Memes

Nice post on topic popularity, at ICCI.

Iraq war veterans who have killed respond to cognitive dissonance, at Scientific American.

Religion may effect what you perceive.

Wall Street Journal op-ed hints at a brilliant recession fighting strategy-- end the war on drugs.

These are all awesome links, I stole them all from Mind Hacks, and I'll probably do some follow up on them.

Religion and Politics - A Fancy Graph

Hat tip to Secular Right.

More fancy graphs here and here.

Friendship and The Supply of Ideas, cont.

Again, I feel the need to do some clarifying.

In the original post, I said:

For many ideas, which are carried in books, on CDs, in movies, and the like, the supply works just as it does with any other material good. As the market price goes up, so does the amount supplied. The everyday upward-sloping supply curve for material goods applies equally to these ideas — because they are material goods.

This is partially true. I failed to address intellectual property laws, which in some cases invalidates this model.

To make a long story short, the amount of information supplied will not necessarily respond to supply and demand. In general, information subject to IP laws (patents, for example), will be supplied suboptimally. That's about all I can say without getting deep into the details of specific industries, as well as monopoly and monopolistic competition theory, and I don't want to do that. Suffice it to say my supply-and-demand model can break down in these cases.


So moving on:

Friendship-

I feel like my analysis of friendship was pretty weak, so I'm going to try to go through it more thoroughly here. Consequently, I'm about to get fairly meticulous and technical. Feel free to skip this, I reach the same conclusion at the end.

Let's take the simplest possible example: one homogenous group of people, who are able to provide what they want on their own. Naturally, no relationships are formed. Everyone is a happy hermit. Supply equals demand, because everyone gets as much of what he wants at the price of providing it.

Now let's say there are two separate homogeneous groups of equal sizes, each of which can provide what the other group wants, and the wants of each group are homogeneous. Naturally, they pair up randomly. Supply and demand again are equal, and the two services are traded. The amount of each service provided depends on the cost of the service.

Two homogeneous groups of different sizes, each of which can provide what the other group wants: scarcer groups attract more friends. Friendship groups are formed with ratios of group 1 to group 2 that are equal to the ratio of group 1 to group 2 of the entire group. So if there are 3 times as many people in group 1, friendship groups will be formed with 3 of group 1 and 1 of group 2. Supply again equals demand.

Now 3 homogeneous groups. Let's say group 1 likes group 2, group 2 likes group 3, and group 3 likes group 1. In this case, the friendship bartering market breaks down, and no trade occurs. Supply doesn't equal demand.

Same as the above case, but introduce a currency to the situation. Let's call the basic unit of currency a "joke". Using jokes, the 3 groups can now purchase the services they like, and supply again equals demand. (Yes, I am proposing that jokes operate as a currency of sorts, but no, I'm not prepared to defend this. Just an example.)

Multiple groups with a variety of services they can provide and services they like: depending on how well friends match up, social currencies may or may not become widespread. In any case, the variety of wants and the variety of abilities allow social currencies to come into play if needed. In the friendship market, supply equals demand (though the process may be relatively crude). This case seems realistic, so I'm feeling confident of this aspect of my model. My conclusion from the last post should hold true.


Also, I keep saying "friendship", but this should apply to all human social interaction, where coercion is not present. People try to avoid those who they dislike and be around those they like. For example, coworkers may be hard to choose, but if the difference between potential coworkers is large enough, it may lead one to change jobs. A person will be willing to accept losses less than the gains from better coworkers. Supply should practically always equal demand in social situations.


I don't like writing these kinds of posts.


[edit- the social currency idea is no good. I should instead argue that as people are able to provide a larger variety of services, there will be a greater likelihood of avoiding the scenario where no trade occurs, so in everyday life the friendship market should be crude but still amenable to economic analysis.]

Friendship and The Supply of Ideas

I've discussed the demand for ideas. What about the supply? (I'm ignoring beliefs for now.)

For many ideas, which are carried in books, on CDs, in movies, and the like, the supply works just as it does with any other material good. As the market price goes up, so does the amount supplied. The everyday upward-sloping supply curve for material goods applies equally to these ideas — because they are material goods. (Some advertising also works in this manner, with advertisers targeting those who are interested in the information they supply, and then adding the advertising cost onto the price of the good when a person buys it. In effect, the supply increases in response to the "price", that is, the value consumers are willing to pay for it.)

Ideas supplied outside of traditional markets are more problematic. What determines the information brought up in, say, everyday discussions?

The key to understanding the supply of these ideas in these situations is the realization that many social processes, though money is not explicitly involved, operate as markets.

There are 6 billion people on Earth, and you can only be in close relationships with a handful of them. The upper limit to the number of people a person can keep in touch with is probably a few hundred. Somehow, individuals must decide who to befriend and who to ignore. Thus friendship involves the allocation of scarce resources. Whether the reasoning behind the relationship is described best by social exchange theory, Gary Becker's rotten kid theorem, or something entirely different, the result is a market.

Let's say each person is looking for the most rewarding friendship he can get, without searching for too long. Since the value of a friendship is subjective, each individual is going to be looking for somewhat different qualities in a friend.

But there's not enough of each person to satisfy the friendship desires of everyone who wants to be his friend (well, maybe for some people— but wannabe friends still have to compete with other activities, like jobs and television). So a sorting process occurs, each person looking for the best friends he can get that will take him.

One of the things a person looks for in a friend is pleasing ideas. For example, a person who talks constantly about his cat probably won't get many friends outside of cat enthusiasts. People might avoid this person like the plague. A person with an unending supply of hilarious jokes, or who can give profitable stock market advice, will be more successful on the friendship market, other things being equal.

This gives friend-seekers an important incentive, which is the entire reason for jumping into this subject: the incentive to tailor their conversation to their friend's (or potential friend's) interests. By doing this, they can extend the range of possible friendships open to them. In other words, there is a sort of implicit price for information in the friendship market, and, by providing more valuable information, you can ask for a higher price. Presumably, people are aware of this, at some level, and respond accordingly. This means the supply curve looks something like this:



As the benefits of supplying information go up, so does the amount supplied.

Combine this with the demand curve from earlier, and the information market looks like this:




Economics and sociology: 1
Memetics: 0


More

Gary Becker, Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology (from The Economic Approach to Human Behavior) -- the rotten kid version of friendship

Sergio Currarini, Matt O. Jackson, Paolo Pin, An Economic Model of Friendship: Homophily, Minorities and Segregation -- a market-oriented model of friendship

George Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms -- the social exchange version of friendshp

Homo Memeticus

In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins famously argued that ideas (memes) are analogous to biological replicators. They replicate, mutate, and evolve, and human brains are their playgrounds.

In this essay I offer an alternative to biological memetics.

Why is an alternative needed?

Unnoticed by memeticists, there is a crucial difference between biological replicators and ideas: in biology, organisms are subject to natural selection; ideas, however, are created and selected by humans. This is an odd situation, which throws a wrench in the normal evolutionary model. Biologists would have to create new models, almost entirely from scratch, to take account of human peculiarities in the reproduction of ideas.

Fortunately, they don't need to. There's already a science dedicated to evolutionary processes guided by humans. This science is economics. (I just rewrote that, by the way.)

Homo Memeticus

"Everyone recognizes that most people respond to costs and benefits in deciding how much to buy of simple goods such as fruit, clothing, or a car. I claim that this common-sense idea applies to all human decisions."
- Gary Becker, The Economics of Life

To simplify their work, economists often use a stripped-down model of humans that is completely rational and informed. This superhuman has been nicknamed homo economicus by detractors.

In this essay I am proposing a slight alteration to this model. I am positing that humans select both information and beliefs in the same way they select other economic goods. (Since homo economicus is completely rational and informed, he never has to select information or beliefs.)

This new model — homo memeticus — looks for the most rewarding information at the cheapest cost. When the costs of a piece of information increase, the likelihood of his "consuming" it decreases. He is utility maximizing, just as homo economicus, but he is not blessed with perfect information.




There are, however, some limits to the analogy with material goods. The market price for many ideas is negligible, allowing other costs to gain primary significance, such as the time and effort needed to understand the idea, or the adverse consequences of understanding it (maybe ignorance is bliss). These costs could apply to material goods as well, but presumably they exert more influence in the realm of ideas.

Homo memeticus also chooses his beliefs economically. Beliefs, though not traded on a market, have many costs. There are the costs of the information needed to understand the belief — for example, the time spent at church to understand Christianity, or the cost of an economics textbook to understand economic theory. There are psychological costs — for example, many people find the belief in human evolution painful, and prefer, psychologically, to believe humans were created by a god. Then there are financial costs — a business CEO will not get far with the belief that he is exploiting workers, and that the only way to rectify the situation is to transform the business into a workers' coop.




The model can be employed like so:
International trade economics is an obscure subject, filled with strange terminology and math. A good deal of time and effort is required to grasp it, not to mention the cost of buying a textbook! And the benefit to the layman is small — how many non-economists make more money or sleep better at night because they know that exports minus imports equals savings minus investments? Protectionism, on the other hand, is an easy theory to grasp. You can almost surely get the theory for free, and it gives you the mental security of knowing that our economic problems can be blamed on foreigners. Any man on the street can pride himself on having serious views about national policies with no schooling whatsoever, and without sacrificing his nationalist prejudices, thanks to protectionism.

The cheapness, simplicity, and psychological satisfaction of protectionism all play a significant role in its spread. In this area, protectionism — in spite of the almost unanimous support of free trade by economists — is the belief best suited to the stereotypical layman (a fact that bugs Paul Krugman to no end).

It is my belief that this simple model, with the help of empirical research, can explain the distribution of human beliefs. And though it is intuitive — obvious, really — it leads to surprising conclusions. More on these later.


More

Bryan Caplan, Rational Irrationality: A Framework for the Neoclassical-Behavioral Debate

Bryan Caplan, Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality

Intelligence and Political Views

Interesting essay here.

His three conclusions about intelligence:

1) Social liberals are smarter on average

2) Fiscal conservatives are smarter on average

3) Radicals are smarter on average

From this, it follows that the ideology with the highest average intelligence is probably market anarchism.


I won't comment on the relationship between intelligence and realistic beliefs right now.