asylum in Holland, using a story she herself calls "an invention." Soon after arriving, she removed her head scarf to see if God would strike her dead. He did not. Nor were there divine consequences when, defying her ancestors, she donned blue jeans, rode a bicycle, enrolled in university, became a Dutch citizen, began to speak publicly about the mistreatment of Muslim women in Holland and won election to the Dutch parliament.

But tragedy followed fame. In 2004, Hirsi Ali helped a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, make a controversial film, "Submission," about Muslim women suffering from forced marriages and wife beating. Van Gogh was murdered by an angry Muslim radical in response, and Hirsi Ali went into hiding. The press began to explore her past, discovering the "inventions" that she had used to get her refugee status. The Dutch threatened to revoke her citizenship; the American Enterprise Institute offered her a job in Washington. And thus she came to be among us.

Look out. If I'm at all normal, we'll be changing the Constitution one day to make her President.

Addendum: Here is her totally unreasonable time slot on Book-TV.

Lying liars

Robin lists 10 ways to detect lies. I think he knows this is a lie, that it is of no use. Those who read the list, already know it. Those who skip it are not interested in finding the truth anyway. I think all of us live on lies to some extent, and some more than others. I fancy myself as a truth seeker, and I think Robin does too (just look at the names of our blogs, for God's sake). Libertarians generally see themselves as crusaders. And it turns a lot of people off. My mother says I sound like Jesus, and she doesn't mean that as a complement.

But I know I couldn't live without lies. For instance, when I was taking economics at Lund in Sweden, they treated me like royalty, I suppose just because I'm American. One young Swede once blurted out in class, "But you're brilliant!", referring to me. I didn't take him too seriously, since he barely knew me, but it's something I'll not soon forget either. It feeds the ego, even if it is a lie.

Last night a friend told me some horrible stories about her on-again, off-again relationship with a pathological liar. She seemed to truly wonder how she could swallow so many lies. I suspect they served a purpose. He's a salesman who knows what the customer wants. Or, alternatively, we can blame him, via a kind of Say's Law of lies, ie the supply creates the demand. Regardless, it is clear that both sides gained something. At least in the short term, the lies expanded the opportunity set.

The same kind of self-deception is behind many of our most cherished institutions. You atheists will immediately think of religion. Indeed, Larry Iannaccone has used this same language, claiming that religion exists in large part because it expands the opportunity set, from the mundane to the transcendent. He does not, however, call it self-deception, since we simply have no evidence one way or the other as to the existence of God.

Another example is democracy and the whole notion of the State. We all know the politicians are lying to us, and yet many of us continue to vote for them. It is a kind of religion for the voter, since he is basically ignorant of the evidence on government effectiveness. For libertarians, of course, this whole arrangement is appalling, because we've seen the evidence and it doesn't look good.

The same applies to health care. The best evidence indicates that, on average, doctors really don't help much at all. Yet, we treat them as experts, and insist on policies which subsidize health care and health insurance.

As Robin pointed out in class this week, this is essentially no different than our faith in financial "experts." We gladly fork over millions of dollars in fees to pay for actively managed mutual funds, when, on average, they do worse than index funds.

The list goes on and on, from academia to the main stream media.

So why do we believe experts, even when the preponderance of evidence contradicts them? Why do we believe lies? And why do lying institutions prosper in prosperous economies? Do lies somehow make the world go round? Or are they just the baggage of civilization, an unfortunate and unavoidable human condition? Perhaps, just as Fischer Black's noise traders provide liquidity in financial markets, lies and those who trade in them provide a kind of liquidity in the extended order.

Addendum: Women, you're in trouble. Apparently, only criminals are good at detecting lies.

Enlightenment 101

Emory University, apparently responding to my post on academic atheism, has hired the Dalai Lama. Holy shit. Is he tenure track? This definately presents a serious challenge to George Mason's own Center for the Economic Study of Religion.

Religion in China

More evidence of what Peter Berger has called the "desecularization of the world":

If the party is still trying to keep its members atheist, it is fighting a losing battle.

What's interesting is there appears to be a fairly even split among the five recognized religions, at least according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Buddhism claims the most adherents (100M) and clergy (200,000), while Protestantism claims the most places of worship (55,000). I suspect this diversity is a major factor behind the government's shift towards religious freedom. That and apparently the government fat cats have figured out how to milk the religious, which probably means they favor the religions which tolerate bribery. But I think China is large enough that the religious diversity factor is sending them down the path towards a free market in religion. It may one day end up being more free than many European countries, which continue to favor an official state religion.

Tolerance as a virtue

As Fr. Connor argued yesterday, that's the gospel according to Oprah, but it is not the Christian Gospel. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue.

Well, I checked up on this, and he's right, there is no obvious way to construe any of the seven virtues as tolerance. By the way, this sort of thing is news to me, since I was not raised Catholic, and spent most of my formal education in public schools. I have an excellent grasp of "current affairs" and "Alabama history", but no real idea what the hell moral philosophy is.

What I've learned is from economists like Deirdre McCloskey, who argues in her new book that economists have for too long focused on prudence, and ignored the other six virtues: temperance, courage, justice, love, hope, and faith. This derives from the grand daddy himself, Adam Smith, whose most influential book, "The Wealth of Nations", deals primarily with prudence. His other book, "Theory of Moral Sentiments", deals with temperance. She argues he intended to write a book about justice as well, but died before he could. P. J. O'Rourke, in his new book, argues that Adam Smith instead lost the nerve, after realizing that his policy prescriptions at the end of "The Wealth of Nations" were rediculous.

Fr. Connor further argued that our national obsession with tolerance derives from the Civil War, in which more Americans died than in all our other wars combined. I've always found political correctness objectionable, but never wondered really where it came from. My experience in Europe tells me Fr. Connor is at least right about the facts: we are different. In Europe, you can call a spade a spade. Of course, this is also means you can call an immigrant all sorts of horrible things. But I don't think European zenophobia and racism derives from this liberty. Rather it comes from homogeneity, and specifically a lack of interaction with immigrants.

The same can be seen in the American South, where very little immigration in the last 200 years has produced a relatively homogeneous culture. No doubt, the South is a richly colorful place, and quite unique and interesting when compared to, say, the Midwest. But that's living off the past. Today it is marked more by intolerance. Nothing a few million Mexicans can't fix.

Addendum: Turns out immigration is more complicated than I thought.

The second largest economy

Turning now to something I really know nothing about, how did Japan get so rich? I'm reminded of this persistent question, which went unanswered through two semesters of macro, by Fr. Connor's coffee hour spiel, "The Gospel According to Oprah." Somehow, he worked in a reference to W. E. Deming's role in transforming the post-WW2 Japanese economy, as a bean-counter! Control charts, baby, control charts.

Perhaps also the Macarthur constitution had something to do with it, although the important elements, ie guarantees of individual freedoms, appear to have already been there in the Meiji constitution of 1889.

I'm also aware of Mancur Olson's argument that Japan and Germany rebounded so vigoursly after WW2 because they were suddenly freed of the sclerotic effect of special interest groups, which were destroyed with everything else during the war. Now of course the special interests have fully recovered. However, I'm pretty sure the important transition in Japan, as in Germany, occured before the war. I just don't know what it was.

Rodney Stark suggests that religion never helped much. He shows that, unlike the monotheistic religions, and Hinduism which he argues is effectively monotheistic, beliefs in Shintoism and Buddhism are not correlated with moral beliefs*. The difference arises because Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism all posit the existence of a moral God, whereas Shintoism, Buddhism, and Taoism do not. So, then I hear that crime in Japan is almost non-existent. What gives? I know at least 3 of you have lived there, so let's hear it.

*I corrected this.

Why are academics twice as likely to be atheists?

Robin Hanson asks the question, Tyler Cowen and Jane Galt pick up on it, but I alone have just written a paper on the topic of atheism in academia. This is no conincidence. All except Jane are professors of mine, as is Larry Iannaccone, who beat us all to the punch on the economics of religion.

Here are my comments posted at the other blogs:

The 1975 Carnegie Foundation National Survey of Higher Education revealed the same basic facts, especially that academics are twice as likely to be atheists. It also revealed that atheism is highest among social scientists, whereas "hard" scientists to not exhibit higher than average levels of atheism. I figure there are four ways to explain this:

1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it. Sounds harsh, but this is Adam Smith's idea.
2) Also from Adam Smith, academics are prone to group-think, and produce sciences which are "a mere useless and pedantick heap of sophistry and nonsense." Here, the bad science is the secularization thesis, which has dominated the study of religion for 100 years.
3) Academics seek fame more than fortune, and this is at odds with Christian theology.
4) Academics seek to persuade and influence society, partly because their minority views put them at a disadvantage. This applies to atheism as well as extreme political views.

I do find support for all of these. Let me know if you'd like to see the paper.

Addendum: More from Arnold Kling, and my posted comment:

I don't doubt there is a certain degree of socialization going on, but I still think selection explains most of it. If I'm recalling correctly, this is supported by Wuthnow's article "Science and the sacred" found in "The sacred in a secular age" edited by Phillip Hammond.

I'm going to go check that out again myself. There's a lot of good research on this summarized in that article.