Multitasking or Parallel vs Serial Thinking

It is useful to know what one is good at, but also what one is bad at. 

The example I am thinking of is multitasking, doing and thinking about several things at once. The first clear evidence of my inability to do it well appeared decades ago in the context of my medieval hobby, which included combat with medieval weapons done as a sport. I was much worse at melee combat—one group of fighters against another—than at single combat. In single combat I only had to focus on the opponent I was fighting. In melee, I had to be, or at least should have been, simultaneously keeping track of everyone else near me. And I wasn't.

The same problem showed up much later in the context of World of Warcraft. Group combat there, a raid with a group of from five to forty people, requires the player to keep track of what he is doing, what other people in the group are saying—in the form of typed messages on the screen—and other things going on around him. I focused on what I was doing and frequently missed important things other people were saying. Interestingly enough, that was less of a problem if the group was using software that permitted voice communication, so that one kind of information was coming in mostly through my ears, another through my eyes. 

It is not just that paying attention to multiple things is hard. My daughter, playing the same game, can not only pay attention to everything in the game, she can also conduct one or two independent conversations, in typed text, while doing so. Pretty clearly, it is a real difference in abilities, whether innate or learned I do not know.

Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I had observed the same pattern in an entirely different context, the difference between how I think and how Richard Epstein, a friend and past colleague, thinks. I usually describe the difference as my thinking in series, Richard in parallel. It shows up when he is sketching the argument for some conclusion. 

A implies B. B implies C. C ...

At which point I demonstrate that B doesn't really imply C, that there is a hole in the argument. That is no problem for Richard, who promptly points out that A also implies B', a somewhat different proposition than B, which implies C', from which he can eventually work his way back to D, or perhaps E or F, and so to the conclusion that the original line of argument was intended to establish. Pretty clearly, he is running a network of multiple lines of argument in his head and only has to find some set of links in the network that gets him where he is going. I am focusing on running a single line of argument. Hence parallel vs series.

Nonconforming ≠ Substandard

President Obama may have secured a measure of political relief for himself by allowing substandard insurance policies to be renewed for another year.

… 

 

“The president told me that if I like my health insurance, I could keep it. And that shouldn’t have an expiration date,” said Crusco, who has been covered under a nonconforming plan that did not cover maternity care. That fit her needs because, she says, she doesn’t plan to have more children.”

One of the things that irritates me about news coverage of the Obamacare mess is the willingness of many in the media to describe plans that do not fit the requirements of the ACA as "substandard."

The two quotes above, both from the same news story, nicely illustrate the rhetorical trick. A plan that does not cover maternity care is nonconforming, since it does not conform to the ACA requirement that all insurance plans provide maternity benefits.  It is substandard for someone who does not plan to have children, possibly a man or an elderly woman who is unable to have children, only if one assumes that the standard of what all plans ought to cover for everyone is determined by what Congress wrote into the act, which, as the example shows, is crazy. It should not take more than about thirty seconds of thought for a fair minded journalist to realize that at least some plans that do not fit the ACA's requirements are what their purchasers do and should want. 

Which suggests that quite a lot of journalists are either incapable of thought or engaged in deliberately biased reporting.

More on Selective Enforcement as Legislation

My previous post raised the question in the context of Obama's apparent intent to unilaterally modify his healthcare legislation. But it is an interesting problem more generally. The theory of our system is that the legislature makes laws and the executive enforces them. But laws cannot, in practice, be perfectly enforced, so the executive is necessarily making the decision about what resources to allocate to enforcing what laws. Where can or should one draw the line between that decision and using selective enforcement to rewrite the law?

This is at least the third time that Obama has offered to do it. The first was when, during his first campaign, he said that under his administration federal marijuana law would not be enforced against people using medical marijuana in conformance with state law—a promise that he promptly broke. The second was when he announced that certain categories of illegal immigrants would not be prosecuted. Revising Obamacare is the third.

Imagine the following scenario at the state level. The governor of California proposes a bill to tax cars that burn gasoline but not electric cars. The bill fails to pass. He responds by announcing that he has instructed the state police that they should enforce speed limits strictly against gasoline powered cars but only stop electric cars if they are going at least twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. 

I am not a constitutional scholar and do not know whether there are legal limits to executive power that would prevent such a tactic. It is legal to selectively tax gasoline powered cars. It is legal for the police to devote their limited resources to catching some speeders but not others, for instance by patrolling highways where they believe speeding is a particularly serious problem. Is it legal to accomplish the substance of the former under the form of something like the latter? 

More generally, what are the limits of such an approach? The executive is not entitled to enforce a law the legislature has not passed. But is it entitled to selectively enforce one that the legislature has passed in order to achieve the effect of one that it has not passed?

Comments from those who know more about constitutional law, state and federal, than I do are welcome.

Selective Enforcement as Legislation

The poet Ibn Harma performed before the caliph, and so delighted was the Prince of the Muslims that he asked the poet to name his reward.

"The reward that I want from the Prince of the Muslims is that he send instructions to his officials in the city of Medina commanding that when I am found dead drunk upon the pavement and brought in by the city guard, I be released from the penalty prescribed for that offense."

"That is God's law, not mine," the Caliph replied. "I cannot change it. Name another reward."

"There is nothing else I desire from the Prince of the Muslims."

The Caliph thought a moment, then sent instructions to his officials in Medina commanding that if Ibn Harma was found drunk and brought in for punishment, he should receive sixty strokes of the lash as the law commanded. But whoever brought him in should receive eighty.

It is one of my favorite medieval Islamic law and economics stories. In theory, Islamic law is not made by the sovereign but deduced by legal scholars from the Koran and the Hadith, traditions of what Mohammed and his companions did and said. The Caliph accordingly could not change the law against drunkenness. He could not even change the punishment, since it is a Hadd offense, one with a fixed punishment deduced from the religious sources. He could, however, repeal it de facto although not de jure by changing the incentive to enforce it.

I was reminded of this by today's news. President Obama is attempting to forestall congressional efforts to alter the Obamacare legislation by doing it himself without appeal to congressional authorization. Presumably the theory is that, since he is in charge of the executive branch and the executive branch is in charge of enforcing the law, he can simply announce that the part of the law forbidding insurance companies from continuing to offer plans that do not meet the requirements of the new law will not be enforced, at least as far as existing customers of such plans are concerned.

This raises two questions. One is a question of constitutional law, whether what he is doing is in law, as it obviously is in fact, a violation of the division of powers between the legislative and executive branches. The other is a political question. Arguably, the political effects of the present mess will have at least partly died down over the next year. Is Obama making things worse for his party rather than better by pushing the next failure, the result of good risks choosing to keep existing plans and leaving the plans sold through the market to the bad risks, making them very expensive, to just before the next election?

How to Run a Restaurant

My previous three posts were serious proposals for changes that I thought worth making. This one is more nearly a puzzle. In the other cases I can see plausible reasons why the changes might not have occurred even if I am right in thinking them desirable. In this case, I take the nonexistence of what I propose as pretty strong evidence that I am missing something, that it is for some reason a considerably less good idea than I think.

When I sit down in a restaurant, I am consuming two different things—the food produced and the use of seat, table, heating or air conditioning, the part of the restaurant I occupy and the services it provides. I can choose to eat lots of expensive food fast, in which case I consume lots of the first and little of the second. Alternatively, I could order something inexpensive, perhaps a bowl of soup, and linger over it for an hour. 

Since the restaurant charges only for the food, I have no direct pecuniary incentive to economize on my consumption of space. Since the price of the food has to cover the cost of both food and space, I have too strong an incentive to economize on my consumption of food. If desert costs the restaurant a dollar to produce, is priced at three dollars, and is worth two dollars to me, I don't buy it—a net loss to me plus the restaurant of a dollar in potential surplus. 

The obvious solution to these inefficiencies is to price food and space separately. When I sit down, a clock at the table starts running. When I leave, my bill includes a certain amount per minute for the time, plus the cost of what I ordered. If I want to spend two hours chatting with a friend over tea and scones, I can do it without worrying about angry looks from the waiter—and pay for it. My total bill should average out about the same, since the combined bill still has to cover the same costs. But now the separate cost of sitting and of eating is being billed separately, giving me the right incentive with regard to each.

The puzzle is why no restaurant, so far as I know, is run that way. Some have crude approximations, such as a cover charge. But why not simply price food and space separately, just as rental cars sometimes price use of the car, mileage, and gas separately?

How to Admit Students to College

Colleges base their admission decisions on a variety of different criteria. One of them is how well the student can write. At present they have two ways of measuring that, neither of which is worth much.

One way is by the SAT writing exam. The problem is that consistent grading across a large number of students requires something close to machine grading, human graders checking the essay against a simple and objective set of criteria. That might tell you how well the student has trained for the test but it is not very good evidence of how well the student can write.

The other way is by having a prospective student send in an essay for the admission people at the college to evaluate. However good a job they do of evaluating the essay, they have no way of knowing who wrote it. The applicant may have written it entirely himself, he may have written it himself and had it gone over by someone more expert in writing, he may have hired someone to write it for him. I have no inside knowledge, but given how important college admissions have become I would be astonished if no such market exists.

There is a simple solution. Many applicants visit a college before applying. As part of the process, put the applicant in a room with a computer and a list of topics and give him an hour to write an essay. If the applicant is not going to visit the college, perhaps there is an alumnus living near him who would be willing to provide the computer and monitor the writing. If multiple colleges want applicants to write essays under controlled conditions, it should be in the interest of someone, perhaps the organization that now administers SAT exams, to arrange suitable facilities in cities scattered across the country.

It seems like an obvious idea and I do not know why, so far as I can tell, it has not yet happened.

How to Buy a House

If you go to a real estate agent in search of a house, there are two questions you are likely to be asked. One is how much you want to spend. The other is what sort of house you are looking for—how large, how many rooms of what sort, in what location. 

It is in the agent's interest to ask the first question; since his commission is a percentage of the sales price, he would like to sell you the most expensive house you are willing to buy. It is not clear that it is in your interest to answer it. Even if you can afford a two hundred thousand dollar house, you might prefer one that fits your requirements a little less well and costs substantially less. If you tell the agent that you are willing to spend two hundred thousand dollars, he may decide not to show you any house that will sell for much less than that.

The second question raises another problem—what you want to buy depends on what it costs. You would prefer a house with a bedroom for you and your wife, a bedroom for each child, and an extra room for a home office—but if an extra bedroom increases the price of the house by too much, you could put your desk at one end of your bedroom or persuade two children to share a room. In order to give a sensible answer to the question, you need a price list, a description of how much more you can expect to pay for a larger house, one with more bedrooms, one in a better location. If you had such a list, you could figure out about what sort of house you wanted to buy and what it should cost and ask the agent to select houses to show you accordingly.

So far as I know, no such price lists are currently available—but there is no good reason why they shouldn't be. Realtors have access to extensive information on houses that have sold. In any area with a sufficiently lively real estate market, it should be possible to use conventional statistics to work out from that data about how much more a house costs with one more bedroom, all else held constant, or with an additional hundred square feet of area, or with a larger yard, or in a better school district. My proposal is that somebody, perhaps the existing multi-lister service that provides the data to the realtors, should do so. The realtor could then provide his customer with a price list, the customer could decide about what sort of house he wanted, and the realtor could proceed to find the houses that came closest to fitting what his customer wanted.

I should  add that it is almost twenty years since I was last in the market for a house. If what I have just proposed is, at this point, common practice in the industry, perhaps one of my readers with more up to date information can tell me.