Why "Monkey See, Monkey Do' Works for People

The Times Tuesday, in Cells That Read Minds, reported on interesting research. Scientists are watching primates (first monkeys, then humans) to see what cells were activated when we watch other primates:

"The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons,
that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries
out the same action on its own.

But if the findings, published in 1996,
surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans,
it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more
highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say
reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.

The
human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out
and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the
social meaning of their behavior and their emotions."

Can You Identify the Original 13 Colonies

History News Network provides this reminder of eternal truths--the young don't know their history.

"“Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen” trumpeted the New York Time’s headline on April 4, 1943, a day when the main story reported that General George Patton’s troops had overrun Erwin Rommel at Al-Guettar. Providing support for Allan Nevins’s claim that “young people are all too ignorant of American history,” the survey showed that a scant 6% of the 7000 college freshman could identify the 13 original colonies, while only 15% could place McKinley as president during the Spanish-American War. Less than a quarter could name two contributions made by either Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. "

Poorly Performing Bureaucrats

Some would argue that my title is an anti-oxymoron, a redundancy. But today's Federal Diary in the Post discusses (Is the Annual Performance Review the Goof-Off's Best Friend?) a proposal from a Harvard man, Robert Behn (see his newsletter here):

"Behn argues that most agency managers have only two choices when trying to fire employees who don't pull their weight: Launch an all-out attack using the full powers of the personnel system, or shrug off their lackluster performance and give the employee a passing grade, such as 'meets expectations' or 'satisfactory.'

Agency managers are not dumb or incompetent in their handling of poor performers, but they understand that there is only so much time in the week, the month and the year, Behn says. Managers can focus on a few important problems and try to make a difference on behalf of taxpayers, or they can go to war with employees who know the workplace rules and are 'willing and able to use them' to protect their jobs, Behn writes."

I agree with the analysis. I'm dubious of the proposal, which is to eliminate yearly reviews and just rely on letters of commendation. The bottom line is that managers, like other Americans, don't like face to face confrontations (in the blogosphere is okay, but not where it counts). So they need strong incentives to manage people well.

Hedgehogs at the White House

Via Dan Drezner an article from the Wall Street Journal--WSJ.com - The Numbers Guy (free)--on Professor Tetlock's book, Expert Political Judgments. He used Isaiah Berlin's categories:

"Foxes [those who know many small things] outperformed hedgehogs [those who know one big thing] in nearly every measure, Prof. Tetlock said. That suggested that those with flexible thinking were better equipped to make forecasts.

Foxes were better, by about three times, at adapting their predictions to world events they hadn't expected. This relates to another failing of hedgehogs: they tended to be more likely to engage in 'hindsight bias.' In other words, hedgehogs were more likely to err in their own favor when asked to recall past predictions -- and if they couldn't recall their own mistakes, how could they be expected to learn from them?"

See Louis Menand in The New Yorker for a fuller discussion, including the points that people make their information fit their preconceptions, discounting opposing information, and that the premium is on "experts" to offer new and different predictions. But hedgehogs can be spectacularly right (particularly scientists).

IMHO our President is a hedgehog (most politicians are, regardless of ideology, although Bill Clinton could not have been), so it's not surprising that it takes a while for bad news to sink in.

How Government Really Works IV

Following up on yesterday's them, Slate has this article--
Lobbying and Laziness - It's not just about greed. It's about loafing. By John Dickerson:

"The more effective scenario, [ than exchanging money for votes] for everyone concerned, involves the lobbyist becoming friendly with members of the Congress member's staff, who research issues and advise him or her what to do and how to vote.

When the member of Congress goes to staff for information, he wants it fast. A staffer can read all available material on the issue, think through the policy, and balance what's right against the member's political interests—or he can call his friend Smitty the lobbyist. Smitty knows all about this complicated stuff in the telecommunications bill. He was talking about it just the other day at the Wizards game, which was almost as fun as the Cointreau-and-capon party Smitty hosted at his spread in Great Falls over Labor Day.

Smitty has a solid, intellectually defensible answer to every question. He also knows how an issue is likely to play out politically for the member back in his home district. In a hectic day, Smitty makes a staffer's day easier. That's almost as appealing as the skybox and the free drinks. It's easy to rationalize relying on lobbyists for this kind of help. In asking lobbyists to help them understand technical issues, staffers are doing the same thing journalists do every day—and in fact, journalists often call the same lobbyists for the same reason. They find someone who understands the issue, figuring that they're smart enough to use the information that rings true and discard the spin."

I.e., like the President with his slide briefings, Congress members and staffs are dependent on others for information. And it's true that most every issue can be given a reasonable justification.

How Government Really Works III

A Big Government Fix-It Plan for New Orleans - New York Times:

"The passage of the bill [a proposal for the government to buy out LA homeowners] has become increasingly important to Louisiana because the state lost out to the greater political power of Mississippi last month when Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf states region. The package gave Mississippi about five times as much per household in housing aid as Louisiana received - a testimony to the clout of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Senator Thad Cochran, chairman of the Appropriations Committee."

How Government Really Works II

Dan Drezner links to a Mickey Kaus observation on a Newsweek story about a slide presentation given to the President showing an al Qaeda/Iraq link. Kaus expresses incredulity that a slide presentation would be very significant in decision making. Drezner explains why it could be:

"The second thing is more mundane but nevertheless true -- the higher you go up the policy food chain, the less detail in the memos. The reason is that the most precious commodity of cabinet-level officials is time. They're scheduled to within an inch of their lives -- the last thing they have time for is 'assessing the veracity of the underlying raw intelligence.'


This is why stovepiping is so dangerous. [The allegation is that the presentation bypassed normal staffing and went up the stovepipe to the President.] Even with a decision as momentous as going to war, a president is rarely going to devote the time to assessing the accuracy rate of intelligence briefings. More likely, they'll assume that if it gets to their desk there must be something there there.

I'm not saying that there wasn't a willful blindness in parts of the White House about this intelligence. But never underestimate the cognitive limitations of policy principals that time crunches create."

I agree with the perspective, but would amplify. The intelligence community has often been viewed as in-bred and biased, a "stovepipe" (or set of stovepipes) in itself. There's a long history of attempts to bring a different perspective to security issues (the Gaither Commission in 1950's which came up with the "missile gap"; the Team B effort in the 70's). Cheney and Rumsfeld had Feith do a shop in DOD that ended up pushing the al-Qaeda/Hussein link.

In a broader sense, any executive needs to avoid becoming the captive of her bureaucracy, relying only on the information coming up the stovepipes. FDR was famously disorganized, setting up competing agencies, talking to everyone, with the result that he wasn't captive of any bureaucracy.

But today shows the flip side of the coin. If you go outside the stovepipe and are wrong, as the Iraq intelligence was, the bureaucrats in the stovepipe get very, very pissed off. Or, using a positive spin, they believe that leaders who have proven their incompetence should not have a monopoly on the information presented to the public. Hence the leaks.

How Government Really Works I

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy discussing the James Risen Book on NSA eavesdropping -. The background is that DOJ issued a memo apparently conceding that the program violated FISA, but Kerr's not sure. He raises the possibility that the DOJ public affairs shop did the document without thoroughly understanding the issues:

"That is, the DOJ memo may have been written by people who knew less about the monitoring program than we now know thanks to Risen's book. (This may seem odd to you if you have never worked in the federal government; my guess is that it will seem less odd to those who have.) "

Yes, outsiders to an institution believe that knowledge is like blood in the body--it's everywhere, so what anyone in the institution knows everyone knows. Makes it easy to demonize.

"Creative Destruction" and New Orleans

One of the favorite phrases of economists is Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction":

the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. [Schumpeter sees it as a virtue.]

But non-economic forces do the same job of revolutionizing structures. Following Katrina/Rita there have been a scattering of media reports on people who are settling into new lives in new places and doing better, finding the schools are better, jobs better paid, etc. The NY Times today has an article on the New Orleans school system, pre-Katrina one of the worst in the country, post-Katrina being converted to mostly charter schools. Of course, I think a conservative economist should argue that people should have left New Orleans before the hurricanes if they could find better lives elsewhere. And politicians should have pushed the charter schools if that's the way to better education.

But the reality, often not recognized by economists, is that people get in ruts and don't act rationally, at least in the terms that economists can calculate and count. They like tradition and community, they fear change, they find it simplest to do today what they did yesterday. Hurricanes, like economic change, uproot. The law of averages says that some people end up better off, some end up worse off. Over two centuries farm children have been leaving the country for the city: some made fortunes, some failed miserably. (That's an example of Schumpeter's creative destruction--moving resources from uneconomic uses to higher uses. ) By the nature of media, we tend to hear more about the successes than the failures. We must remember both sides: good and bad came out of the disaster, just as good and bad come out of the migration to the city.

Pornography and the Bureaucrat

Sorry, the title's misleading. My interest in porn has waned over the years.

Today in the Times Nick Chiles attacks black "street lit" in Their Eyes Were Reading Smut -:

"As a black author, I had certainly become familiar with the sexualization and degradation of black fiction. Over the last several years, I had watched the shelves of black bookstores around the country and the tables of street vendors, particularly in New York City, become overrun with novels that seemed to appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures - as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner."

(He reminds me a bit of the reaction to "Peyton Place" in the '50's.) If he's correct, publishers have discovered that young black women will buy racy books. Presumably the bodice busters of the Barbara Cartland school are too tame, but books with "street cred" appeal. [Warning: I'm so out of it the phrases in quotes may be totally inappropriate.]

How's this speculation: pornography is often linked with masturbation, the topic that got the great bureaucrat Dr. Jocelyn Elders fired. Masturbation is often correlated with a lack of sexual intercourse. Lack of sexual intercourse is correlated with a lack of partners. Young black women lack partners because racial prejudice tends to limit their choices to young black males, a huge proportion of whom are locked up. (There's also the possibility that women prefer to marry above themselves, see my blog on Tierney's column.) So young black women turn to porn on Saturday nights as a result of our drug laws and culture. (If this extended chain of argument has any validity, porn in India and China should be exploding among the men.)