Outliers

Outliers is a nice collection of marginally related, well written (Malcolm Gladwell, natch), stories that are ostensibly tied together by their ability to disprove the notion of a "self made man".

It's a little difficult to tease out what Gladwell thinks a "self made man" would look like, but we know what he doesn't look like: any existing human being with a family history that influenced his life. You're not a self made man if you were raised in an environment which valued education or entrepreneurship. You're not a self made man if you were a life-long computer nerd in your mid twenties at the dawn of the micro-computer revolution and became successful in that industry. You're not a self made man if you were unfairly shut out of the "best jobs" because of your ethnicity only to end up with a "second tier" job that, because of changes in society, ended up being much more lucrative than ever predicted.

What Gladwell doesn't do it look at the history of similar people with similar backgrounds. Joseph Flom presumably wasn't the only Jewish law student from an immigrant, garment industry family who couldn't get a job at the top law firms. Why was he so successful and not the others? More relevantly, why did some of them become at least reasonably successful, while others gave up (if any did)?  What was it about Bill Gates' nature that drove him to sneak out of the house at 3:00am to code in the University of Washington Academic Computer Center that was not the nature of other nearby children? 

Gladwell's argument is that Flom and Gates wouldn't have been able to do what they did had a fairly specific set of things not happened in their lives, but he doesn't investigate people for whom those or similar sets of things did happen.  In science this is referred to as "survivor bias", and Gladwell is assuredly familiar with it. 

"Self made man" is a trite, wince-inducing phrase that anyone should be embarrassed to apply to himself.  But let's not pretend that all life is random chance.  Or, if you want to make that claim, you have to do a better job than Gladwell does here.

In the end the book works extremely well at illustrating a point that precious few ever doubted: That the exact path of one's life is heavily influenced by family environment and elements of random chance. It that regard it's a kind of "Connections" for the social psychology set. But the stories themselves are best read as enjoyable, unrelated, long form magazine pieces. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Anyone listening to the intellectually oriented radio and podcast world over the last several years will recognize this theme: recent scientific research has identified types of decisions in which human beings tend to make somewhat counter-intuitive decisions. From memory: 

1) People faced with a promotional display of 24 different varieties of jam will not buy as much jam as people presented with the same promotional display of a mere 6 flavors. 

2) Hotel customers will be more likely to respond to a card noting that 75% percent of other customers choose to save water by not requiring the hotel to wash their towels every night than will respond to a card making the intellectual case against profligate water consumption. 

3) People will choose to save more if their employment contracts default to contributing to a 401k program rather than waiting for the employee to take the positive step of enrolling in the program. 

4) An Israeli day care center’s institution of a sliding “lateness penalty” in an attempt to reduce tardiness among parents picking up their kids backfires as parents interpret the charge as giving them license to be late, when previously they had considered arriving late as an act of rudeness towards the center.

As an Economics grad student in the mid 1980’s I was introduced to Daniel Kahneman through his research that found that even math experts (not to mention everyone else) were very bad at incorporating general information about we know about the world when dealing with specific types of questions. E.g. (and I’m making the details up entirely), when presented with a description of a person that includes the characteristics “bookish” and “likes poetry,” survey respondents will probably be more likely to choose “philosophy professor” over “computer programmer” when asked to speculate about his profession, even though there are many many many more computer programmers in the world than philosophy professors. In fact, there are almost assuredly more bookish computer programmers who like poetry than similar philosophy professors simply because there are so many more computer programmers in general. 
Frequently this research is presented as a frontal assault on the assumption of rationality employed by standard economic analysis, especially of the “Econ 101” variety. And it is, to some extent. But just to some extent. 

Kahneman is disappointingly full of himself when lambasting expected utility theory, a mainstay of economic theory which Kahneman appears to think is entirely overthrown by his research. The work on which he bases this assessment investigates the difficulties humans have dealing with very small probabilities, difficulties which have some unusual effects at the margin (such as most people “irrationally” overweighting a .0001% chance of something happening), and making inconsistent decisions depending on the framing of options (e.g., starting with $300 with the ability to possibly make an additional $200 vs starting with $500 with the ability to possibly avoid the loss of $200). 

This is valuable research, and well worthy of the Nobel Prize bestowed upon him. But how many real world decisions fall into these categories? How does this research weigh on the Econ 101 discussion of, say, the effect of a carbon tax on oil at the wellhead on the price and consumption of gasoline? The effect of the minimum wage on the unemployment rate of unskilled teenage labor? The effect of rent control on the housing market? Not a lot. Some, perhaps. But not a lot. 

Attacking the “rationality assumption” in economics has become something of a shibboleth among the less educated critics of Economics. But, in fact, the sort of super-human feats of hyper-rationality that are mocked by these critics really aren’t necessary for what economists want out of the “rationality assumption.” When you find yourself in a supermarket (never mind how you got there), and you’re hungry, do you usually find yourself walking out with a roll of toilet paper, a bar of soap, and two quarts of oil, or are you more likely to toss a pound of ground beef and some buns in your car for the trip home? For the basic, regular lessons, that’s really all that Economics needs from the rationality assumption.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan is an alluring writer.  He's not a scold.  His writing is quiet and humble and lacks the arrogant confidence of most activists pushing his agenda.

The bulk of "The Omnivore's Dllemma" tells the story of three different modern ways of making food:  1) What is referred to as "industrial," and is best thought of as the consistent application of science and efficient specialization to agriculture, 2) what I'll call "Industrial organic," which also strives for efficient specialization while avoiding some chosen aspects of conventional agriculture which are believed to be toxic for the environment, and 3) essentially "nostalgia" farming (my term, not Pollan's), which tries as hard as possible to source inputs directly from the land on the farm, and is basically what most of us think of when we think of a "family farm."

Joel Salatin, a nostalgia farmer (and a libertarian, bless his heart) is the hero of the story, and many inspiring paragraphs are devoted to the sophisticated understanding of a seemingly infinite variety of details associated with making his farm work, from (hyper) local watershed management to optimal chicken coop construction and deployment strategies (it's regularly moved from spot to spot to take advantage of natural fertilizer).  

By comparison, the Iowa corn farmer is presented as needing to know little more than how to drive a combine and plug his iPod into his climate controlled cab, a circumstance occasionally rued by the farmers themselves.  

Of course, by being so specialized, the Iowa corn farmer can manage to grow a lot more corn than could ever be managed by nostalgia farmers, even if he doesn't get to raise his own chickens.  

This points to a bit of a blind spot in the book.  By stressing the impressive range of knowledge Salatin brings to bear on his farm, as compared with the seemingly meager array of skills needed to farm corn in the corn belt, Pollan subtly downplays the vast array of skills brought to bear in the entire "industrial" farming complex.  

As an journalistic exercise, Pollan purchased part of a cow to watch as it worked its way through the industrial system, moving from place to place to better address its needs at various stages of its life-cycle, and occasionally leaving questionable environmental messes along the way (it's telling that the benefits of specialization would make it worthwhile for cattle ranchers to abandon manure, in earlier years valuable as fertilizer, in toxic pools).  It's a decidedly unromantic life for the cow, perhaps, even, one that the government should forcibly modify, but it's also a life that illustrates the value of specialization and gains from trade.  Moving cattle isn't cheap.  Profit seeking businesses aren't going to do it unless there are good reasons.

The book would have been well served if Pollan made an effort to calculate how many Joel Salatins would be needed, at his level of productivity, to feed seven billion people.  I don't know the answer to that question, but I bet it would have tamped down the romance a bit.

Pollan is well known for being perhaps the uber-critic of "Big Corn," having found that essentially everything Americans eat appear to have some corn product in it.  This is supposedly because of the malevolent influence of processed food manufacturers who push for crop subsidies which are heavily weighted to corn production.  His argument is pretty compelling, although I suspect that more of the recent innovation in the use of corn would survive sans corn subsidy than the fashionable anti-corn crusaders would expect or like.  Still, I'd be happy to join forces with them in fashioning a more rational agriculture policy (meaning, something approximating none at all).  The big worry is that the sausage-factory of Congress will keep the corn subsidies and add on new policies pushing broccoli, or snap peas, or beets, or what have you, rather than letting consumers make their own non-nudged choices.  

That would probably be worse than the current system, and one wonders whether Pollan, anyway, is equipped to grapple with these issues.  Consider the following:

"Perhaps it is no accident that sentimental communism founders precisely on the issue of food.  The Soviets sacrificed millions of small farms and farmers to the dream of a collectivized industrial agriculture that never managed to do what a food system has to do:  feed the nation.  By the time of its collapse, more that half of the food consumed in the Soviet Union was being produced by small farmers and home gardeners operating without official sanction, on private plots, tucked away in the overlooked corners and cracks of the crumbling Soviet monolith.  George Naylor, speaking from deep within the American monolith, might be onto something when, during our conversation about industrial agriculture, he likened the rise of alternative food chains in America to '...the last days of Soviet agriculture.  The centralized food system wasn't serving the people's needs, so they went around it.  The rise of farmer's markets and CSAs is sending the same signal today.'  Of course, the problems of our food system are very different--if anything, it produces too much food, not too little, or too much of the wrong food.  But there's no question that it is failing many consumers and producers, which is why they are finding creative ways around it."  

Interesting comparison.  Naylor and, I assume, Pollan, miss the key point in the difference between Soviet and American agriculture:  Soviet private plots were an attack on the system.  They ran completely counter to what socialist collectivism was all about.  In a free market system, like we kinda have in the US, people abandoning Safeway for farmers markets and CSAs when they decide that the latter do a better job than the former is the system.  When someone comes up with a better process, people are allowed to use it, the wails of the spurned incumbents be damned.  

And then there's this piece of bizarre pseudo-science:

"We don't have the scientific tools to measure or even account for these fungi's unusual powers.  (Andrew) Weil speculates that their energies derive from the moon rather than the sun, that mushrooms contain, instead of calories of solar origin, prodigious amounts of lunar energy."

"Who's to say the day won't come when science will be able to measure the fungi's exotic energies, perhaps even calculate our minimum daily requirement of lunar calories?"

Oh Michael!  I thought you were speaking to the reality-based community.