Paradoxes of an Interventionist Foreign Policy

In case you hadn't noticed ...

The U.S. has long been a critic of Assad's government in Syria, supporting, at least verbally, the insurgency against him. Military intervention in support of that insurgency seems to have been seriously considered although never actually implemented. Then ISIS, one of the groups fighting Assad, invaded Iraq and seized substantial amounts of territory, raising the possibility of a takeover of the country by Sunni fundamentalists. The U.S. government responded by air attacks against ISIS in Iraq. It now seems to be seriously considering air attacks on ISIS in Syria.

In other words, they are considering military intervention in support of the same government they were, quite recently, considering military intervention against.

Which reminds me of something I wrote more than forty years ago:

The weak point in the argumentis its assumption that the interventionist foreign policy will be done well—thatyour foreign minister is Machiavelli or Metternich. In order for the policy towork, you must correctlyfigure out which countries are going to be your enemies and which your allies ten years down the road. If you getit wrong, you find yourself unnecessarily blundering into other people's wars, spendingyour blood and treasure in their fights instead of theirsin yours. You may, to take an example not entirely at random, get into one war as aresult of trying to defend China from Japan, spend the next thirty years trying to defend Japan (and Korea, and Vietnam,...) from China, then finally discoverthat the Chinese are your natural allies against the Soviet Union.

(The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 45)

Problems with "Fact Checking"

I recently came across a link on Facebook to a claim that "Over Half of all Statements Made on Fox News are False," based on a story in the Tampa Bay Times' PunditFact. My first reaction was that I had no more reason to trust the Tampa Bay Times than to trust Fox, making the story  pure partisan assertion, so I followed the link to see what support it offered. To their credit, they listed the statements on Fox that they based their claim on and provided the basis for their conclusions. But looking at them in detail, their evaluation was clearly biased in favor of what they wanted to believe. 

The clearest case was one where they said a claim they liked was mostly true when, on their evidence, it was  false. The claim was: The people who want President Barack Obama impeached "are all white, they're all older, and guess what, they're in the far right wing of the Republican Party." According to the poll information they cited, about 33 percent of the public wanted Obama impeached. There is no way that older whites in the far right wing of the Republican party could make up anything close to 33 percent of the public. According to the poll information, about 17% of non-whites wanted Obama impeached—a lower percentage than of whites, but quite a lot more than zero. The statement should have been rated as mostly false.

Another claim was that ""Over the last 40 years, real wage growth has been flatlined because of the policies of the Federal Reserve ... It was all driven by the Federal Reserve." PunditFact found the flatlined claim "largely correct" but rated the overall statement "mostly false" on the grounds that economists they consulted did not think the Fed had any responsibility for the long term trend in wages. Given the state of macroeconomics—I like to describe a course in macro as a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site—I do not think it's legitimate to rate such a statement as either true or false. The claim that the Fed was largely responsible for the Great Depression, after all, was accepted by, among others, the just previous chairman of the Fed. And the Fed has repeatedly made it clear that it believes that its policies affect the overall health of the economy.

Another claim they rated as false, by Lou Dobbs, was reported as: "Because of President Barack Obama’s failure to "push job creation," the black unemployment rate in Ferguson, Mo., is three times higher than the white unemployment rate." I rate PunditFact's statement of what Dobbs said as itself false, since if you follow the link, what he actually said was "These are the results of policies on the part of the state government, the local community, and the president of the United States," which does not imply that all, or even most, of the problem is due to Obama's policies.

PunditFact's explanation of why what they claim Dobbs said is false includes:

"Experts have consistently told us and our colleagues at PolitiFact that although government policies can affect employment figures, other economic factors are typically at play; in this case, the Great Recession and subsequent recovery."

Considering that Obama himself claimed his policies would bring down unemployment and so terminate the Great Recession, it makes no sense to take it as an entirely independent cause.

PunditFact points out, correctly, that the higher black unemployment rate long predates Obama. But that does not tell us whether different policies by Obama would have changed it. Obama and his supporters, after all, clearly  believe that there are policies he could and should follow that would solve long standing problems.

In summary ...

To their credit, PunditFact takes advantage of the opportunity provided by hypertext to provide detailed explanations of their ratings. Looking at those explanations, I conclude that:

1. PunditFact interprets disagreement with them and the experts they choose to consult as either false or mostly false.

2. PunditFact judges statements they like not by whether they are actually true but by whether a much weaker claim along similar lines is. Thus they implicitly convert "they're all white, they're all older, and guess what, they're in the far right wing of the Republican Party," a claim that is clearly false, into "people who are white, older, and right wing Republicans are more likely to want Obama impeached than people who are not," and then judge it mostly true.

They take the opposite approach to statements they don't like. Converting what Dobbs actually said to "Because of President Barack Obama’s failure to "push job creation" I would rate as "pants on fire"—a flat lie by PunditFact.

the probability of his results being due to chance ...

I recently came across a sentence in a reasonably well balanced article on climate issues that nicely illustrates the problem of interpreting statistical claims. The relevant passage:

Despite the relative simplicity of his model, Crowley found good agreement between the temperature fluctuations it calculated for the years 1000 AD to 1850 AD and the fluctuations actually measured from tree rings during that interval. Over that 850-year period, fluctuations in solar intensity along with volcanic eruptions could account for roughly 50 percent of the variation seen in the tree-ring record -- give or take 10 percent. 

Something happened, however, after 1850. Crowley's model could only account for about 25 percent of the observed temperature changes. Something else was needed -- volcanic eruptions and solar variability were not enough.

Crowley then introduced a human-triggered greenhouse effect to the model and it produced a much better match.
....

In the case of Crowley's study, statistical tests show that the probability of his results being due to chance is less than 1 percent.

(Emphasis mine)

There are two things wrong with the final sentence. The first is linguistic ambiguity. "the probability of his results being due to chance" sounds as though it means "given the results he got, the probability that the cause was chance is less than 1 percent." What it actually means, however, is "if the results were due to chance, the probability of their occurring would be less than 1 percent."

To see the difference between the two readings of the sentence, consider a simpler case. I pull a coin out of my pocket and, without examining it, flip it twice. It comes up heads both times. My null hypothesis is that it is a fair coin, my alternative hypothesis is that it is a double headed coin.

Given the null hypothesis, the probability that the result would occur, that the coin would come up heads both times, is only .25. It does not follow that the probability that the result was due to chance is only .25 since, in my simple example, that would mean a .75 chance that the coin is double headed. To calculate the latter probability you would need to take account of the fact that double headed coins are very uncommon, hence, even after getting two heads, the odds are overwhelmingly against the coin being double headed.

Similarly for Crowley's result. It is a statement about how likely it is that his model would work as badly as it did for the period after 1850 if nothing had changed, not the probability that a change in what determined climate was responsible for its working as badly as it did.

But it doesn't even tell us that, because there is an additional assumption built into the argument—that the data from 1000 A.D. to 1850 A.D. provide a complete model of what determines climate. Suppose there is some cause of climate change that occurs rarely enough so that it did not occur in the period Crowley used to build his model, giving him no data at all on how likely it was or how large its effects. If it happened to hit around 1850, it could explain the divergence from his model thereafter, even though that divergence was entirely due to natural effects. Probability of that occurring? Unknown.

And in fact, if we accept Crowley's interpretation of his evidence, that is precisely what did happen—with "natural" interpreted to include the results of human activity. Every year for the past tens of thousands, there was a tiny probability of an industrial revolution producing enough CO2 to affect climate. It did not happen from 1000 A.D. to 1850, so did not show up in Crowley's data and the model built from that data. It did happen thereafter, producing results that look very unlikely given that model.

An earlier post on these issues, in the context of Lovejoy's similar 1% claim.

Earlier posts on the first problem in other contexts—World of Warcraft and Egyptian mummies.

Ferguson, Los Angeles, and a 14th Century Sultan

Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth century North African world traveler, spent some time in the employ of Mohammed ibn Tughluq, the fabulously wealthy sultan of Delhi. The Rehla, Ibn Battuta's account of his travels, contains a section on bad things about the Sultan and a section on good things about the Sultan. One of the good things he describes is an incident where Mohammed struck a young man with no legal justification for doing so. The young man took the case to court, the Sultan made no attempt to block it, and the verdict was that the victim was entitled to either monetary compensation or retaliation. He chose the latter, struck the Sultan, and, ibn Battuta tells us, he saw the Sultan's turban fall to the ground. Reading the passage, it is clear that the author thought that was how rulers ought to behave, holding themselves subject to the same law as everyone else, but usually didn't, hence that ibn Tughluq's willingness to accept a legal judgement against himself was admirable.

I was reminded of the passage by recent news stories about unarmed men shot dead by police under circumstances where, it is alleged, there was no legal justification. Such incidents occasionally lead to the policeman responsible being disciplined. They practically never, so far as I can tell, result in his being charged with homicide, tried, and, if convicted, jailed. 

It would be nice if our legal system could at least come up to the standards of a fourteenth century sultan.

The Third Edition of the Machinery of Freedom is Now Available

As a kindle on Amazon.

It is not currently available in hardcopy. I am interested in comments from people as to whether they would want it to be. The kindle is up at $2.99. If I self-publish a hardcopy with CreateSpace it would be substantially more than that, and if I go with a commercial publisher more still. 

I am also interested in comments by people who read it and spot mistakes. One of the advantages of an eBook is that it's easy to make minor changes.

What We Could Learn From Dan Kahan. And Perhaps Shouldn't

I have commented in earlier posts on Dan Kahan's research about why we believe what we do. The basic conclusion is that, in the case of beliefs linked to group identity, individuals choose what to believe not on the basis of the evidence but on the basis of what beliefs fit their group identity. For most of us, as Dan points out, that is rational behavior. My beliefs about evolution or global warming have  little effect on the world at large but could have a large effect on how well I get along with the people who matter to me.

There is no reason to assume that the pattern I have just described only applies to other people. One possible conclusion is that I ought to look for beliefs that it is very much in my interest to hold and think about how good my reasons are for holding them.

One of the first candidates that occurs to me is my belief that minimum wage laws have bad effects, that they make it harder for unskilled workers to get jobs. That is a belief widely held among economists, especially economists generally in favor of free markets. Academic economists are part of an academic world where most people are politically liberal, hence inclined to support minimum wage laws. That makes the fact that economists are inclined to oppose them an important marker for group identity. And I have evidence of the cost to an economist of rejecting it from an interview with David Card, coauthor of a widely cited study that failed to find the expected effect. By his account, getting what was, from the standpoint of his professional peers, the wrong answer cost him a lot of friends.

That is a reason to think that my view on the subject might be mistaken but I cannot think of any good arguments against it, so I will rapidly pass on from my possible false beliefs to other people's. Dan Kahan's, for example.

Dan is a professor at Yale law school. My guess is that if he pointed out that there is no good reason to expect the distribution of intellectual abilities to be the same for men as for women, hence no good reason to interpret unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination, he would suffer significant social costs. If he made the same point in the context of racial differences, the costs would be more than merely significant. Perhaps he should think about those questions, examine the arguments and evidence, and revise his beliefs accordingly.

Or perhaps not. His explanation for what he observed, after all, was that it was the result of rational behavior. Believing things merely because the evidence supports them may sound like an admirable policy, but it could prove to be a very expensive one.

Why Improving Things Is Hard

Someone who studies the effects of different diets comes up with evidence that consuming more salt causes high blood pressure and associated medical risks and concludes that people should eat less of it. Another researcher repeats the study looking at mortality from all causes and finds that people who eat more than the average amount of salt are no more likely to die early than people who do not.

Arguably you not only should not be surprised at the result, you should expect it. We have, after all, been "as if designed" by evolution for reproductive success. Dying, whether from high blood pressure or some other cause, makes it difficult to either help rear your existing children or produce more. Our bodies have built into them a sophisticated chemical factory for converting what we eat into what our body requires; reducing the amount of salt absorbed and excreting the excess should not be beyond its capabilities. If the body instead  absorbs all the salt consumed, that suggests that the disadvantages of higher blood pressure are on average balanced by other advantages.

That is one example of a more general point, suggested by my rather vague memories of what I have read about the effects of salt consumption and a comment someone made on an earlier post. For another, and this time entirely imaginary, example of the same point, suppose you discover that increasing the size of your car's tires improves its gas mileage. Before concluding that bigger tires are a good idea, it would be prudent to look at other consequences of the change—because you will probably discover that some of them are negative.

The logic is the same as in my previous example, although this time the design is by engineers rather than by evolution. People who design automobiles would like them to use less gas. If bigger wheels achieved that objective and had no disadvantages, someone in the past century would have discovered the fact. The current size of wheels is not an accident. It is the best solution engineers could come up with to the problem of optimal design.

The argument does not apply to everything; there is no reason to assume that either the climate or the population of the earth is optimal. But it does apply to anything that has already been optimized for some purpose, whether by human design or some natural mechanism. Any change from the present design that produces a benefit probably also produces a cost. That is why it is not already in the design.

Of course, even if something has been optimized, it may have been optimized for a purpose other than yours. Evolution designs organisms, including me, to do the best possible job of passing their genes down to later generations. That is its objective but not mine. Birth control is one of the ways in which humans subvert the objectives of the genes in order to better achieve their own objectives. 

For another example, consider trade barriers such as tariffs. There are good economic arguments to show that we would be better off if we went to complete free trade. That seems puzzling—if we would be, why don't we?

The answer is provided by public choice theory, the branch of economics that deals with the workings of the political market. A tariff makes the inhabitants of the country that imposes it worse off but the politicians who pass the tariff better off, since it benefits a concentrated interest group at the cost of dispersed interest groups. More concentrated interest groups are better able to pay politicians to do things for them.Trade policy is optimized, but for the wrong objective.

Another exception to the general rule occurs where optimization is slow and constraints have recently changed. Through most of the history of our species it made sense to get fat if you could in order to increase your odds of surviving the next famine. Now that famines are vanishingly rare, the same hardwired tastes produce less optimal behavior. Similarly, if gas prices have recently gone up a lot, existing car designs may weight fuel efficiency less heavily than  they now should.

Improving things is not always impossible. But it is often harder than it seems.