Economists just don't look very ideological

A while ago I blogged about a paper by Roger Gordon and Gordon Dahl that showed that economists aren't ideological - or, at least, that their ideology doesn't line up much with the American left-right political axis. Now a trio of economists, Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu, have come out with a very rigorous empirical analysis on the subject. They comb through a bazillion papers and do word analysis on the text! This paper is really impressive - it's very rigorous and obviously took a ton of work and careful thought.

The authors discuss their paper at 538.com, and they emphasize that they do find evidence of ideology in the way economists write their papers. But Kevin Drum, blogging about the paper, points out that the results, while statistically significant, don't look that economically significant - i.e., not that big:

What I see is a nearly flat regression line with a ton of variance. Those blue dots are all over the place. If the authors say their results are statistically significant, I believe them, but it sure looks to me as if (a) the real-world error bars are pretty big here, and (b) economists as a whole are remarkable unbiased. I mean, look at that chart again. I would have expected a much steeper line. Instead, what we see is just the barest possibility that ideology has a very slight effect on economists' findings. 

If these results are actually true, then congratulations economists! You guys are pretty damn evenhanded.

I agree with Drum. That's just not a lot of ideology. Although it's hard to interpret the meaning of the slope of the regression line - it depends on the economic impact of the policy recommendations that the y-axis represents - the fit of the regression line is obviously very low. This is true for all of the various ideology measures the authors use:

So political ideology, as far as we can tell, just doesn't explain much of the variance in academic economists' policy recommendations. Keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - the authors simply might not have measured ideology accurately. 

But given the fact that economists deal every day with topics that are inherently political, I'm surprised we don't find more bias in paper-writing. 

And there's also the possibility that the sample is heavily influenced by a few outliers. There are a couple of departments out there that may be influenced by big donations from political activists. That might inject a few politicized folks into the academic mix. (Update: Matthew Martin makes this point graphically.)

So overall, I think my thesis that most of econ doesn't line up along left-right political lines seems like it's borne out by the data. Still, that leaves the possibility that a few policy issues, or a few top economists, might be strongly motivated by political ideology. I'm sure we can all think of one or two anecdotes.

Five reasons Japan could never have won WW2

In honor of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I wrote an article trying to explain why Japan had made such a boneheaded decision (my explanation was high-level disorganization). Commenters mostly agreed with that diagnosis, which is consistent with a lot of the things political scientists have said about Japan. But many disagreed with my assertion that Japan's war against the U.S. was unwinnable. For example, one commenter writes:

Moreover, the odds against the Imperial Japanese Navy weren't nearly so long as the ONI had erroneously calculated. The IJN quickly gained the upper hand in the early stages of the war, and would have swept the Americans from the Pacific altogether and secured Japan's hold over the Dutch oil fields but for certain shortcomings of the Pearl Harbor attack itself (with the sunk battleships proving to have been relatively unimportant targets) and but for the success of codebreakers in giving the Americans an upset victory at the Battle of Midway. Advantages in GDP and population by themselves are no guarantee of victory, especially in a naval conflict where it can take years to build fleets but only hours to destroy them.

Another writes:

Japan's strategy was simple: strike first, strike hard, occupy as much territory as possible, dig in, and make it incredibly expensive for the US to remove them. It was not a bad strategy, it very nearly worked. Had Pearl Harbor been a victory, had the carriers been there, had the Japanese hit the oil depots, the war would have had a very different flavor to it.

Sorry, guys, I just don't think this is the case. Here are five reasons why I think Japan could not possibly have won the war against the U.S.:

1. Size matters. 

They say "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." But that saying deserves an addendum: For roughly comparable amounts of fight, it really is the size of the dog that matters. GDP is not a deterministic predictor of who wins wars, but when you have as lopsided a ratio of war material as in the Japan/U.S. war, you basically have to be so much better than the enemy that you win all the battles.

That can happen. In the Russo-Japanese war, Japan's navy demonstrated that it could decisively defeat the Russian navy again and again. It didn't matter how many ships Russia threw against Japan - Japan could sink them as fast as they showed up. Japan's advantages in technology and training were just too great.

But in WW2, the U.S. had technology and training roughly equivalent to Japan's. The battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Eastern Solomons, and the Santa Cruz Islands showed that over time, clashes between the two nations' carrier fleets would result in significant attrition for both sides. That meant Japan was doomed, because while the U.S. could afford to suffer attrition, Japan could not. Game over.

2. U.S. technology never stopped improving.

At the beginning of the war, Japan held several technological advantages over the U.S. Its Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters were better dogfighters than anything the Allies possessed. Its Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes outranged the torpedoes on American ships by a factor of about three to one. And Japan's night optics allowed Japanese ships to spot American ships first (actually this was a combination of technology and training, because the U.S. focused on radar instead of on trying to train the best night spotters). These latter two advantages were key to Japanese victories at the Java Sea, Savo Island, Tassafaronga, and Kolombangara. Meanwhile, 1942-vintage U.S. technology had some major weaknesses, in particular torpedoes that went too deep and failed to detonate.

But because the U.S. had big research budgets, and focused on technology over training, by late 1943 the U.S. had amassed a huge technological advantage over Japan. Radar advanced to the point where hit-and-run attacks left Japanese surface ships largely at the mercy of their American counterparts, as demonstrated in the battles of the Vella Gulf, Cape St. George, and (to a lesser extent) Empress Augusta Bay. By this time, of course, the U.S. had torpedoes that worked.

In the air, the U.S. built the Grumman F6F Hellcat, which took advantage of a totally new type of aerial combat ("boom & zoom" high-speed attacks, pioneered by the Germans) that replaced dogfighting. The Hellcat had much better speed and armament than the best Japanese planes, and made short work of the legendary Zero.

Radar also allowed U.S. fighters to coordinate much better, giving them an insurmountable advantage in battles like the Philippine Sea. U.S. signals intelligence was also way beyond that of Japan, 

There were many other examples of U.S. technological advantage, e.g. the nuclear bomb. In comparison, Japan made relatively few advancements over the course of the war, and its much smaller manufacturing capacity meant that it could not afford to deploy the advancements it did make on a large enough scale to make a difference.

3. The U.S. was able to take even the best-fortified positions.

Time and time again, the U.S. demonstrated that it was able to take even the best-fortified positions from the Japanese military. The strategy of "island hopping" - starving out islands instead of storming them - dramatically cut down on the number of assaults the U.S. had to make. But when the U.S. did make assaults, it always won. If you can overrun positions while taking less casualties than the defenders, and if you have more resources than the defenders, it's game over.

The only battle in which a U.S. assault cost the U.S. more casualties than it cost Japan was the battle of Iwo Jima (of flag-raising photo fame). But even in that case, most of the U.S. casualties were wounded, and most of the Japanese casualties were KIA, so the Japanese resource loss was probably higher.

In other words, digging in might have slowed down the U.S. - it did slow down the U.S. - but it never would have been decisive.

4. The U.S. had oil, Japan did not.

The whole Pacific War began over oil, which Japan needed if it was going to continue conquering China. The U.S. had tons of oil, and was by far the biggest oil producer at the time. Japan, in contrast, had only the oil it managed to seize in Southeast Asia. This oil shortage chronically limited the mobility of Japan's navy, and also limited the amount that the Japanese Army could rely on tanks.

Many have suggested that Japan's critical mistake was not to destroy the U.S. oil infrastructure at Pearl Harbor - indeed, Chester Nimitz said that if they had done so, it would have prolonged the war by two years. He was probably exaggerating, but even if not, the fact is that it would not have affected the outcome of the war. Since the U.S. produced so much oil - almost a quarter of total world production in 1937 - it would have eventually brought those resources to bear.

5. China was unconquerable.

"We could only control the cities and railroads," lamented a Japanese friend, recalling the Japanese invasion of China (in which his grandfather fought as a high-ranking officer). The immensity of China - a country with six hundred million people and few natural resources - meant that Japan's attempt to conquer that country could never have succeeded. When Japan invaded China, the country was in a period of extreme chaos and civil war, and Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalists were forced to fight a rearguard action against Mao Zedong's communists even as they tried to hold off the Japanese. Nevertheless, by 1939, the Chinese nationalists had begun to win battles. 

This doesn't mean the Chinese military was ever more effective than its Japanese counterpart - even late in the war, Japan won a pitched battle against the Chinese in Operation Ichi-Go. But what it does mean is that Japan suffered massive attrition against China, and with China's enormous population advantage, that couldn't go on. 

The fact is, this is not some crazy revisionist history or 20-20 hindsight on my part. Japan's military leaders knew in 1941 that, barring a U.S. political collapse or coup or wholesale unwillingness to fight, they were going to lose the war. 

Sociology vs.the Empire

My Bloomberg article on how sociologists could close the salary and prestige gap with economists has gotten some pushback, including this post from Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber (a blogger I like a lot). Basically, I said that if sociology focused a lot more on stats and quantitative modeling, then sociologists would have much more lucrative outside options in consulting and finance and industry, and hence would be able to command higher academic salaries.

There were (at least) two big things I left out of my article, but I'll get to those at the end. First, some responses to Henry.

Harry says that I'm being "imperialist" for economics by claiming that it's natural for policymakers to ask economists - not sociologists - about the economy:

[W]hile it’s true that many sociologists have a complex about economics, the tacit imperialism is compounded by this claim: 

As for economists’ “influence over the economy,” I am going to take a wild guess and say that it isn’t because of their arrogance or hierarchical insularity or “sense of authority and entitlement.” It’s probably because…drumroll…economics is the discipline that studies the economy. If politicians want to know how to reduce cancer rates, they should go to a biologist. If they want to know how to shoot missiles at Vladimir Putin, they should go to a physicist. If they want to know how to boost productivity at U.S. companies, or increase employment, or auction off broadcast spectrum rights, whom should they ask for advice? A sociologist? 

Heaven forfend! After all, it’s not as if there’s a large grouping in sociology devoted specifically to the study of the economy or anything. And if there were such a peculiar tribe of sociologists, economists would surely know all about them!

Sure, I knew about economic sociology - I took an undergrad class on exactly that subject from Mark Granovetter at Stanford. But to think that policymakers are abandon econ whole hog, and replace their teams of advisers with economic sociologists, is stretching the bounds of the plausible. I guess it could happen that the profession that was created to study the economy failed so utterly that they stopped being regarded as the primary experts on the economy, and were replaced by one branch of a different field, but it seems like a very extreme scenario. And it certainly doesn't seem "imperialist" to point out that this is a very extreme scenario. And it certainly doesn't seem "imperialist" to say that expecting this very extreme scenario to be the natural and right course of things is a bit silly. But YMMV.

Henry then points out, aided by numbers from Cosma Shalizi, that statisticians - who of course know more stats than economists - are paid less than economists. This is true. Why? Well, one reason might be the same reason why biostatistics profs get paid a lot more than statistics profs. Biostats is an applied field, and the skills are more transferable to industry. Also, the applied nature of the biostats field indicates that a prof would be willing to work in industry, which pure stats profs might not be willing to do. Finally, there is undergraduate demand, but this is one of the things I left out, so I'll get to it later. But the point is, the biostats/stats disparity seems unlikely to be due to "power", "social construction", "performativity", or the other stuff that Fourcade, et al. and Henry talk about.

OK, let's talk about that other stuff. Henry says that much (most?) of economists' high salary is due to politics, power, and other social factors:

I suspect that much of the assumed authority of economists (just like the authority, in certain policy roles, of international relations scholars like myself), is socially constructed. Expertise is not just a matter of raw talent, whether mathematical or otherwise. It’s a matter of legitimation – of being anointed with the proper sacraments associated with publicly acknowledged expertise in a particular topic. And that is, unquestionably the product of a certain kind of politics, a kind of politics that sociologists have a lot of experience in studying... 

The underlying point of the Fourcade et al. article is that politics and power play a far larger role in determining both the success of economics and the success of economics than economists are prepared to admit in public. Or, more succinctly, sociology provides a much better account of economics’ success than economics itself does.

The last lines of each of those paragraphs are a bit funny - is this the idea that "those who cannot do, teach"? But anyway, here are the problems I have with this thesis:

1. Do political/social factors also explain the high salaries of professors in engineering, biostatistics, operations research, and accounting? If not, why should we expect that econ is substantially different from all of the above? Sure, it's possible that politics explains econ's riches, while skills explain the riches of all of those other fields. But it's not parsimonious. If we're choosing a null hypothesis, shouldn't we choose the null that all of these explanations are the same, instead of the null that econ is a unique outlier?

2. And if we choose the null that econ isn't an outlier, then we have to ask: What support - data or theory - do Fourcade, et al. present for the thesis that econ's high salary is socially constructed? Do they have a theory of how the legitimation happens or happened? Of who conferred the prestige and power upon economists, and why? I didn't see such a theory in their paper. And I certainly didn't see how any of the data they present imply any mechanism for the assigning of econ salaries. No theory, no data - why should I believe this story??

3. Also, I'd like to take the opportunity to rant about the concept of "power". This has always struck me as just another form of economic phlogiston - just another labeled residual, like "technology" or "culture" or "confidence", whose behavior we are expected to take for granted. The reasoning always seems to be something like "Economic outcomes happen because of power. How do you know who has power? Just look at who does better in the economic outcomes!" Some people have actual theories of specific kinds of power, just like some people have actual theories of how technology works instead of just using it as a label for a production-function residual. But I often see people waving their hands at a phenomenon and saying "It's power, of course!" Which doesn't seem very explanatory at all.

OK, this all having been said, I did leave some important things out of my article. 

For one thing, I didn't talk about undergraduates' demand for econ teaching. If undergrads didn't want to major in econ, then universities wouldn't pay them so much. Econ is a popular major. As for why that's true, I suspect that there are many reasons, and that one is that an econ major requires just about the level of quantitative skill that most well-paying white-collar managerial jobs require of graduates. Another is probably the idea that econ majors learn more about business than other majors of comparable or greater technical skill. A third might be that econ acculturates econ majors to business culture - see Henry Farrell on the potential value of business culture. But now I am just tossing out hypotheses - the fact is, econ is a popular major.

A second thing I left out was the fact that in order to "tech up" (i.e. move in a more quantitative direction), sociology will have to raise the technical requirements for both undergrad soc majors and PhD students. There are quantitative sociologists out there, and sociologists with great technical skill, bu they would have to become the overwhelming majority if sociology were to be regarded as a technical field, like econ is. That will almost certainly mean raising the IQ bar for entering sociology at the undergrad and grad level. It will also mean closing the field to many people whose culture has taught them to fear math, to think that they are "not math people". This will change the composition of the sociology field. So a lot of the increase in the average salary of sociologists would come from a change in the background of the average sociologist. Sociologists might regard that as a pointless exercise. It would be about raising the prestige and wealth of the profession more than the people currently in the profession. That may not be something sociologists care about.

But look, salary issues aside, here's the bottom line. Sociologists are fighting what they perceive to be an intellectual battle against economists over whose description of social phenomena - discrimination, family life, etc. etc. - is going to be accepted by society. And it is asymmetric warfare. Sociologists, by (sometimes) continuing to use the tools of literary "critical theory", have brought a nerf gun to a tank fight. We live in a quantitative, data-driven age, and if sociologists want to beat the imperialist economists, they aren't going to do it by talking about "performativity", or by ranting about how arrogant economists are, or by using "power" as a catch-all explanation for unexplained phenomena. That critical theory stuff just doesn't cut a lot of mustard with most people these days.

That's not me being an imperialist. That's not me saying "econ roolz!". That's not me saying that it's a good thing that we live in a quantitative, data-driven age. That's just me delivering the facts as I see them. I might be wrong, but that's how I see the facts.