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A fourth replication of the pattern was reported by us recently at https://bit.ly/roundedCornersPatternMetroPost, adding evidence to this replication effort.

With a sample of over 7.4 million users (vs. under 1,000 in the original study), the estimated lift was -0.07% (p-value 0.83), so consistent with the null hypothesis of no effect.

I am much intrigued by this article. Moreover it brings home Smith’s commonplace humanity. I find it implausible that Smith did not partake of the romantic pleasures of the French Salon he was associated with in Paris. The women there were in Opera, known as desirable entities among men, who would ave commanded good prices for their services. Neither he and his charge, the young Duke could hardly have been immune to its temptations.

How on earth did this paper make it to the JPE? This comment is not about ideology but about simple logic.

Let us assume, for simplicity, that their empirical tests were conducted correctly. How does their results relate to their conclusion AT ALL? The rise in Ngram shows an increase in fame, not academic statue. The authors provide no justification for the leap in their logic.

Moreover, let us assume that every tests the authors ran are correct, and that Marx’s fame and consequently academic status did rise as a result of the revolution. How on earth does this suggest that Marx is NOT worthy of this? (I’m not saying he is or isn’t. I just cannot toloerate the lack of logic)

Suppose Marx’s work in any field is trash. Why do researchers in other field keep discussing Marx and his work? Is it because all other fields are stupid?

Or, perhaps, there is a perfect economic explanation. Due to the lack of, well, the internet, and the fact that French and Germen were arguably the more important scientific languages, the work of Marx did not receive it’s desired attention IN CERTAIN FIELDS. (Obviously, Marx’s econ theory in capital iii was wrong, but his other ideas could be useful). In other words, there was a market failure. The war as well as the revolution introduced the work of Marx to many, thus resolving the inefficiency in the market for ideas due to cost of information.

Perhaps the best annecdotal evidence to reject the authors’ claims is the fact that van Gogh only sold one painting when he was alive. The authors might believe that van Gogh’s fame is accidental and completely attributable to the exhibition of his work organized by his sister eleven years after his death! Why was van Gogh’s work well received after the publicity? Why was Marx’s work well received after the publicity? The authors don’t seem to bother. They are completely statisfied some statistical artifact.

shudder not “shutter”

This is an interesting article, and though I certainly understand the arguments and the existence of a trade-off between using English and the local majority language in higher education, I think there are additional benefits associated with using English other than the ability to disseminate one’s research to an international audience and preparing a small minority of students for a globalized labor market.

My practical experience of this is as a professor who uses English to teach students in a Taiwanese MBA program. As the authors note, the obvious benefit of using English is greater opportunities for international collaborations and interactions. Now, obviously, it would be easier (in one sense) for the domestic students (about 50% of the total) to interact in Chinese than in English. And it would also make it easier to do research on local conditions, and the difference is arguably greater when the languages are from different language families. But there are also some other factors to consider that seem as important as the ones mentioned in the paper:

1 The effects on teacher-student interaction depend on the cultural context. While Taiwanese students as a rule speak better Chinese than English, they tend to be more reluctant to have informal discussions in Chinese. This is related to more “hierarchical” traditions in which students are not supposed to ask questions. Thus in certain contexts, English may encourage more interactivity (this is generally true in most parts of Asia).

2 There is also the hypothesis – and there is empirical research that supports this – that the experience of cognitive dissonance stimulates creativity. Using a foreign language may increase cognitive dissonance and thus make them more open to new ways of thinking about various problems.

3 As a teacher, I have found that classroom discussions become much more interesting and insightful if there are students with dissimilar cultural backgrounds in the same class. Using Chinese instead of English would (almost) eliminate participation by students from other backgrounds (our international students take classes in Chinese, but their Chinese is with few exceptions at a much lower level of proficiency than the English spoken by our domestic students). Indeed, one of the main reasons that we promote English and recruit foreign students is that we want more classroom interactivity.

4 Exposing domestic students to foreign professors may be desirable in itself. It is obviously in my self-interest to claim this, but there is a growing realization here that it is easier to break out of the local preference for learning-by-memorization if the teacher is from a cultural background where rote learning is less common than here (again, this is a common problem in many Asian contexts). Note that most of the internationally recruited professors would not be here if they had to interact with students or at meetings in another language than English.

In some ways, I think the authors assume that the education system should adjust to the state of the environment as it is. But what if the aim is to contribute to a transformation of society? For example, one aim could be to make it more probable that students embark on an international career than otherwise, while simultaneously increasing the attractiveness of the locality of the educational institution as a destination for skilled workers from elsewhere.

Ok. So the US is the worst country in the world for mass shootings. Why? There’s a reason. It isn’t gun ownership. That doesn’t make sense because we have always been a nation of gun owners. Something changed in our history. I posit that it is our media coverage that is the primary difference. At some point in our history, the media decided that it was more important to sell coverage than it was to report news. At that point, the sensationalism of news media became the tipping point that has fueled this shooting frenzy. Of course I can’t prove it. Hence, the term “posit”. If we look around, though, we are the only nation in the world that combines guns with news sensationalism. That is the deadly combination. Let’s just think about that for a moment and see what we come up with. Thoughts?

A good exposée of ideological bias in academic publishing.

This day 31 Aug 2022 we revised the pdfs to make rectify our reproduction of the 1826 error—that is, we’ve changed “myself” to “yourself.” Thank you again Professor Tasset!

Outstanding, thank you so much Professor Tasset. We are reproducing both pieces in a volume from CL Press, and we are making the correction. The erroneous “I mean myself” is in the 1826 Hume edition, the text of which was used by Project Gutenberg, which is where we lifted the English translations of Rousseau from. Thank you again!

It is incredible that this is not front page news for all sociologists and the cause of pushes for institutional reforms in the direction of open science. Every psychologist knowns the name Diedrik Stapel now, and his actions were central to the massive reforms that took place. Granted that Eric Stewart was not as famous or had as much grant funding throughout his career, but he certainly was a name in sociology.

Amazing how everything Lankford claims has so easily been demonstrated to be false. Any academic that refuses to show his data and methodology is already suspect.

good

Very nice article. It seems Hayek was a rogue who cheated on his wife and wanted to abandon her and his children and have his friend Robbins support them. That does not detract from Hayek’s greatness as a scholar, except perhaps for casting doubt on his judgement about the importance of laws and norms supporting the family, which was surely clouded by wanting to justify his own selfish and agreement-breaking behavior.

Eugene F. Miller, Editor’s Note, Hume’s Essays (LF), p. xxvii:

“Many years ago, while a doctoral student under the Committee [on Social Thought, at the U of Chicago], I first studied Hume’s writings in research that was guided by Friedrich A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Joseph Cropsey. The Committee on Social Thought, more than any academic program that I know of, has sought to recover the unity and comprehensiveness of human knowledge that was lost after Hume’s time, with the division of learning into departments or disciplines.”

This article is more evidence that Jeff Hummel is one of America’s greatest living economists. (Too bad he doesn’t do more math so he can be more widely recognized as such!) A point that I wish he had elaborated upon was just how much repression would be necessary to end criminal activity by tamping down on substitutes for cash. Obviously, criminals are going to use the least costly method of payment and that may well vary by level. At the retail level, one can imagine that “dime bags” ($10 worth of weed or some other drug, which fluctuates in quantity/quality with supply and demand, much like the penny loaf used to) are replaced with “Camel bags,” or a sealed, excise stamped pack of Camel smokes. The Camels can then be false invoiced to a front and vended via debit card or whatever and come out clean.

Better yet, a retail outlet could sell “tickets” to some fictional event with the understanding that certain “tickets” are actually prepayment for drugs, prostitutes, etc., which can then be tendered and destroyed by the seller. That’s what Idris Elba as Stringer Bell would have done (he was a student of Adam Smith fans of The Wire will recall). So now are you going to tamp down on all tickets too? And for those of you not conversant with drug deals (I only know what I’ve seen on The Corner, The Wire, Weeds, Breaking Bad, etc.) there is a moral hazard involved in cash deals too … the cash is tendered to A but B delivers the drugs at some other time and place. So the ticket ruse would not represent more moral hazard than market competition and info. can handle.

Wholesale payments could be made in gold, esp. if its market price stays up. Yeah, there are added transaction costs here (like assaying the gold) but they’ll soon be minimized by competition. So then you have to tamp down on the precious metals and we’re looking at an authoritarian state, one that will stamp on civil liberties and punish everyone because a few people are breaking laws some of which maybe even shouldn’t be on the books in the first place.

The government doesn’t have to supply cash but to outlaw it in all forms is a violation of natural rights that would have to lead to Revolution, just at the Financial Money Meter reproduced in my Hamilton Unbound (2002) predicted.

Note that an alternative to evolution as a source of innate morality is God. The implications are similar, for purposes of this article.

You’d find this article interesting—- “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand,” Helen Joyce, PlusMath.org (2001)

Peter Schwartz discusses the relationship between the regulatory state and the welfare state in his book “In Defense of Selfishness”. There is an excerpt from the book in this blog article:

http://peterschwartz.com/if-the-government-feeds-you-it-will-tell-you-what-you-may-and-may-not-eat/

The article started well with a discussion of the political liberals of India.

Thereafter it got derailed entirely, by including academics like Jagdish Bhagwati and Deepak Lal who are grossly illiberal and have actively supported socialist and arguably anti-Muslim BJP (in particular, both of these “liberals” rejected any interaction with actual political liberals and actively promoted, instead, the violently illiberal Modi during the 2014 Indian elections).

It then discusses think tanks, some of which (like CCS) have been entirely and actively supportive of socialist parties.

Worse, it entirely blanks out Sharad Joshi’s work for Indian liberalism, including through his Swatantra Bharat Party.

And it entirely blanks out the work of SV Raju in taking the flag of Indian liberalism forward for over 50 years through Freedom First, including through his writ petition against the mandatory requirement for political parties to swear allegiance to socialism.

And it entirely blanks out my work since 1998, including through the India Policy Institute, the Freedom Team of India, the Sone Ki Chidiya Federation and Swarna Bharat Party. My work has been 100 per cent devoted to political liberalism, towards which none of the post Rajaji alleged “liberals” cited this article provided either any intellectual or moral support – since they have been smitten by socialist political parties. And one should not forget the role of young political liberals like Anil Sharma and now, Sanjay Sonawani.

One would have expected at least a modicum of research capability from the authors, given that I myself have elaborately written on wikipedia on this subject and run a political liberal blog which receives over a thousand unique visits each day. It is all there on the internet. However, these authors did not care to type their question into google.

Overall, this article must be rated a C.

John Quiggin: Thanks for your comment on Pew. You have a good point about the importance of baseline numbers. Unfortunately the Pew survey is unclear as to who its survey respondents are. They indicate that they surveyed the membership of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS publishes journals, and it includes a large share of academics. Also, its membership includes many outside the hard sciences, specifically in the notorious field of psychology. Hence, the Pew survey isn’t useful as a baseline. I just finished a study in which I actually found a higher rate of D affiliation among hard scientists in elite liberal arts colleges than in the Pew survey, so there is something wrong with it. In fact. some of the past AAAS presidents have been psychologists. A good survey of nonacademic scientists would be a good baseline. When you find one, please let me know. Thanks. ML

I enjoyed your article, not least because it helped to familiarize me with a literature that I have read only a little of. As you know, I am not a Smith scholar. I have been drawn into TMS because of unanswered, or badly answered, research questions in the experimental (and behavioral) economics literature. For me TMS provides a comprehensive means of understanding the predictive and modeling failures (and successes) of economics since the 1870s fork in the road.

On the distinction between empathy and normative sympathy. As I see it, we can only imagine what we would feel in another’s situation, never what that person feels. But through our interaction, when I conjecture and take action that misreads what that person feels, and receive corrective feedback, I am aware of error in the rules I follow when mapping propriety as a function of circumstances into an action. I modify my rule-following based on fellow-feeling, and thence my actions.

As I see Smith on morality, it is social order. Smith and the Scots are trying to understand the invisible forces that account for it. Smith came to understand his own program better through the six editions of TMS over 31 years. Hence, the decline, but not complete elimination of the Divine—he knew that you can’t get purpose out of a better understanding of how things work; it does not pop out of the observations. This explains his discussion of how in “operations…of the mind” we often fail to “distinguish the efficient from the final cause.” He is trying to see how human society adapts, learns and becomes fitter, where it does, and where it goes wrong where it does not. It was an incomplete model, but a powerful thinking machine that was not a lost legacy in economics, but one never found. The success of WN swamped TMS, so who cared about human sentiment? I love the return to Smith and a focus on adjustment processes in rule space.