I think we're in serious danger of killing wizard cocksucker in its crib.
This "wizard c**ks**ker" crap is seriously cramping my ability to comment from work.
it misses what's so interesting about addiction, namely, the sort of intra-agent conflict that seems to be at the heart of the phenomenon.
Interesting to whom? "It misses what I find interesting in phenomenon X" is not a very strong critique. As with most of the Chicago stuff the problem isn't with the paper itself (it does exactly what you say: it shows that rational choice theory can model addiction) but with the policy implications that are inevitably drawn from it.
Well, that is definitely not wizard cocksucker, Becks. Would wizard chodesmoker be a more work-friendly alternative?
What is so annoying about this is that it manages to be both: (1) offensively counterintuitive and (2) blindingly, almost tautologically, obvious. Wait, you mean addicts stay addicts because they think that the short-term costs of not taking the substance outweigh the short-term benfits of not taking it? Amazing! It never would have occurred to me that there might be an incentive to avoid painful withdrawal symptoms!!!
So much of this kind of work is like this. The beginning move looks intellectually daring -- namely, using economic analysis to explain behavior that seems outside the scope of instrumental rationality. But then the analytical tools of economics are employed so abstractly that all the analysis essentially does is redescribe what everyone already knows.
What's this about people who are addicted to Ted Danson?
Come on, ogmb, "interesting about" meaning "what is essential to"--but a philosopher can't say "essential" without being prepared for a big throw-down.
I dunno. You could use Becker's argument as a foundation for some sort of new addiction therapy, using the rational choice lingo. Becker hasn't done that though -- or at least, if he did, it's not in your post.
The problem with this stuff is that often a lot of care is put into the foundations of the argument, where you are pretty much saying obvious things, such as: addicts seek to maximize their own welfare. Then the jump to the non-obvious conclusion is often hasty, and the econ-fellow makes lots of assumptions. You might go from (a) addicts seek to maximize welfare, to (b) therefore we should increase drug sentences, without a lot of time spent on the journey from (a) to (b), and half the article spent solely on (a). See, e.g., just about any well cited Posner opinion.
Why do we need a rational choice theory of addiction? Why wouldn't a neurochemical one suffice? Whatever the addict's inner monologue is telling him is cognitive bullshit.
In the technical sense of the word. Sorry, Becks, I'm not making life any easier for you.
Doesn't just about every comment thread on this site have some forbidden word in it?
ogged at 7, I don't see how your translation would change my point. Just because it's not interesting/essential to FL it doesn't mean it can't be interesting/essential to anybody. In academia you usually write for an audience of 25.
Yeah, I think 10 is the more interesting question. For example why do alcoholics who've been sober for years relapse? They wouldn't suffer physical withdrawl symptoms. They ought to know better, and, yet, it happens all the time.
What would "essential for Fontana Labs" even mean? I took Labs' point to be that if you try to describe addiction without accounting what he calls the "intra-agent conflict," you haven't really described addiction. (But I didn't mean to be so snippy in 7.)
For example why do alcoholics who've been sober for years relapse? They wouldn't suffer physical withdrawl symptoms. They ought to know better, and, yet, it happens all the time.
Only once every few years, is my guess.
14: Here again the econ-lingo does supply us with an answer, but an obvious one. The relapse occurs because, even without withdrawal, there are psychological benefits derived from the booze. And the act of getting drunk has certain positive benefits. If the negative externalities are in fact worse than the benefits, then the drunk has made a cognitive error.
What that adds, I can't say, except that it makes explicit what is usually implicit -- i.e., obvious.
why do alcoholics who've been sober for years relapse
Because not drinking sucks.
Actually, most of my friends who have relapsed into this or that temporarily licked substance abuse problem have done so at times of heavy stress. Job loss, divorce, etc.
Joe D., you know that I meant that people--different alcoholics who've been sober for a long time--relapse.
As BG points out, the relapse rate is one thing that isn't explained by the Becker account (according to some survey stuff I've read, at least). Also, there's some other stuff about consumption rates that is alleged to pose a problem. So the empirical adequacy is tricky.
As for what's interesting/uninteresting, I don't think I'm just reifying my idiosyncrasies. For example, addiction looks like a clear case of weakness of the will, and that seems like a form of irrationality. Furthermore, this sort of inner conflict might explain (e.g., on a duress-inspired model) why we have intuitions that addicts are less culpable for various kinds of wrongdoing. In order to overturn that, the Becker model should have some kind of positive payoff. Not simply "I can model it with RCT" but "see what exciting insights can be gained from modelling it with RCT."
I'm no expert on this stuff, but I found myself reading the account, scratching my head, and wondering what the appeal was. I think that's a fair question, at least, though I'm not claiming there's no answer.
urggh, ...and that it's not a rare phenomenon.
The alcoholic might relapse for the same reason a person with a bacterial infection might quit taking their antibiotics before completing their prescription. The symptoms disappear, which presents as a cure; and given enough time, the symptoms, now less immediate, don't seem as awful as they in fact were.
Yes, most threads eventually get some profanity but I'm more concerned about the question of degree -- if WC catches on like ATM, this place is going to go from being Entourage to Deadwood. I'm not asking that everyone keep things perfectly clean, but the spread of WC concerns me. I feel bad offering a vote against it, though, because WC is, well, pretty wicked.
With alcoholism, I'd guess that society's general acceptance of alcohol makes it much more tempting. if you're on the wagon, but all your friends seem to be able to handle themselves just fine when they get a pint after work, why not give it another try? It doesn't have the social stigma attached to, say, heroin addiction; in fact, abstinence from alcohol has a stigma, in many circles.
Sure SB, or as my father's an alcoholic, I think that I can say that when he was alone and suffering a setback in life, he started to drink heavily. (It's not a rational act, because he loves me, and enjoys talking to me, but I cut him out of my life after that until he could show me that he was in treatment.) It didn't maximize anything, since it made him more disorganized and less able to act in a welfare maximizing way.
There has been some work done on the way memories are formed and it is starting to look like the drug effect is remembered as being better than it was. So the addict is expecting to attain something that becomes farther and farther from what he actually gets.
Becks, I think that "the WC" might be a suitable alternative especially since it has a perfectly "clean" meaning too.
I second 28 (although the article is superfluous, isn't it?) and was about to suggest the same when I saw on preview that bg had beaten me to it. I feel so pwned.
I haven't read any of the original work, but I doubt if what Becker could possibly arguing is that addicts are actually maximizing their long-term utility, but acting to maximize their welfare in the short term. Since y'all are saying his observations are trivially true, I don't see why this doesn't account for relapse as apo argues in 18. Also, I'm not sure that intra-agent conflict always surrounds the decision to drink at the moment the decision is made, since mechanisms like denial are what allow the discounting of long-term outcomes. Addicts I have known aren't having a struggle of will at the moment they make the decision; they've decided there won't be bad consequences. This is non-trivially different from believing that addicts are engaged in a struggle of will at the decision moment (though I'm sure both models obtain to different situations).
It's possible I've been thick, or failed to understand the thrust of any and all parties. Apologies if so.
obtain in. sometimes I have real issues with prepositions and conjunctions.
"I don't see why this doesn't account for relapse as apo argues in 18."
or as I argue in 17. I am become Farber.
Point four from Tyler's post on Schelling might be relevant.
Becks, are you, perchance, the outodoorsy type?
Not simply "I can model it with RCT" but "see what exciting insights can be gained from modelling it with RCT."
FL, I don't know the history of this paper but I'm guessing Becker wrote it in reponse to repeated criticisms of the "But RCT can't explain things like addiction, now can it?" variety. As it turns out, yes it can, and the explanation isn't even that complicated (cue: complaints about obviousness). As about the insights, clearly the point of the paper was to show that seemingly "rational" mechanisms can create seemingly "irrational" outcomes.
For example, Olav Gjelsvik argues that the fact that p(addict relapsing)>p(non-user starts using) is unexplained by the Becker model (unless Becker thinks the rate of future discounting varies, which is possible but not intuitively appealing)
That makes some intuitive sense to me. Maybe a tendency to discount the future is a predictive characteristic for addiction.
You assume the goal was to shed light on the phenomenon in a way that would be interesting to a philosopher or non-economist. A lot of the work in economics follows this same rhetorical move: look this phenomenon appears irrational (ie violates many of the assumptions of economics), and yet when we look closer it has a basis in rational decision-making. It's self serving but an effective path to get attention within the field.
You could use Becker's argument as a foundation for some sort of new addiction therapy
I'm looking forward to a new Clockwork Orange based on this idea. What would be the Becker treatment for Alex?
Alex would be issued good-behavior credits from his neighbors, when he failed to molest them, which he could mix and trade with his friends. They would be redeemable for eye-liner and milk plus.
I would also add that Becker doesn't account for explicit self-destructive behavior, but then again I haven't read the paper in a while, so I might be wrong on that. None of the criticisms you listed though seem to support the claim that Becker modeled something other than addiction. They much more seem to claim that the model is not general enough or too rudimentary.
Any certainly Becker wouldn't call the outcome "irrational" since in his view it is driven by rational choice. I'm just trying to point out the disconnect that in my opinion creates much of the unease about this paper. People see the "irrationality" of the outcome and try to ascribe it to an "irrationality" of motives.
The brain is a strange thing. After the Pinter post above, I could have sworn the title to this one was Beckett. Only after reading the first sentence did it switch to Becker.
Oh well, good luck to whoever is on trial when I'm called as an eye-witness.
Reading through the thread, it strikes me that (IMHO) people are missing the point.
The point is not the amount of pleasure derived from A vs B; it is the question of whether people are homo economicus, a question that has already been answered in the negative in a hundred different ways. People are not utility-maximizing actors, they are animals evolved to act according to a set of heuristics that, in the past, did an adequate job of ensuring their fecundity.
You don't need to ponder addiction to see this, ponder your daily life. Every one has experiences where we know that doing something that is temporarily unpleasant, until we get into the swing of it, will, once we hit flow, be really pleasant. This might be cooking a meal, it might be sorting out old photos in iTunes, it might be reading a sophisticated book. But there's a counter pull, the thought that fifteen minutes of ramp-up time is a hassle and watching TV is so much easier and damn, I'm tired, and I work all day so I owe myself a break. Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other, but I wouldn't in any sense model it, in myself or anyone else I know, as some sort of utility maximization based on long-term expectations, discounting and similar paraphernalia.
they are animals evolved to act according to a set of heuristics that, in the past, did an adequate job of ensuring their fecundity.
okay, thesaurus-boy.
(I kid, I kid)
it is the question of whether people are homo economicus, a question that has already been answered in the negative in a hundred different ways. People are not utility-maximizing actors, they are animals evolved to act according to a set of heuristics that, in the past, did an adequate job of ensuring their fecundity.
The question is also not whether people are homo economicus, but whether homo economicus is an adequate tool to predict human decision making, a question that has already been answered a hundred times as "it depends", namely on the scope of the activities and the precision you expect from your inquiry. And of course on the academic affiliation of the responders.
After the Pinter post above, I could have sworn the title to this one was Beckett.
I kept seeing
">Gary Brecher
Oh hell, here's that link. So much for pithy.
whether homo economicus is an adequate tool to predict human decision making, a question that has already been answered a hundred times as "it depends"
Am I right in understanding this as saying that we don't know why the models work sometimes, only that, given certain constraints, they do seem to work? That is, there may be some larger, very different model that works better, we just haven't found it yet?
Have I mentioned that one of my students, last year, decided that the adjectival form of homo economicus was homoeconomic? I liked it.
JackM- I followed your link, and read two of his articles. That's pretty screwed up shit, if I do say so myself.
A final question is whether it is good for people to be "homo oeconomicus". Economists often make these little jokes about how H.E. is just a construct not describing any actual person. But everyone knows people, usually guys, who neglect their health, their families, their communities, and pretty much everything in the pursuit of net worth. Or perhaps spend all their time earning money to buy toys they don't have time to play with. Or who buy things they don't want or need because the price is too good to pass up.
Economists counter that with some sort of formalized meta-economics, where they assume that everyone can be assumed to be maximizing something, even if the something is fictional and unmeasurable. So you lose real actual economic rationality, which can be expressed in terms of dollar values, while gaining some imaginary economic rationality maximizing or optimizing unquantifiable shit.
Sen's attempt to define a more humane form of economic rationality seems to give away the farm, in terms of the large claims of economics to provide a powerful logic machine able to give valid answers to important questions. It seems to me that he is trying to figure out a way to bring non-economic values into economics, at the cost of mushing up the precision.
Screwed up, yes; he's barely socialized, and I'd never like to think that people like him were in charge of anything. But he's can often be dead-on about how wars actually get fought. His article about the Iran-Iraq war, titled something like "The War That Nobody Watched," has remained in the back of my mind for almost a year now.
"There are sort of small-scale criticisms (it fails to explain various empirical results, etc.)"
I would think a failure to explain empirical results is anything but small scale. Maximizing "welfare" is otherwise an exercise in pointless mathematics because as others said, its qualitative value is obvious and its quantitative results completely non-unique. This is a problem with most economic theorizing-scant respect for empirical results, and a fondness for pointless mathematical theorizing about qualitative statements ("Maximizing utility" which is an artificial and qualitative construct in the first place).
Matt has indeed mentioned "homoeconomic" here before.
This is a problem with most economic theorizing-scant respect for empirical results, and a fondness for pointless mathematical theorizing about qualitative statements
And the better alternative is...?
This is a problem with most economic theorizing-scant respect for empirical results
This is a bit broad brush, no? There's a lot of power in economic reasoning, and lots of empirical work being done. Most work these days relaxes one of the more restrictive assumptions, say on information or coordination, to look at the types of outcomes we'll get under imperfect conditions.
Given the rise of behavioral economics, which studies decision making in controlled experiments, it's going to be interesting to see how modeling reacts to the growing knowledge of actual patterns of economic decision-making. It could lead to a real dismantling of the edifice or to incremental improvement. I'm not sure which is more likely.
cw,
I agree it is a bit of a broad brush, and a tad provocative. There are many very respectable empirical economists around. The nice thing about empirical work is that it seems to be driven by data and actually tries to answer questions accordingly. In addition, as many economists have shown, a lot of extremely powerful economic arguments can be made without the aid of fancy mathematical abstraction (the most obvious and recent one being Thomas Schelling).
ogmb,
For starters economic theorists could stop pretending to be mathematicians for a change. I am sure that would help greatly. In any case, I will point you to someone who has made the same point much more cogently and better than I could. This is a piece by Deidre McCloskey which might interest you:
www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm4.pdf
Improving the predictive powers of economics visavis individual choices wouldn't do much to improve economics as a policy-forming discourse.
A: This is a problem with most economic theorizing-scant respect for empirical results, and a fondness for pointless mathematical theorizing about qualitative statements.
B: And the better alternative is...?
You don't have to replace someone else's bad dollar. Economics claims to be a powerful science vastly superior to common sense, muddling through, and (as far as that goes) all other social sciences. If it's not as good as it claims to be, you just go back to what you had before.
For starters economic theorists could stop pretending to be mathematicians for a change
Aka the "my level of abstraction is the right level of abstraction" objection. I'm not a very good mathematician. If economics were all about math I wouldn't get a foot in the door. Lots of mathy papers get lost in the thicket of their equations, or simply assume away the complications they're trying to uncover. But nothing of this refutes RCT as a useful tool to model human behavior.
If it's not as good as it claims to be, you just go back to what you had before.
Well, why don't you just go and turn it off then?
Ogmb,
I would think RCT is not exactly a useful tool to model human behaviour if it has some "small scale criticisms" like a failure to explain empirical results. If one still considers it useful, I would really be curious to know what exactly this usefulness is. At least in my areas of work, a failure to explain empirical observation means that a theory is plain wrong. Incidentally, this is the context of my original statements.
And your question about a better choice is a straw man. If a theory like RCT is inadequate, the logical thing would be to look for alternatives, and to acknowledge these inadequacies in the absence of alternatives. Instead, one often sees even famous economists sticking to theories which are clearly wrong (I don't know about specific examples from RCT, but an example is all those economists who still swear by the "efficient market hypothesis").
Doesn't just about every comment thread on this site have some forbidden word in it?
One place I stayed recently was running a content filter on their internet terminals that blocked out profanity. Any time I loaded a page with obscene words I'd get an error message saying I couldn't access it. The funny thing was that instead of saying "Page blocked: profanity" or something like that, the message would actually repeat the specific word that triggered the filter.
More than one Unfogged thread was blocked and the message almost invariably read something like:
"forbidded keyword fucked!"