Alas, Poor Yoram
by Steve Landsburg
on December 19, 2011
in Bad Reasoning and Education
This just in: The study of physics makes people less compassionate. Data show that when cornered at a party by the inventor of a perpetual motion machine, physics majors are particularly unlikely to offer positive encouragement.
Also, the study of history leads to closed-mindedness. After taking an American history course, students become considerably less open to the idea that Millard Fillmore might have been Abraham Lincoln’s vice president.
Meanwhile, the study of chemistry makes people less ambitious. Chemistry students are particularly unwilling to invest in lead-to-gold conversion kits, even when they are conveniently offered over the Internet.
Geology students are just plain nasty. Among all majors, they are the least likely to participate in coordinated meditation exercises for the prevention of earthquakes — even when the organizers estimate that hundreds of thousands of lives might be at stake.
And economics majors are so greedy that they are particularly unlikely to donate to left-wing interest groups that seek to undermine capitalism.
I made all of those up except for the last one, which I got from University of Washington Lecturer Yoram Bauman’s contribution to yesterday’s New York Times, where he actually (and this part I swear to God I am not making up!!!) draws the conclusion that students who have studied the merits of capitalism are among the least likely to support its detractors and then manages to conclude that this is because economics students are greedy.
What can one possibly say? Did no alternative hypothesis present itself to the editors of the New York Times? Did it not occur to them, for example, that economics courses might, you know, teach something about critical thinking? Except, of course, when those courses are taught by the likes of Yoram Bauman.
thebigquestions.com
Bauman versus Landsburg et al
In a comment on co-blogger Bryan Caplan's recent post, economist Yoram Bauman writes:
If you're looking for another post topic, you could try to mediate between me and Steve Landsburg. (I've given up on him for now :)
I thought I would take a shot and so I read Landsburg's criticism of a New York Times column by Bauman, along with Bauman's responses and Landsburg's rejoinders. I quickly realized that to mediate well, I needed to read all the other comments on Landsburg's cite, of which there were many. I have now done that. There is nothing in mediation requiring that the mediator "split the difference." The goal of mediation is to figure out who's right. Landsburg is right. So what follows is my statement of the various arguments, adding my own thoughts from time to time.
Here's the basic issue. Bauman and co-author Elaina Rose published a study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO). In it, they showed that there was a systematic difference in the percent of students who contributed to two causes: a lower percent of economics majors than of other students contributed to the two causes. Bauman concludes that economists and econ majors are more selfish than others.
But surely, writes Landsburg, we must at least look at what the two organizations to which students could contribute were. One was "WashPIRG," which, in Bauman's own words, is "a left-leaning activist group." The other was Affordable Tuition Now (ATN), a group that lobbied for "sensible tuition rates, quality financial aid and adequate funding."
In his NYT piece, Bauman seemed to anticipate a criticism, writing:
You may question whether these groups actually serve the common good, but that's mostly beside the point. Regardless of the groups' actual social value, a purely self-interested individual would choose to free-ride rather than contribute; after all, a single $3 donation is not going to make a noticeable difference in tuition rates.
Bauman is right that a purely self-interested individual would choose to free-ride rather than contribute. But that doesn't mean that someone who chooses not to contribute does so only to free-ride. If A, then B, does not imply, If B, then A. That's the logical fallacy called "Affirming the consequent." A person who chooses not to contribute might do so because he doesn't believe in the cause. How could that possibly be "mostly beside the point?" Indeed, that's where Landsburg goes. He presents an alternate hypothesis: economics majors actually learn something about economics and that learning tends to inoculate them against causes in which wealth is not created but redistributed. Left-leaning causes are often that way and lobbying for "sensible," that is, low, tuition rates is a clear-cut instance of lobbying for redistribution. (A little thinking will convince anyone that if tuition rates at a government-run university are to be kept low, taxpayers must pick up the tab. In fact, at a recent rally run by some students at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), students called explicitly for higher taxes so their tuitions wouldn't rise.)
...
So my job of mediation is pretty much done on the issue itself. I'll sum up: Bauman wrote an article making a strong claim.
Landsburg showed that the claim did not follow from the evidence.
Bauman admitted that the claim did not follow from the evidence and pointed out that his and Elaina Rose's original study had pointed that out.
...
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