Fake Asperger's guys?

The other day I wrote a Bloomberg View post about women in econ. Frances Woolley had some good criticisms of my piece. But others thought I was focusing on attacking Robin Hanson, a quote of whose I used to illustrate the fact that stuff considered "sexist" in other disciplines is considered "normal" in economics. Actually, I just used Hanson's quote for illustrative purposes - the meat of the article, if you will, was about the research by some economists who claim that women suffer more promotion and salary discrimination in econ than in the sciences. Hanson wasn't really the point, though I personally did think his quote was offensive.

But anyway, some right-wing types on Twitter thought it was all about me trying to sic a mob of SJWs ("social justice warriors", i.e. left-wing types) on Hanson. Steve Sailer jumped in to defend Hanson and all "Aspergery nerds":

Professor Hanson is a very nice, very innocent, very eccentric man who tries to come up with counterintuitive thought experiments (most of which aren’t very useful thoughts, but he means well)...It’s striking how it’s turning into Open Season on Aspergery nerds. Various Dilberts are being targeted as the Gender Enemy Oppressing Four Billion Women. Why? Because they are socially maladroit.

And righty pundit Randall Parker pursued the Aspergery Nerd Defense Crusade on Twitter.

This is something I'm hearing more and more often these days: right-wingers, at least the smart ones, are just people with Asperger;s, whose condition prevents them from being socially sensitive enough to feel the vibes of political correctness. In fact, I don't see any lefty types humble-bragging about their position autism spectrum. This makes me suspicious (and not just because Asperger's was removed from the DSM).

It occurs to me that it's not that hard to fake Asperger's. After all, most "neurotypicals" don't really know exactly what true Aspergerians are like. So just talk about nerdy stuff, get a blank stare on your face every once in a while, intentionally ignore social cues, etc. It'll take a little effort at first, but eventually it'll be second nature. And it'll be fun - if you meet a girl who you know is too pretty to sleep with you, instead of bowing and scraping ineffectually before her majesty and beauty, you can say un-PC stuff that sends her into spasms of ineffectual rage! Wheeeee!! 

Fake Asperger's seems like it could also be a signal of high intelligence, but I'm not sure whether it's a real or a false one. On one hand, social ineptness is a costly signal. If you choose to pay the social cost to become a Fake Asperger's Guy, you prove that you are confident in your ability to make it in this world on intellect alone. (An economist once told me this was called "countersignaling," but actually I think this is just normal signaling.)

But on the other hand, it could also be a false signal. We associate the autism spectrum with high quantitative and technical intelligence, so Fake Asperger's might be a way to spoof society's expectations and pretend to be smarter than you are by exploiting the Representativeness Heuristic. If so, expect the Fake Asperger's Party to run out of steam once folks catch on to the trick.

In any case, if we restrain ourselves from giving social censure to people who are perceived as "Aspergery nerds," doesn't that just incentivize the adoption of Fake Asperger's?

Generally, the possibility of a trend of Fake Asperger's Guys is sort of darkly, gently hilarious, but one thing about it annoys me. Real Asperger's guys are going to get a bad name from this. Real Asperger's guys are usually not right-wing types who brashly declare their disdain for social cues by talking about rape around girls. Most of them are kind, good-hearted people who occasionally say offensive or hurtful things simply by accident, and are very very slow to realize it - but when they eventually do realize (or are informed by friends), they are generally remorseful and distressed. They are people with a real, if minor, disorder, who almost all wish they didn't have the limitations they have. They're basically like Lawrence Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon (though Neal Stephenson took a bit of artistic license).

I wouldn't like to see those real Asperger's people given a bad name by swaggering right-wing jerks who decided Fake Asperger's was a fun and profitable way to shuck the pressures of PC.


Update: As usual, SMBC got there first. Hat tip to Adam in the comments.

Update 2: Legendary troll douchebag Chuck Johnson apparently refers to himself as a "neuroatypical".

Update 3: A thought occurs to me: Maybe fake Asperger's guys are just non-fake sociopaths. Real Asperger's basically means not being able to perceive other people's emotions, while real sociopathy basically means not feeling any emotions of your own when you do bad things to other people...

Some nonfiction books I really like

My last post was a mainly negative review of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and a while before that I posted a decidedly mixed review of Kartik Athreya's Big Ideas in Macroeconomics. So commenters are justified in pestering me to list my favorite books (other than sci-fi). Here's a short list. If your favorite book isn't on here, it's either because (in order of decreasing likeliness): A) I haven't read it, B) I read it a while back, C) I didn't happen to think of it off the top of my head, or D) I didn't like it that much.


Big Theory-of-History Books

1. Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
An obvious choice. The most original and compelling "big arc of history" thesis I've ever read. And contains pages and pages of details about domesticable plants, which I love reading about, because hey - domesticable plants.

2. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker
This reads like the anti-Graeber. So on point, so forceful, so focused. Such clarity and readability. There is the occasional howler, as in Graeber, but far fewer, and sources are cited. Pinker successfully makes the case that we live in a much more peaceful world than ever before.

3. Why the West Rules - For Now, by Ian Morris
This one didn't really have as clear a thesis about the big arc of history, but the important thing here is the data - the first hard data I've ever seen on which civilizations were the most developed at which point in time.


Economics and Finance

1. The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox
The single best pop econ book ever written - a complete history of financial economics. It made me want to join the field.

2. The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford
This is a managerial econ course in a book - no equations, but read it and you will understand all the concepts. Professors, you could assign this to your class instead of a textbook.

3. When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein
The best history book about the financial industry that I've ever read.

4. The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki
Lots of cool facts about finance, economic theory, complex systems, and behavioral econ. Impossible to summarize, but that's fine. Probably the best pop book about complex systems.

5. The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
This book is great at conveying what the modern finance industry is really like. Of course, everything by Michael Lewis is worth reading. Liar's Poker is the most fun, of course.

6. The Occupy Handbook by various authors, edited by Janet Byrne
A wonderful collection of essays about the financial crisis, the recession, and problems in our economy today. I even loved David Graeber's chapter!

7. The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson ad Andrew McAfee
The single best book on the "rise of the robots" question. Doesn't have a strong conclusion about what to do about automation and the economy, but that's because humanity just doesn't quite know what to do yet! Jam-packed with information.

8. Time to Start Thinking, by Edward Luce
The case for economic nationalism and institutional renewal.

9. A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel
The best personal finance book. Just reading this book will save the average person thousands of dollars.

10. Zombie Economics, by John Quiggin
Someone had to write this one. Quiggin did it exceptionally well, IMHO.

11. 13 Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
Great expose of regulatory capture in the pre-2008 finance industry.

12. My Life as a Quant, by Emanuel Derman
An excellent memoir by a very smart and cool dude.


Japan-Related

1. Nightwork, by Anne Allison
Why Japanese companies are killing Japanese families. Actually, that should have been the subtitle.

2. Can Japan Compete?, by Michael Porter and Hirotaka Takeuchi
A bit dated, but a great look at some of the micro reasons why Japan's economy petered out in the early 1990s. Not intended as a defense of neoliberalism at all, but this is the book that first made me think that neoliberalism might be good for Japan (and might have been good for us, back in the day).

3. Democracy Without Competition in Japan, by Ethan Scheiner
Read this to understand Japanese politics, at least through the early 2000s.

4. The Making of Modern Japan, by Marius Jansen
The best history of Japan, period.

5. The Rising Sun, by John Toland
A great history of WW2 from the Japanese perspective. It will permanently shatter any stereotype of Japanese people as conformist, obedient, etc.


Assorted Other Nonfiction

1. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman
Everything by Feynman is good; this is the best.

2. The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin
Captures both the beauty and fun of doing fundamental physics theory, and the frustration of seeing a field of science hobbled by bad sociology. I wonder what other fields are hobbled by bad sociology? Hmm...

3. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, by Stephen Platt
An eye-opening account of the Taiping Rebellion, the Chinese version of Armageddon.

4. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford
The story of a boy who came from nowhere to conquer the world, who tried to singlehandedly yank the middle ages toward liberalism, and who of course failed.

5. A World Undone, by G.J. Meyer
An eye-opening account of World War I, the European version of Armageddon.

6. Destiny Disrupted, by Tamim Ansary
An informal history of the world from a Muslim perspective.

7. Lost Enlightenment, by S. Frederick Starr
The amazing history of Central Asian science and technology before horse nomads and religious fanatics wrecked the region forever.

8. Empires of the Sea, by Roger Crowley
A gripping account of the desperate dirty battles between Spain and Turkey in the 16th Century.

9. Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh
I don't read many autobiographies, but this one is great. It made me a Hsieh groupie, and I've never even met the man.

10. Mindset, by Carol Dweck
The only self-help book you'll ever need.

11. The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dolnick
The history of how Descartes, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton destroyed the old world of magic and superstition and made it safe for science and rationality - the most important thing that has ever happened to humankind.

12. How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman
Just one reason Scotland is awesome. Well, many reasons, actually.

13. Coming Apart, by Charles Murray
The sad but apparently true story of America's growing class divide.


(Reminder: Most books not on this list are simply books I haven't read, or read so long ago that I can't remember them clearly. My list of books to read is very long indeed...)

Book review: Debt: The First 5000 Years

A while ago, I wrote a rather acerbic critique of one of David Graeber's magazine articles, in which I mentioned his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years - which, at the time, I hadn't read. This angered a bunch of Graeberites, not to mention Graeber himself. And to be fair, I do have a bad habit of passing judgment on books before I read them. So, in keeping with my new philosophy of fairness and open-mindedness, I read the whole thing.

Now, from interacting with David Graeber on Twitter, I have a sneaking suspicion that he is a certain type of Public Intellectual - the type who bristles with anger at the mildest criticism. This type of Intellectual will view any paraphrase of his ideas by a critic to be a total and utter misreading and misrepresentation of what he intended to say, no matter how close the paraphrase is to the original - deviate one word from exact quotation, and you're a Vile, Intellectually Dishonest Boor (V.I.D.B.) who obviously couldn't be bothered to read what the author actually wrote. As for exact quotations, those are certain to be out of context. Just as there is no physically exact model of the Universe except for the Universe itself, there is no representation of the Touchy Intellectual's thought that is accurate except for the Intellectual's own complete and unabridged oeuvre. (Paraphrasing by supporters and fans, of course, is perfectly legit, as long as their support and fandom is unqualified.)

Now if I'm right, and if Graeber is this sort of fellow, then this review is in trouble before it gets started, because the main problem with Debt: The First 5000 Years is that after slogging through all 560 pages, I can't for the life of me tell what point it's trying to make about the phenomenon of debt. This means that in order to say anything about what I think this book might be saying, I will have to paraphrase heavily, which means that Graeber and the Graeberians will undoubtedly conclude (quite vociferously) that I am either lying about having read the book, or am simply a village idiot, and Tweet-spam me accordingly.

OK, so now that we've dispensed with the pleasantries...

Debt is a sprawling, rambling, confused book, mostly about economic history, mixed with some political and moral philosophy. It begins with a discussion of the "textbook" economic history about the transition from barter to money economies, and debunks this with historical evidence. Barter was actually never common. Graeber thinks this will come as a big shock to economists, and indeed it might to some, though monetary economists are well aware that before the advent of currency, credit arrangements were the standard form of payment, and were usually denominated in units of real commodities. Graeber discusses why this kind of payment, which doesn't have a standardized unit of account, is technologically difficult and clunky. He mentions some intermediate solutions, such as using fictitious units of account with fixed prices in bilateral credit arrangements (e.g. one goat = 5 "doubloons"), or using ingots of metal as a rough-and-ready unit of account. He also discusses how currency came into use primarily as a result of war (much of this point is actually sprinkled throughout the later sections).

This was the most interesting part of the book, and I learned some very interesting things from it. However, it would have been nice if Graeber had sat down and talked with an actual monetary economist before writing this section, instead of just reading Econ 101 textbooks. An hour or two of conversation with Miles Kimball, David Andolfatto or Steve Williamson - to name three people I've chatted with about these ideas - would stimulate many interesting thoughts and crystallize others, greatly enriching these sections of the book. Graeber shows keen economic intuition, actually, and I'm sure he could publish papers in monetary economics if he set his mind to it, but of course he has bigger fish to fry.

Most of the book, however, is not about the mechanics of debt, but about its connection to moral issues. If Debt can be said to have a basic thesis, it's that debt has a moral dimension, and that this moral dimension enables people to do bad things to other people. (Yes, I paraphrased; cue brickbats from Graeberians!)

Graeber advances this thesis indirectly. The bulk of the book describes a long sequence of bad things that have been done to people in the past - mostly some form of slavery or another. The upshot of this long litany, though it is never explicitly stated, seems to be that commerce - exchange, markets, capitalism, pick your preferred term - is fundamentally exploitative, and is fundamentally about turning free people into slaves. This is a pretty standard leftist idea. But by always reminding the reader that these arrangements of commerce/exchange/capitalism are carried out via the mechanism of debt, Graeber pours this old wine into a new glass. Capitalism is bad, and debt is the mechanism of capitalism, therefore it is upon the idea of debt that we must turn our disapprobation.

Many times throughout the book, Graeber rails against the fact that the morality of "paying one's debts" functions as a mechanism for keeping debtors in bondage to creditors. But a few times, Graeber actually reverses the equation, and laments the power that debtors can sometimes exercise over creditors, quoting the old saw that "if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank." In other words, whether debt gives power to creditors or debtors, power is the bad thing, and debt is merely the mechanism by which power is expressed.

Now, this may sound a little silly - if someone wrote a book called "Metal: The First 5,000 Years," and then filled that book with stories of war and bloodshed, never failing to remind us after each anecdote that metal was involved in some way, we might be left scratching our heads as to why the author was so fixated on metal instead of on war itself. And in fact, that is indeed how I felt for much of the time I was reading Graeber's book. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Graeber continually talks around the idea of debt in other ways, mentioning debt crises (without reflecting deeply on why these happen), the periodic use and disuse of coinage (which apparently is just as bad as debt in terms of enabling the capitalism monster), and any other phenomenon related to debt, without weaving these observations into a coherent whole. 

In other words, I am now angry at myself for paraphrasing the book, and trying to put theses into Graeber's mouth, because this is such a rambling, confused, scattershot book that I am doing you a disservice by making it seem more coherent than it really is.

The problem of extreme disorganization is dramatically worsened by the way that Graeber skips merrily back and forth from things he appears to know quite a lot about to things he obviously knows nothing about. One sentence he'll be talking about blood debts and "human economies" in African tribes (cool!), and the next he'll be telling us that Apple Computer was started by dropouts from IBM (false!). There are a number of glaring instances of this. The worst is not when Graeber delivers incorrect facts (who cares where Apple's founders had worked?), it's when he uncritically and blithely makes assertions that one could only accept if one has extremely strong leftist mood affiliation. The most egregious example of this occurs in the book's conclusion, when Graeber writes:

I would like to end, then, by putting in a word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone.

Both the declaration that the non-industrious poor aren't hurting anyone and the implication that being "industrious" probably is hurting someone are obviously false. But Graeber delivers absurdist sentences like this with the same calm assurance with which he tells us about when coinage first became popular in the Mediterranean.

Not only does this have the effect of diminishing Graeber's credibility as a narrator (what if he's wrong about the blood debts too?), but it makes a careful, critical reading of the book nigh impossible.

Now if you have strong leftist mood affiliation - i.e., if you've already bought into most of the background ideology that suffuses Graeber's book - then you will probably nod your head as you read this rambling mess of a book, and come away with the feeling that debt, in some way or another, is another star in the constellation of nasty concepts that you associate with the capitalist machine. But if you don't, you might walk away thinking "What was I supposed to take away from that? That debt is, like, bad, or something?"

Or at least you would if you had read Debt in 2007. But Debt was published in 2011, when legions of middle-class and poor Americans had just seen their wealth wiped out by a housing crash, and yet who were still on the hook for the money they had borrowed to buy those houses. With Americans drowning in debt, the message of a debt jubilee - a general bailout, not just for the big banks that started the whole mess - seemed very attractive (I, for one, would definitely have supported it!). So I'm sure it resonated with a lot of people when Graeber wrote:

It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that...paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.

That sounds like something we should have done more of in the years following the bursting of the housing bubble. But - and here I just want to editorialize a bit, since I deserve it after reading 560 pages of Graeber - as a general, regular thing it sounds like a bad idea. It smacks of the idea that wealth redistribution should be opportunistic rather than systematic - that the government should use debt cancellation in place of regular systems of welfare, thus replacing redistribution to those most in need with redistribution to those who are boldest in asking for "loans."

Anyway, now I'm rambling. To wrap up the review, Debt: The First 5,000 Years is not a book I recommend. It contains some interesting tidbits, but these are not worth the cost of the slog. Perhaps capitalism is a rotten, inhumane system that kills relationships, rewards violence and trickery, and enslaves us all to the brutal logic of the market before inevitably destroying the planet. Or perhaps not. But either way, there's little insight to be gained by reframing the issue in terms of debt. Or if there is, I'm damned if I can find that insight in this book. Perhaps the next 5,000 years will prove more enlightening.

Preview: Trillion Dollar Economists, by Robert Litan

In the tradition of passing judgment on books I haven't read, let me say that Trillion Dollar Economists, by Robert Litan, looks like it mostly agrees with my priors. From the inside flap:

A trillion dollars, and most likely more – that’s how much economists contribute to the U.S. economy. But you’d never know it by reading the jokes and criticisms (some of it fair) about economists in the media and in the blogosphere. 

In Trillion Dollar Economists, one of the nation’s leading policy analysts, Robert Litan, explains with lucidity and precision how the insights of many economists, mainly over the past fifty years, have helped to revolutionize business, resulting in huge benefits for companies and consumers. 

Economists and their ideas are embedded throughout the economy, Internet-based companies (even on-line dating sites), and increasingly in sports. Whether they know it or not, Internet retailers owe their existence to economists who in earlier decades helped convince policy makers to remove limits on prices and entry into the transportation business, while providing much of the intellectual impetus for breaking up the telephone monopoly that otherwise most likely would have inhibited the growth of the Internet. 

The widespread use of auctions in on-line commerce and search has its origins in economic research. 

Consumers and businesses that have benefited from the oil and gas boom have economists to thank for convincing policy makers to remove energy price controls. Investors in indexed mutual funds and other financial products are in debt to entrepreneurs who got their ideas or inspiration from financial economists.

This sounds a lot like what I wrote here, except without the macro-bashing.

Anyway, it looks like Litan divides the benefits of econ into two categories: 1) engineering applications, and 2) policy advice. That sounds right to me. I would have added a third: 3) ideas.

Economists helped prepare the public psychologically for the advent of neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s. Neoliberalism has had its costs and its benefits, but overall I'm glad we went down that road, since I've seen the alternative (Japan). Economists eased this transition by basically being priests of the free market. That often meant ignoring things like externalities and public goods, which was bad, but it might have been necessary in order to convey a simple message to the public: Don't be afraid of economic liberalization. Economists assured Americans that although liberalization would destroy many jobs, more would be created in their place. That turned out to be pretty much true. But anyway, now that the gains from neoliberalism have been mostly reaped in the U.S. (though not in Japan, Korea, or some European countries), economists may have to shed the role of "priests of the free market," and start talking about how to fix the market failures that they glossed over in the 80s.

So I'm interested to see if Litan deals with this idea.

I'm also interested to see what he thinks will be economists' most important role going forward. My guess has always been that micro theory would become more and more important, as tech companies find more ways to exploit things like auction theory, search and matching theory, etc., and that policy advice would become a bit less important now that the big liberalization boom is over. So I want to see if Litan agrees. I also want to see if he thinks that economists' policy advice will continue to shift from simple deregulation to designing "smart" regulation (a shift I think has already occurred to some degree with things like pollution permits).

Anyway, looks like a cool and interesting book. I'll of course write a review after I've read it.