Economic Woman

Indulge me, and I promise I won’t start calling myself a social media expert.

I’ve noticed that some media improves when you share it. Actually, I’ve noticed this about television. It doesn’t matter how many times I watch the first episode of the West Wing, say, or Friday Night Lights. If I’m watching it with someone who has never seen it before, I enjoy myself. On my own, I’d be bored.

Also: I am a compulsively social reader. By which I mean, I have to read all the best parts out loud to you. This is one of the things that is great about Twitter, or Facebook, or the “email to a friend” buttons on newspaper websites, right? I can pester you even when you’re out of earshot, and that makes reading more fun.

Speaking of which, via Mathew Ingram, you should read this review of Timothy Ferriss’s new book. Here’s a teaser:

Mr. Ferriss offers advice about so many disparate things — not simply losing weight and building muscle and improving sex and living forever, but learning to hold your breath longer than Houdini (!) and hit baseballs like Babe Ruth (!!) — that paging through “The 4-Hour Body” is like reading the sprawling menu in a dubious diner, quite certain the only thing you’d dare order is the turkey club.

And that’s not even the best part.

I see that the New Yorker has ungated Jonah Lehrer’s The Truth Wears Off, on how statistical significance seems to decline over time. Lehrer’s is one of those rare features with a punch line, so if you want to enjoy the piece fully you should read it before this post.

Lots of smart people have weighed in online. The best follow-up I’ve read so far is from Andrew Gelman, who links to his own piece from American Scientist. (H/t to Chris Blattman.) But as plenty of good has been said about the piece already, I’d like to point out the one thing about it that bugged me.

Early in the piece, Lehrer writes at length about Jonathan Schooler, a psych researcher who has found that he has difficulty reproducing his own results.

…while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. “I’d often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn’t be as strong,” he told me. “It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker.” At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research.

The central insight of the piece is that declining statistical significance in a field overall is one of the effects of publication bias. When an idea is new, strong positive results are required for publication. As it becomes accepted knowledge, contradictory results become interesting enough to publish. That’s a brilliant, important observation.

The problem is that Schooler’s experience can’t be explained by publication bias. He is just one researcher. If publication bias was the only force in play, individual researchers wouldn’t see their results change over time, only their chances of getting those results published.

Schooler’s problem is probably better described as regression to the mean following a few anomalous results, as the article acknowledges. (Though it is a pretty weird case, and I’d love to hear a better explanation, especially for his tests of the decline effect itself.) That’s a less important issue than publication bias.It’s not a problem with the scientific method if anomalous results are gradually disproven, but publication bias can twist our perception of the world over the long term.

If the piece is really raising questions with the scientific method, why do we read so much about Schooler? And why do transitions throughout the piece seem to relate his research to the decline effect in fields as a whole? I suspect it’s because even though it isn’t illustrative of the articles’ central point, his story is interesting.

This is the sort of compromise that writers and editors make during revision. Some characters seem too compelling to cut, even as inclusion confuses the point, as I believe it does in this case. But we’re supposed to be servants of the truth, not just great stories, and I expect better of the New Yorker. Maybe it’s an unrealistic standard.

From Monday’s Globe:

Mr. Lopez, who has designed fitness nutrition plans, recommends options for healthier dining and drinking.

“When Dawn’s at the pub, a turkey burger or sweet potato fries would be better alternatives. On average, one chicken wing has 100 calories, seven grams of fat and 100 grams of sodium.” As for alcohol, “vodka with soda or champagne are her best bets – both are below 100 calories.”

So I’m trying to picture 100 grams of sodium. Sounds like a lot, right? And when you multiply up, the numbers become really silly: There’s a full kilogram of sodium in ten wings? Obviously, it’s supposed to be milligrams. This might look like a typo, and I do think pointing out typos is kind of petty. But this kind of mistake doesn’t surprise me nearly as much as, say, a misspelling of the word “grams” would. And that’s frustrating.

Much more at Regret the Error.

(H/t to a sharp-eyed friend, Mike Markovich.)

This is a bit late, but last week I was quoted in the Washington Post’s ombudsman’s column. The piece includes a link to one of my This Mag columns. Finally, one of my comments was quoted over on ScienceBlogs, in service of an interesting point.

On this story, I’ll make one obvious comment: What kind of aspiring State Department staff wouldn’t be discussing the cables? The kind you probably don’t want to hire, I think.

Last night, thanks to a productive procrastination binge, I finally got around to watching this documentary about data visualizations in journalism. It’s nice to see data journalism getting some attention, but I also hope that the shiny side of the field doesn’t eclipse writing and analysis.

Even the best visualizations can’t represent more than two or three variables. To analyze most complex problems, we need to discuss data that we can’t imagine in 3D. One of the things I’m trying to wrap my head around is how to bring real regression analysis, or at least some knowledge of statistical significance, into journalism. If we really want to use the avalanche of information that is hitting the web, we need to communicate better about statistics and statistical methods.

Interactive visualizations are supposed to replace old-fashioned, static infographics. Today, most writing about statistics is equivalent to the bar charts of old. You know: This number is bigger than that number; some other indicator is going up. Let’s take for granted that the difference isn’t random. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about selection bias. You don’t need to know how or why this survey was conducted. Let’s imply that any two studies with competing conclusions cancel each other out. And on and on and on. It’s time for a new model.

(h/t to kottke)

This is related to another question, namely, why anyone votes at all. The chance that your vote will alter the outcome of an election is extremely small, which makes the marginal benefit of that trip to the polls effectively zero. This piece suggests that if you care about social good in general, your payoff is very high in the unlikely event that your vote is pivotal. I think this argument is complicated by the relative similarity of front-running candidates, among other things. As far as I can tell, I vote for some sort of emotional and social return.

Strategic votes express a preference for some second- or third-best candidate. They are, on some level, an attempt to increase the marginal impact of a vote. But their effect is still very close to zero, and in my experience, voting strategically doesn’t bring anyone much joy. And yet we continue to do it. In fact, in the aggregate, strategic voters can be pivotal. In Toronto’s despair-inducing mayoral campaign, every other candidate is scrambling to collect votes from the otherwise disenchanted anyone-but-Rob-Ford contingent.

A few years ago, I vowed that I would never cast another strategic vote. This has made voting more fun, but in some ways it’s similar to Gordon Tullock’s decision not to vote at all. (That’s a reference to the first  link.)

On a trial basis, I’m going to post some links on gender and economics without (much) comment. Let me know if you find them useful or interesting.

Frances Woolley calls out Steven Levitt on Emily Oster’s gender balance research. A good summary, though I find her conclusion a bit unreasonable.

Via Economix, US women are leaving the financial services industry; it’s not clear why.

In US graduate schools, women are in the majority in most fields. Between 1999 and 2009, they caught up somewhat in engineering, business, education and a few other fields. (But not math.) To comment briefly: This is a pretty imperfect metric for occupational achievement. Graduate school, especially at lower-tier universities, isn’t a guaranteed job, and in many cases it’s a backup when good jobs aren’t available.

Mothers seem more likely than fathers to pass on resources to their children. Why?

I just read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece about online activism. I find the social media expert industrial complex pretty obnoxious, and like Gladwell, I don’t think the micro-donations and “awareness raising” that characterize most online activism can challenge the status quo. But this piece, like so much old media coverage of new media, is lazy and dumb.

(Note: I wrote this before reading other commentary online. That was lazy and dumb of me. Alex Madrigal has made similar points, better than I ever could, here.)

One of Gladwell’s main arguments is that real-life activism is based on “strong ties,” while social media enables “weak ties.” (I’m breaking out the scare quotes to remind myself, as much as anyone else, that Gladwell has an unnerving ability to make a concept feel true just by labelling it. For a good takedown of this concept, check out this post, via Madrigal.)

This ignores the strong ties that are reinforced online. But in my experience, Twitter is also a tool that can turn weak ties into strong ties. And while it isn’t automatic, social media is particularly suited to creating friendships across traditional social divides like age, class, and race.

A couple years ago, most of my time was spent with other students and high school friends. The folks I followed on Twitter were ex-colleagues, casual friends, and strangers. But all of that communication has bred intimacy, and lead to more face time. The divide between online and offline relationships is increasingly fuzzy, and as a result, I interact with a broader group of people.

Gladwell doesn’t account for this because, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t bothered exploring or even thinking deeply about social media. At one point, he sets up Wikipedia in opposition to hierarchical offline activist groups. The implication is that all online networks are leaderless and chaotic. The thing is that Wikipedia has both a leadership structure and institutionalized structures for dispute resolution. There isn’t one editor who reads every entry, but there is definitely one guy with final say on strategic direction.  And yet we get nonsense like this:

If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure.

There’s no such thing as a “wiki-boycott”—it’s just a funny combination of words, a diminishing shorthand for all online organizing. The internet, apparently, is the one thing the New Yorker is allowed to be inaccurate about. And that’s too bad, because whether the revolution is tweeted or not, I’d hate to see it missed by the world’s best magazine.

When I started university, one of my majors was urban studies. After a couple years I formally transferred to economics (which had made up part of my interdisciplinary curriculum) mostly out of frustration with the discipline. The study of cities, outside of geography departments, is pretty new. In many ways, that’s great for young people, because there are so many opportunities for original work.

But I felt like the tone of the discipline was set. While I learned a lot about rigorous qualitative research (it exists!) the mediocre qualitative work, and lack of quantitative rigour, drove me crazy. It seemed telling that my major didn’t require a single methods course. I couldn’t help but notice how much of the discipline was lifted more or less entirely from Jane Jacobs‘ work. We seemed to have only one intellectual giant, and academia couldn’t claim any credit for her work.

Thank god for Jacobs, though, for having the good sense to take on slum clearance, Le Corbusier, and half a dozen other destructive urban fads. And thank god for her latest successor, Doug Saunders.* Saunders’ new Arrival City builds on Jacobs’ work (it even includes an interview with her) by placing neighbourhoods like the ones she observed in a global context:

What will be remembered about our century, more than anything except perhaps changes to the climate, is the final shift of human populations from agricultural life to cities, the effects of which are being felt around the world. Arrival City gives us an on-the-ground view of this phenomenon—from Maryland to Shenzhen, from the favelas of Rio to the shanty towns of Mumbai, from Los Angeles to Nairobi. Doug Saunders [...] makes clear that the cities and nations that provide citizenship and opportunity to migrants stand to benefit as the migrant class evolves into a middle class, and he explains why those that ignore these people will see increased social unrest, poverty, and religious fundamentalism.

More than that, I think Arrival City is this decade’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (I’ve been saying this to everyone, and now the Guardian agrees with me.) Like Jacobs, Saunders has depended primarily on thoughtful observation. In retrospect, his insights seem so simple, so self-evidently correct, that it’s hard to imagine that no one has made exactly this case before.

Since reading the book, I see support for its thesis everywhere. I find myself thinking and referring back to it often, which, let’s face it, doesn’t happen with most trade nonfiction. If you’re interested in cities, migration, equity, or social policy, you should be reading this book. If there’s any justice in publishing, it will sell more copies than The Tipping Point. Saunders’ Canadian book tour starts today; events are listed here.

* Regular readers will know that I’ve done a little bit of work for Saunders, but it was in no way related to the book.