Happiness by State in the US, 2018

A study done by Wallethub (their image below) using their own 31-factor happiness index shows the Bad Stripe, along with a few other interesting patterns.


1) The Bad Stripe (West Virgina, Kentucky and Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) is evident as a negative outlier as usual. These make up 6 of the bottom 11. For fans of Albion's Seed, this is where the Reavers are, i.e. Greater Appalachia. This also shows the limitation of a state-level analysis. There is significant structure within the states. Pennsylvania's southwest if taken separately would very likely look like West Virginia. The southeast if taken separately would be much more like New York and New Jersey. Same thing for Missouri - the northern part of the state is likely more like the Upper Midwest, and the southern part is the Ozarks, part of the Bad Stripe and more like Arkansas.

2) The Upper Midwest and Utah stand out as positive outliers, as usual. Moynihan's Law - is it the result of Yankee settlers (again Albion's Seed), non-British Isles North European immigrants, or some combination? (Map below from Wiki on German Ancestry in the USA and Canada.)



3) Very interesting that two demographically similar states like the Carolinas could be so different in this rating. North Carolina has done better economically than South Carolina, and culturally does tend to move in sync with Virgina (perhaps most famously in the 2008 presidential election predicted by Nate Silver) - which makes sense because South Carolina was largely settled from Georgia initially, and North Carolina from Virginia. Still, they're not THAT different, and they have a very different happiness outcome.

4) I can't argue for similar historical links to the Reavers for Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, who as always fare very poorly. You'll have to develop your own theory for that!

Patterns that Emerge In Both Social Conservatives and Social Leftists

The American left is beginning to curiously resemble the right - not in its positions, but in dynamics and behavior. I can't quite say "mirror" unless we're talking about a tinted fun-house mirror, because it's not the specific concrete positions of the left that resemble those of social conservatives, but rather the social dynamics and patterns of the discussions about these concrete positions that are becoming so bizarrely similar. I use "social leftist" rather than liberal or social liberal because a clear division has emerged. What I mean by this term is a group of American progressives more focused on race and gender issues than the average liberal, active and strident on social media, and demanding removal of platforms and free speech protections for political opponents. Conservatives have traditionally been divided among social, nationalist and economic conservatives ("God, country and market") and the cracks inside the GOP show these tectonic segments. The Democratic party of the late twentieth century was more divided among identity politics lines (which we're now paying for; more on this in a second) but the Dems are not immune to the realignments in American politics either, and what's emerging is something I think very like the traditional divisions within the GOP. And what's more, these divisions mirror the old GOP fault lines, for reasons of basic psychology, and similar dynamics emerge.

For the past one or two decades there has been a growing awareness that each person's political positions are strongly influenced - maybe even dominated - by our temperament. This is in turn determined by genetics (yes, really) and our early life experiences and cultural programming, none of which is within our conscious control. This is actually quite a depressing reality since in a democracy, we hope that we can change our minds about politics based on reasoning about new information, as opposed to psychotherapy or genetic engineering. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt founded the field of moral foundations theory, showing that all humans base their moral sense on five dimensions - care/harm, sanctity/purity, authority/respect, loyalty, and fairness. Only a truly disordered or feral mind ignores any of them completely. Where we differ is in the importance we assign to each. Not only do humans differ significantly, we tend to fall into clusters. Given the nature of those moral dimensions, you can already imagine how this might sort us politically, and indeed there are clear differences in which of those dimensions liberals and conservatives value.[1] This is why you can travel to other countries with open political systems and instinctively figure out who the conservatives and liberals are by talking to or seeing the kinds of people in each party, although the concrete coalitions on-the-ground that make political engines run in the real world can mask this from time to time.[2]

And this is what's so interesting about the social left, because it's diverging from "traditional" American liberals in its emphasis on certain values that historically have been conspicuously unimportant to American liberals. What follows is an analysis of the social left's behavior and what this tells us about those emerging value differences, an explanation of the concrete moving parts in the psychology of social leftists, and a demonstration of the parallels to social conservatives.


1) Social conservatives and the social left tend to take positions that resemble tribal affiliations or identity, and any effort to reason coolly about them meets with outrage. Social conservatives and the social left seem to think that if (people stopped having casual sex and abortions, or the white power structure was destroyed) that suddenly all the world's problems would be solved, and are quite offended when asked to objectively, quantitatively measure the harms that these claimed evils are causing. People in the social arm of both ends of the spectrum tend to be much more insular and extreme. Interestingly, libertarians have a much easier time getting along with more economic leftists and rightists alike. This may be what it necessarily looks like when people on right and left confuse politics with uncompromise-able cultural and/or moral values, and I suspect that it's the tribal identity and in-group thinking this engenders that explains why the social arms of political affiliations demonstrate these patterns. That this would emerge in the social left is not surprising given the ongoing focus on the left on identity politics, so that now these political affiliations are associated with ethnicity and unfortunately even more set in stone, but now that here is unfortunately a white identity politics on the social right, the parallels are striking.[3]

2) While both conservatives and liberals value the care/harm value foundation, it's much more important to liberals and much more abstract, and this is exaggerated on the social left. That is, conservatives focus on active harm done to one's concrete in-group, especially family; for liberals, it can be mere absence of caring for other humans that you've never met. In fact not actively caring for certain people is constantly conflated with actively harming them. Witness the meme virtue signaling, "If you can't understand why you should care about other people, you're beyond help", usually with a conservative response having to do with neglecting one's concrete in-group peers "maybe you should take care of your kids first", etc. Many conservatives and libertarians are at best puzzled by the liberal fixation with others having a right to be cared about, and sometimes outraged at the presumptuous demand to care about strangers this places on them. The social left in particular demonizes not caring enough, and the care should be self-sacrificial of any claim to morality or authority if the obligated carer is far enough below the care-ee in the victim hierarchy.

3) The social left's extreme focus on the harm/care foundation is reinforced by the use of outrage as moral currency, and in this closely imitates social conservatives. That is, the public profession of negative affect as a sign that one has the right values, has them so much a part of their identity that threatening them causes such a strong reaction, and that this reaction will motivate the person to work in service to the tribe. Negative affect also includes sadness but sadness is a weakening emotion, and if you're using this for a status display to appear high-status to others in the tribe, negative affect mostly has to be anger.

4) A result of outrage as moral currency and well-spring of status is that any attempt by an outgroup to decrease the outrage, even by apologizing and reversing exactly the act/position/statement that incurred the outrage to begin with, will meet with even greater outrage. An outsider trying to decrease anger is profoundly threatening, because they're essentially shutting off the status-ATM that the outraged person is getting rich from. This is why apologies to either the social right or especially social left are inadvisable, because they don't ever work - in fact they cannot.

5) Among social conservatives, the outrage factory's fuel is threat to authority and sanctity, which are not as important to traditional liberals, but are important to social leftists. "Normal" liberals can get angry when conservatives don't care enough, but they don't typically appeal to personal authority or the sanctity of an abstract entity, whether it's a group of people or a symbol.[4] Point out an inconsistency in the Bible to an American social conservative, and you know what will happen. But the same will happen if you do the same with Marx or Linda Sarsour to a social leftist. (Try to quote them in support of your position and the reaction may be even worse - see #9 below.) The "victimhood hierarcy" and the groups of people in it (the groups - not the individuals, but the abstract groups) are all-important to the social left as sacred. To the social left, none of the very real historical tragedies can ever be truly corrected and to suggest concrete policies that might actually do that produce explosions of outrage. This seems strange because you might think you're addressing this person's concerns, but really what you're doing is trying to dissolve the central sacred object. Imagine you invent a time machine and go to the Pope, offering to go back and stop the crucifiction of his beloved savior from taking place. His reaction won't be an immediate "yes", will it? So another way of putting this: smart-ass atheists that point out to Christians that they should be thankful to Pontius Pilate for facilitating Christ's sacrifice get the same reaction as traditional liberals who suggest to the social left that Policy X may actually really-and-truly correct the impact of slavery and racism on African-Americans. I suspect that there is a feedback loop once any group (political or otherwise) begins to see itself as a tribe, as a group per se, and separate itself from outsiders, that induces a focus on and strengthening of authorities and sacred objects. (As opposed to a bête noire, we might call those authorities and sacred entities "white beasts". The negative connotation of the term and the parallelism with objects of scorn makes it better than "sacred cow.") One interesting difference between the two tribes is that often, social conservatives are open to pointing out that things are off-limits, that they're flat out not interested in seeing if reason supports their positions, etc. The social left has to do a lot more rhetorical fluorishes to support their own authoritarianism, because it's important to tribal identity that they are not authoritarian, and don't you dare question that or there will be consequences!

6) Just pointing out the inviolability of authority or sanctity of the white beasts of social rightists or leftists raises blood pressure, because it draws attention to their unquestionability and implies that it's possible for these things NOT to have authority or be sacred. ("I'm not disagreeing, just trying to understand. So this cracker actually IS the body of your god?" "Wait, why do black trans women have it worse than white gay men?") Many on the social left argue that some people are just so far outside the victim hierarchy that they can never really be considered to be oppressed, and if you suggest otherwise or keep asking questions, it's because you're morally bad. E.g., point out that maybe a broke single mother of four in Appalachia with a tenth-grade education is oppressed in some ways, and you'll be called a racist, and told of course you believe that because you're white (or male, or straight, whatever.) Here you are, a heathen, telling a Christian "Come on guys, actually getting crucified doesn't hurt THAT bad, and anyway the gospels aren't really that well-written." Again, this is the social left's reaction. Traditional liberals might disagree with you on something, but are likely to try to explain it instead of telling you that you're a dirty sinner and to shut up.

7) The social left's demand for censorship of dissenting voices over the past few years (both defectors and traditional opponents) is another sign of the appeal to authority previously unusual among traditional liberals. And consistent with the theory, the argument is that free speech on the right harms the most valuable people in the sacred victim hierarchy. So far the main authority where they'e been able to exert influence is universities. This is probably the behavior that contrasts the most with traditional liberal temperament and not surprisingly troubles traditional liberals the most. (And outraged social leftists - if you've gotten this far in the post, it's worth pointing out that when free speech does get restricted, it's never an intellectual or artist who's enforcing it based on just principles - see: Trotsky vs Stalin - it's the local J. Edgar Hoover or Donald Trump, deciding what offends his personal authority and taste. By demanding a roll-back of speech freedoms you're giving Trump what he wants - if not tomorrow, then next week.)

8) Outrage-as-status-currency makes it very hard for social leftists or rightists to "come in from the cold". They're only as good as their last expression of angry moral contempt. If they stop doing this, they become turncoats to the movement, inauthentic people willing to actually engage with the other side and get moral cooties. Think of a rebel leader who might not really want the civil war in his country to end, because his skillset is limited to organizing violence, and does not include drafting constitutions or getting elected to public office. (Think of the absurdity - someone who started out fighting to get rid of the old guard, but because of their entrenched interests, doesn't really want the fight to end.) Turncoats are often met with more anger and derision than those who've been in the outgroup the whole time.

9) Among tribal thinkers including social conservatives and leftists, beliefs usually serve more importantly as markers of tribal loyalty than as tools to make decisions (and "decision" in politics means policy.) Even though a social leftist or conservative might say with desperate passion that they wish the government would do X - goodness forbid that a political opponent actually does X! Although a rational person would say "Good, I'm glad we got through to somebody - even though I disagree with the other side on everything else, at least they did something right and we're moving forward on this one thing." But that's not what happens is it? No, the appropriation of a sacred value is also profoundly threatening to the moral authority of tribalist thinking. At first the outrage is that the enemy says they will do X, but (so the outraged parties claim) the enemy won't really do it - or is doing it for the wrong reasons (so what?) And then, when X actually does come to pass, strangely the tribalists aren't so interested in talking about it anymore. Witness the inexplicable anger from the left at Obama's switch to supporting marriage equality, or the irrational grumbling from the right at Bill Clinton's embrace of certain business-friendly practices. And I understand the tendency. (A self-disclosure gives a current example - Trump is the worst president we've ever had and the sooner he's gone, the better. But his administration just proposed decreasing business tax reporting from quarterly to semi-annually. I have to admit this isn't a bad idea. And yet I still feel the urge to say that he's probably just saying it and won't really put it through, that the idea probably didn't come from him, or if it did he probably has some personal tax angle on it, etc. - but it's still a good idea.)

10) It's useful to notice the specific kinds of people who've served as canaries in the political coal mine who have first noticed the curious behavior of social leftists, relative to traditional liberals - especially when the canaries are actually social leftists themselves! These people are a) little-l libertarians (who argue with their traditional liberal friends about economics but are usually on board with social issues), b) atheists (the majority of whom are at least socially liberal) and c) traditional centrist liberals. Centrist liberals are low on the authority and sanctity dimensions, as are atheists; the censorship and inability to question social leftists in good faith troubles them (even centrist-liberal Obama addressed this while he was in office.) Little-l libertarians are in addition low on the care dimension, and they resent being told who they have to help (which costs money); unlike many conservatives, libertarians have no problem with marriage equality for example, but being told they have to use certain pronouns and can't ask why certainly rubs them the wrong way. And these groups of people are increasingly pointing out the uncomfortable disconnects in social leftists' viewpoints, which of course social leftists will not explore or tolerate having questioned or pointed out. Chiefly among them is the double-standard where Christians (you would think, according to the leftists are the only oppressors of women and LGBTQ people) which puts social leftists in the bizarre position of defending the most oppressive backward and medieval religion in the world (amazingly, atheists who criticize Islam become oppressor imperialists in this narrative.) Another example which is gaining traction is the discrimination by elite colleges against Asian applicants, uncomfortable to social leftists for several reasons. First, the university is the leftists' natural home and the one place where they actually do exert any authority. Second, that there ARE elite universities which perpetuate class divisions in fact more effectively than the business world or even the racially well-integrated armed forces is not a welcome topic of inquiry. And third, that there exists an ethnic minority with its own history of institutionalized oppression (Asian-Americans) who have nonetheless succeeded superlatively in the U.S. - in fact, moreso economically than whites! - cannot be acknowledged without threatening the whole edifice, along with the fact that universities are now unique among American institutions in stating openly that they discriminate against non-whites in admissions.


Unfortunately for the authoritarians of the right or left, their white beasts are in fact quite open to discussion, no matter how offended they might get.[5] People on the left, in terms of organization their people around strong central authority, often sigh and make comments about herding cats. That lack of unity is core to the psychology of people drawn to the left and has always been the left's main obstacle to power, and I suspect that this newfound authoritarianism on the social left is too unstable to last very long.


FOOTNOTES

[1] There are also temperament differences between liberals and conservatives, related to the moral foundations; for example, conservatives tend to be more anxious, which could be argued is related to the conservative feature of considering authority more important. Autonomy is nice but if you're constantly under threat, you give some away to a strong protector.

[2] There may be an argument that bizarre coalitions make for less bitter politics. From the Civil War until Nixon's Southern strategy turned the blue South red, the U.S. actually had quite an odd coalition in each of its parties. The Democrats had Northern ethnic-minority labor unions and conservative Southerners (still amazingly enough voting with the unions out of spite at Abraham Lincoln.) The Republican party had Northern business and Southern minorities. This could only have lasted as long as it did in a two-party system, but Nixon recognized the fundamental mismatch that this accident of history had produced, especially obvious after the Johnson-Goldwater inversion of the electoral map in 1964. Since the Southern strategy our map in the East has looked much more like a Civil War map and the rest is an urban-rural divide and the tone of our politics has changed for the worse since then, because the parties identify more closely with immutable sociodemographic categories.

[3] You might ask, if identity politics was an earlier central influence on the left than the right, why the social left didn't emerge first. I think it has to do with access to public platforms. Before the internet era, right-wing white Christians, aligned as they were the business establishment, had more cash and therefore easier access to platforms than the left, which was relegated to a few magazines circulating in particular communities. That is to say, blame the internet. Today the right has both FOX and a lot of people on Twitter, while the left is still mostly online (MSNBC is not remotely the FOX of the left and is in any event a recent arrival.)

[4] Authority is about valuing without question, bargaining, or deliberate interpretation the word of a human. Sanctity is about doing the same for an abstract entity, which could be a symbolic physical object (e.g. the flag) or a people (e.g. the LGBTQ community.) As a result of this observation, I would bet that these two are the most closely related pair out of all possible pairs in his system.

[5] The rhetorical hostility of outrage-driven movements is easily hacked. In the same way that being the first to question a social conservative's conservative credentials will initially outrage then cow them (you can explain that you brought it up first because you're the real conservative, and now the other person is trying to explain, just like a mealy-mouthed liberal would!), when talking to a social leftist, always call them a racist immediately in the debate. They'll try to argue they're not, just like a racist would! Try it, it actually works - and in so doing, you'll be eroding the tactic's usefulness.

Dry Counties - Roughly Track the Bad Stripe

Above, map of dry counties in the US (Wiki.) Compare to one of many Bad Stripe maps, a map of Well-Being, below. This stripe pops out on various maps as a coherent region of the US ("Greater Appalachia") with various unique cultural characteristics and poor human development characteristics, here.

How America Uses Its Land

Full map with all use-types here.

Our Future: Trading Reliability for Power

I've often heard people 40+ grumble in the following way about modern communication technology: "Yeah email and text and voicemail and all that are great. But in 1982, you called a number, and either the person answered, or they didn't. There was no 'Oh your text got buried,' 'It must've gone into my spam folder,' et cetera." (All the more annoying because they're all plausible excuses.) Having all these technologies makes our reach much greater, but ironically, much less reliable.

If you're not sure this is such a great trade, it's worth thinking about, because something similar is increasingly happening with public services. Startups are replacing a lot of the services that local government typically provides in the U.S. - e.g., information reporting for state governments (traffic light is out at Third and Grant), DMV appointments, metro bus routes, trash collection, etc. Yes, sometimes those services are already spotty. The concern is that with, say, trash collection, barring gross dereliction of duty, I know the majority of days they'll get my trash, I know who to call if they miss it, and I know next week and next month and next year it'll be my city that's doing it. In a truly efficient market, there's no guarantee that if Startup A is doing it this week that they'll be doing it next year - yes, Startup B might replace them because it's doing a better job, but with that marginal improvement comes a whole lot of friction - a new schedule, new rules to learn, etc. This is a cost which, in making this trade, I don't think is adequately appreciated. It's already enough of a pain that you have certain friends eat up your bandwidth remembering which media platform is the one the check regularly. Expand this to other domains in life, and pretty soon all you're doing is keeping lists, which change constantly.

The analogy: you have to choose between being Clark Kent who can bench a respectable 400 lbs any day of the week, vs Superman. The catch is that 20% of the time Superman is sick in bed with kryptonite flu and you never know when that will be, and the medicine for kryptonite flu is constantly sold at different pharmacies and his health insurance changes unpredictably.

Low Rainfall Predicts Assassination of Roman Emperors

Paper here, from Christian and Elbourne in Economics Letters, H/T Marginal Revolution. Nice to see a rigorous quantitative paper show the association, although it's not surprising - a simple model of Roman political history is that since there was no formal succession rule, the Emperor had to keep the army satisfied through pay and morale (successful conquest.) Low rainfall leads to starving troops in the provinces leads to a desire for a new emperor and assassination.

Interestingly enough, in 2010 Haber and Menaldo showed that democracies cluster in areas of moderate rainfall, and autocracies cluster in deserts, semi-arid areas, and the tropics. If we assume stability produces a tendency toward democracy, this is consistent with ancient Rome's experience. After all, much of Rome's territory was semi-arid areas.

Pennsylvania Economic Growth - Appalachia vs the Urban Northeast, Together in One State

There's a report out from Alter, Fuller, Sontheimer and Seigworth at Penn State, with good summary coverage by Jeff McGaw at the Reading Eagle. It shows how there are really two Pennsylvanias, economically speaking. While this isn't surprising, the degree and timing of the divergence is.

Besides being my home state, Pennsylvania might interest you because it's a swing state, which is in turn directly related to the mix of cultures and economies that comprise it. Pennsylvania is part Northeast/Mid-Atlantic, part inner Midwest/Rustbelt, and - often ignored, but quite important in these numbers - part Appalachia. Overall the state is lagging all of its Northeastern neighbors except for one (more on that in a second), because Pennsylvania's numbers are an average of two regions - the sucessful region (Philly and southeastern PA, which have done quite well after the 2008 recession) and then the rest of the state.

You can see the figures at the report and article, but here are two instructive maps. The top is the county-level 2016 presidential election data. On the bottom is (from Alter et al's article) county resident employment in the post-recession period 2008-2016. Even if you don't know PA geography, the resemblance is obvious.



[Added later: more here at this great Philly.com article, with better geographical resolution, returns in more kinds of races, and 2014-2018 comparison gadgets.]

It turns out the only state that Pennsylvania beats in the Northeast group is West Virginia. That's not a coincidence. The central-and-western PA counties have numbers that look remarkably similar to West Virginia's post-recession numbers in terms of jobs lost and unemployment, but when averaged with Philly and suburbs, these quite-bad numbers are obscured and you end up with one mediocre-looking state, instead of a very depressed large rural region, and a very successful metropolitan area. West Virginia comes across as struggling much more clearly, because it's the only state entirely within the Appalachians. (The Bad Stripe, a demographic region of bad quality-of-life and human development indicators, roughly corresponds to "Greater Appalachia" and does extend a bit into Pennsylvania.)



[Added later: Reddit user Anpanboy uploaded thisvmap of population growth 2018-19,whicu follows the economic growth pretty well.]

So these maps tell two stories. First, it's a cliche of campaign strategists and the cultural commentariat that Pennsylvania is "Philly on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in between." But that's not quite right. Pennsylvania is Appalachia, with Philly and suburbs in one corner. And remember all those angry unemployed coal miners we've heard so much about? They live in Appalachia. Second, the late 90s/early aughts began the renaissance of the Northeastern American city, and even the recession couldn't stop that positive momentum. The divergence you see in these numbers and maps of Pennsylvania is both these stories, playing out in the same state and hidden by being averaged together.

The problem is that coal has been dead in PA for decades, and many of the people demanding its return at this point have never even worked in the industry - more likely, their fathers did, and that's what they view as important valuable work. It's a cultural problem. We all know that coal is not coming back and that it has everything to do with changing technology and nothing to do with regulations, a narrative that people in this part of the country have a hard time accepting. (Abstract economic forces are much harder to viscerally hate than bad people hurting you by design.) What's worse, the big cities like Philly, filled with untrustworthy people unlike you, have come roaring back; worse still, this happened just as media became all-pervasive and started constantly reminding you that these people look down their noses at you. At least before, you might have been unemployed and living in Clearfield County, without being constantly reminded you were on the bottom of a status hierarchy that was exactly inverted, with the most immoral people at the top.[1]

The reality is, for all us blue-staters in the suburbs and cities, these numbers show you that even though your suburb might be getting better all the time, things really are bad out there in the hinterlands, and this is why they were so desperate for a change they voted for Trump. And they're going to vote for Trump again as long as we don't show some solidarity with our countrymen, instead of ignoring their problems or even dismissing them with active contempt,[2] which I admit I've been tempted to do myself. It may be taking a while for people to accept that coal is dead, but it's certainly not their fault. I don't have a clear policy prescription for how to help life get better in interior Pennsylvania, but taking people's problems seriously seems like a good place to start - which I deeply hope the Democrats can do in 2018 and 2020, or Trump will get re-elected.


[1] Many people called the 2008 recession a "man-cession", with men disproportionately hit relative to women. Nowhere was this more likely to be true than Pennsylvania, with effects lingering until today. Construction and construction-adjacent industries were propped up by capital flowing in from the cities, and now that those easy loans have dried up, construction isn't coming back either. This region is part of the "health belt", because it has an overabundance of older people, and the one source of capital coming into this region that has grown is Federal dollars in the form of Medicare disbursements. Therefore, many of the un- and under-employed men in the regions lost their construction-related jobs, and have wives working in nursing or other healthcare fields who became the breadwinners, a final slap in the face.

[2] More than once, both online and in person, I've seen urban and suburban centrists or liberals express sympathy for the plight of people in another country whose luck has gone south for economic reasons out of their control, e.g. when the local mineral deposit was played out; then in the same conversation, say about their fellow Americans (essentially): "Coal is dead, get over it losers." If Democrats want to win elections at some point, this attitude has to stop, because human beings are good at detecting contempt - especially human beings going through tough times - and they don't react well to it.

[3] Mountainous regions tend to be poorer than non-mountainous regions because it's hard to grow crops there - and the difficulty of agriculture means little opportunity for a service economy to develop on top of a farming and trading population. There are exceptions to the rule (e.g. Jackson, WY) but those are based on outside capital brought in by wealthy in-migrants or tourists in recent times. Out of curiosity I looked at Colorado to see if a similar relationship exists between election returns, economics and mountains, as in PA (the eastern half of CO is flat prairie and the western half is the Rockies.) Eyeballing it, there may be some pattern, but certainly not as clear as for PA. Speculatively, it could be that PA's mountains are smaller, and have been settled for (generations) longer, therefore producing an actual population that shows the impact of "bad mountain economies" - as opposed to CO, which has a much more thinly scattered population and may be more mobile relative to what resources there are. Concretely: a coal mine opens in the PA Appalachians in 1850 and a town grows up around it, which doesn't just evaporate when the mine is played out by 1970 - by this point the families have been there for generations, and the climate isn't so harsh, and leaving just isn't really considered. (Although counter to my theory, there are ghost towns in PA.) Versus CO, where an unobtainium mine opened in 1950, and today is just about played out - but the settlement around it is a high-turnover one of mostly youngish men who aren't living at 10,000 feet elevation for fun, and they clear out (or a few remain and develop the area for tourism, e.g. Leadville.)

Differences in Belief Updating Depending on Belief Content

A study by Walter and Murphy in Communication Monographs shows that political misinformation is harder to correct than health misinformation. It also shows that the more educated someone is, the harder it is to correct. This both contradicts and coheres with things we thought we already knew.

We already knew that the more educated people were, the harder it is to correct misinformation they believe (here and here) and depressingly, even that increasing people's access to information only makes them dig in further; it doesn't matter if the extra knowledge is inside or outside our skulls, but where politics is concerned, we will recruit it to confirm what we already believed. But notice that most of these kinds of studies (good roundup here) are about politics. What about other kinds of beliefs?

That's the take-home from the Walter and Murphy study, and one interpretation is that it's identity protection and/or tribal affiliation that all this motivated reasoning is protecting - and that politics is very identity-defining. It's therefore interesting that when given the chance to improve one's own personal traits, people actually chose things things less central to their identity - for instance, musical ability over moral sense - which is of course completely absurd (study is in a post at Overcoming Bias which I'm having trouble finding and will update when I do.) If your moral sense is that much more important, why would you not choose to improve that? (If what you're really doing is reinforcing your identity, it makes perfect sense.) This is why Paul Graham gives the advice of shrinking your identity, to prevent all your identity-defining beliefs from biasing your thinking.

By this argument, in this sample, people's health beliefs were not as identity defining as their political beliefs. A way to test this would be to measure the importance of such beliefs to people's overall identity, and then see if the health-politics difference is as strong, and also if there's a good relationship to identity-centrality. There are lots of food extremists and antivaxxers whose health beliefs might be as central or more central to their identity than their other beliefs, including their political ones. You might also wonder why the U.S. got into its current failure mode of politics having become so central to identity (moreso than religion by many measures) - my guess is some combination of only two parties for 3x10^8 people, along with the decreasing significance of other meaning-providing communities and overlapping status hierarchies. I'm hardly endorsing religion as the answer, although there are plenty of people for whom the vacuum of meaning left by the decreasing role of religion has made them turn to politics - namely, young white working class people, who despite being less religious, voted enthusiastically for Trump.

The Most Haunting, Literature-Like Discussion Section Comment In History

From a Lonely Planet discussion page as I'm trying to figure out how to get from Big Bend to Chihuahua without a rental car:

I've taken that train, from Ojinaga to Chihuahua. The train was more like a streetcar than the typical locomotive and passenger cars. We must have hit at least 50 goats that refused to get off the railroad track. Every one made a bump. Started getting used to the routine, a loud whistle then a bump, and a few miles down the track another loud whistle then a bump, and off we went through the dark. I don't know why they bothered blowing the whistle. Not once was there a whistle without a bump.

If you've found this and are actually interested in traveling from Ojinaga to Chihuahua, it is reported that as of 2018 this train is not running anymore, and in fact there is no passenger train service anywhere in Mexico except for two tourist trains in the north (to Los Mochis) and south.

Time of Founding of Each American County

From Reddit user JFBoyy.

Prepare for People Signalling Their Taste by Seeking Out "Artisanal" Non-Machine-Harvested Wine

Early move toward automation in Napa, predictably there due to land and labor costs and the availability of automation experts. Prepare for the usual pearl-clutching that a culturally important (but nonetheless already commodified) object like wine is being increasingly mechanized. At least this will give the opportunity for future hipsters (I predict on the 5-10 year horizon) to signal their values by only buying human-produced wine.

Instrinsic Social Skills: Small Towns vs Big Cities

PART I. People from small towns find even setting foot in a big city scary - because you have so many more interactions with strangers, you're forced to make frequent decisions about the kind of relationship you're going to have with that person (even if it's for three seconds) and there is sometimes genuine conflict. You can split social interactions with strangers into three tiers.

Tier 1: ignoring strangers, avoiding eye contact, maybe slightly altering your direction of travel to avoid bumping into somebody. The default mode. Note that people in big cities are famous for sticking to this mode more often.

Tier 2: interactions where you acknowledge each other but that are largely ceremonial; e.g. asking someone at a restaurant if you can take a chair they're not using from their table. You'd be surprised by anything but a quick yes.

Tier 3: interacting with strangers in a situation where there are potential divergent interests to navigate, and negotiation and emotional-regulation (of both self and other party) are important; e.g., saying something when someone jumps the line, asking someone for their phone number, asking someone to move their car.


PART II. I had these reflections as I was walking back to my hotel from getting pizza on a Saturday night in Manhattan, categorizing types of social interactions (a very unlikely thing to do if you have innately high social intelligence) and realized that a place like New York does a big favor for people who do NOT have high social intelligence.

One of the things I pay attention to when I visit any big, dense city is the social perceptiveness and effectiveness of people living there. Do they read people well, and are they smoother? (How would you measure this? Not sure overall, but some proxy indicators: automatically understanding the intentions of people they interact with, rate at which they perceive new unspoken hierarchy structures, ability to defuse conflict.) My prediction would be that they're better at these things, because of practice, and they do seem to be a little bit better, but not dramatically so. (In truth, this is mostly based on my observations of New Yorkers, since differences between people in say Tokyo and a Japanese small town are to me as an American much harder to see than the same kinds differences between New York and rural Pennsylvania.)

But, there's a pretty large overlap between the social skill spectra of big cities and small towns, so that even in New York, you meet plenty of socially "slow" people. It's not dramatic, but it still always surprises me to meet a social laggard in New York, just like I'm surprised when I meet someone from Mexico who doesn't like spicy food (believe it or not, there are lots of these folks too.) All that said I'm certainly not the most innately socially intelligent person, but at this point in my life I've consciously learned a lot of tricks, much like someone who works around horses learns consciously how to read them and influence them. And the sheer volume of data a big city provides teaches many of the socially slow among us (like me) how to handle people almost as well as the innately gifted types can - that's the favor that big dense cities do.

The implication is that innately gifted people have a bigger advantage in a small town than they do in a place like New York. It's also worth pointing out that lots of other cognitive characteristics likely co-vary with innate social intelligence, and this may be part of what sorts people into "big city" types and "small town" types. If you're a socially smooth person in a small town, why go to New York? You lose part of your advantage. In a small town, the socially un-gifted have no chance to catch up with you - but in a place like New York, people like me can become almost as socially clever as you, just from social "Big Data" analysis.

States Emerged In Places With Marginal Agriculture Potential That Benefited From Central Control

I. More Evidence for the Argument That States Emerge When Food Production Benefits from Central Control

If you looked at climate and climate alone, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes and the Mexican Plateau would not seem like optimal cradles of civilization. And yet, it's exactly these kinds of marginal places where states first emerged. Yes, those places are hotter and drier than they were during the neolithic, but they still weren't better suited for cultivation than other places with more arable land. They're dry, they rely on rivers, and in some cases there's considerable altitude. So why there?[1] Why did we not first have large states in the Pacific Northwest of North America, or the southern (wetter) African Sahel, or the (early, but not first) wet parts of the Mediterranean? No, it had to be at the edge of the Sahara, or in the highest mountains outside Asia.

The immediate counterargument to such a theory is one word: China. Any theory of early state emergence that does not include China is not much of a theory of early state emergence. And if we're assuming that the cause is marginal conditions for agriculture, we definitely can't explain China, since the Chinese coastal plain is ideal for agriculture and for transporting agricultural goods. Is there still a commonality? One argument is that anywhere conditions are such that farming only works with central coordination of labor - but with such coordination, it really works - you have the conditions for a state. Planning your crops in a harsh environment and relying on the flooding of a river, as in Egypt would be one such setting. Another would be an otherwise fertile environment but where the grain of choice was hard to harvest alone, but paid off handsomely when harvested with central coordination.

In a review of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, Reddit user lunaranus quotes Braudel and then expands on him:

Rice is an even more tyrannical and enslaving crop than wheat.

The key difference between rice and wheat is that the former can produce ~7.3 million kcals per hectare, whereas wheat can only reach 1.5 million. Unlike wheat, there was no need for fallow land, and bythe 13thC in China a system of double (or sometiems triple) crop was established. "And thus the great demographic expansion of southern China began."

The high population density created by rice, combined with the necessity for elaborate top-down irritation systems, resulted in strong state authority that constantly pursued large-scale works.

My argument is that this principle applies to the more marginal areas, but the necessity for labor coordination, including irrigation, is really what was important. Any place that could get 1) a big bump in food production from central coordination, and 2) which you couldn't defect from and survive, would favor state formation.

II. A Side Observation About Genetic/Cultural Quality vs. Climate as an Influence on Propensity for Regional Dominance, Toward a Macro-Theory of History

There's also the argument - though this makes some people uncomfortable[2] - that people from climates with wider annual temperature extremes are more behaviorally adaptable, and therefore when they encounter people from less extreme climates, they "win". To the surprise of many, the closer to the poles you are, the more extreme the annual temperature difference (the temperate regions are NOT the most extreme.) That is to say, during the summer Arctic regions are at or close to room temperature but can get to -50 C or worse in the winter. (Is -50 C really that different from - 30 C to humans, livestock and agriculture? Maybe this could be adjusted by "meaningful" temperature variation, but I digress.) Sure enough, the history of China is a history of more northerly groups (including, in two cases, non-Han steppe people) taking over territory to the south. The history of India is a history of Indic speakers coming from the north-northwest and displacing Dravidians. In North America, Na-Dene speakers migrated from the northerly Alaska/Yukon region, displacing people throughout Western North America, just in the last millennium. And of course in 2018 it's Germany, not Rome, that has most influence over the continent. Of note: I recently visited the site of Carnuntum, a Roman garrison town frequently visited by Marcus Aurelius, who was trying to keep the Germanic tribes out of the Empire. At the time he celebrated some successes, commemorated with carvings on cliff faces occasionally like the one in Trencin, Slovakia. But Since Carnuntum is now in Austria we can see how successful he ultimately was.

Of course that begs the question of why we haven't all been conquered by the Inuit already. The pattern of the Germanic takeover of northern Europe gives us a clue. The first Germanic-speakers appeared in non-Scandinavian Europe around 120 BC, migrating from (guess what) farther north in Scandinavia. Even in Julius Caesar's time seventy years later, the Celts were still his main concern. It wasn't until the mid-second century that the Germans were a major concern for the empire, with their numbers now growing after settling in the lands north of the Danube. The idea is this: Scandinavia has more extreme temperature and bred more adaptable people, but it's just too cold to grow enough food for the population to expand (the region still only has 26 million today, fewer than California.) After three centuries of farming in the much-more hospitable northern "mainland" Europe, their numbers had grown, and now they were ready to take on the Roman Empire, which lasted only three more centuries after that. So we have our time scale: six centuries from crossing the Baltic to destroying the Western Roman Empire. (You could even make the argument that Braudel's southern Chinese expansion was actually northern Chinese - Han - who had settled in what was previously tribal areas, done under the more stable-appearing timeline of centralized governments.)

And there we have the outline of a macrohistorical and demographic theory: states began in areas where food production was difficult, either because of local conditions or choice of food source, but where food production benefited greatly from centralized control. The old centers of civilization give way to waves of people coming from areas of more extreme climate, usually from the north. One prediction that follows from this theory is that the Inuit and related people, given time in warmer more fertile land, will start farming and demographically expanding, moving further south and indeed controlling Siberia and Canada, but this might be simplistic. It's not the mere fact of living where there are temperature extremes, it's that you have to adjust your behavior to seasons. The Inuit did outlast the Norse in Greenland but it wasn't because they were better farmers. Even though the Inuit might have to move to follow fish and game, they're still hunter-gatherers. My expectation is that it's seasonal agriculture which is the key factor to producing more adaptable behavior (read: more effective ability to control behavior to plan for the future.) So that being the case, in the year 3000 look for states in Eurasia dominated by people who are Siberian agriculturalists today. (Seem silly? If you had told Julius Caesar that western Europe would be dominated by German-speakers within five centuries, including former Roman territory, he would have fallen down laughing.)

Things that may have checked this trend in some cases in the past, and could stop it in the future:

The Old Word interrupting this process in the New World. (Obviously.) If there are two continent systems and one of them has both better diffusion of inventions and more territory, chances are that one will be "ahead" in terms of cultural evolution (the Guns, Germs and Steel argument) and it won't be because of more adaptable northerners, but the other continent finally crossing the ocean that your state-originating-center will be overwhelmed (i.e. the Columbian exchange.) Without that you might orthodict (rather than pre- or retrodict, that is, predicting alternative histories, granted untestable) that the Mapuche would have been the Germans to the Incas' Romans, and likewise the Comanche or Lakota to the Aztecs; maybe the Maori to indigenous Australians.

Centers of civilization getting too far ahead of the northerners. Also, there may be a point where the sheer population numbers of the old centers of civilization are so far ahead of the northerners that they can't be overwhelmed. Had the Germans arrived a few centuries later at the edge of an even more-developed Roman Empire, they may not have had the same effect. The communication and transportation capabilities of modern states may exaggerate this effect, so that the Inuit don't have the same opportunity. There is a major asymmetry in modern technology in terms of the capital and manpower it requires. The Germanic tribes and Mongols had technology that was not substantially inferior to the people they were inundating (in some cases, actually superior.) And colonials in Pennsylvania could re-invent medieval metal-working techniques which turned out to be good enough to run off the British, whose weapons were better but not that much better. But it's harder to imagine that a nascent state in the boreal forests distant from Moscow, no matter how adaptable its people, could really produce their own technology to resist the drones and agriculture-attacking Stuxnet malware of even a decadent future Russia.

Technology obviating the need to plan and adjust behavior seasonally. This is the most speculative. Living in a northern OECD country today, do you really have to plan that much for the seasons now? Yes, you reserve your beach house in the summer and get your coats out during the winter, but your life is not directly dependent on your ability to plant and harvest and store and ration food as it would have been until just a few centuries ago. The reign of the northerners may then be over. Of course, just living in such a technologically advanced society requires cognitive discipline and planning, but does that often result in poor reproductive success? Sure enough, in Iceland in the last century, genes associated with educational achievement have become less common. Also curious: there is a known bump in births in September, but I don't know if this extends outside the U.S. Is this just because in January people don't have anything better to do? Or an adaptation so more babies are born during the harvest when there are calories available? (Easy to check: does it persist in US states or other countries with low seasonal variation? Does it differ between ethnicities (forbidden question!) whose ancestors are from different latitudes, living together in a high-variation climate?)


[1] Inferring too much from population patterns in terms of climate and impact on agriculture and the local economy is always a precarious road to go down, especially in parts of the New World that have seen most of their development in the industrial age. For example - population density in the United States drops off west of the 100 W meridian. This is commonly assumed to be due to decreasing rainfall and therefore poorer agricultural productivity, but this is not the case - it's most likely a historical artifact, since aside from a few wagon trains willing to risk the long ride all the way to the coast, until the trains went all the way through and were cheap and reliable enough, people generally just moved a few miles west to start a new homestead. Around 1880 trains had become accessible for most relocating families, and by 1880 that slowly moving population front had made it to about 100 W. Here's the data. What's more, to this day, poorer countries have lower agriculture productivity even with the same or better innate agricultural endowments in terms of soil and climate - see Adomopolous and Restuccia, 2018.

[2] This makes no argument as to whether and what combination of genes and culture mediate this effect - but to drive the point home, either genes affect bodies, or they do not. If we accept that they do affect bodies, it's a very tortured argument to say that for some reason genes cannot affect behavior, since that's saying genes can affect other organs but not the brain. There's a similar gyration you can observe when someone wants to say that culture matters (fair enough) but can't effect outcomes in the aggregate (that is to say, culture doesn't affect happiness or survival.) Either culture matters to outcomes, or it's meaningless static.

The Great Stagnation: Problems Are Harder, and/or Talent is Misallocated

On Rationally Speaking, Julia Galef interviews Michael Webb about increasing research inefficiency - for example, Webb cites the statistic that today, to get another Moore's-Law-Doubling, it takes twenty times as many researchers as it did in the 1970s. It's not obvious that research is more and more inefficient because it's still producing improvements at the same rate, but only by consuming more and more resources to maintain the same rate. He uses the analogy of mining, where you have to keep going further and further into the ground to get to the gold, or the coal, or whatever it is. The longer the mine is operating (assuming a single central shaft) the bigger this distance gets:

[The pre-work you have to do in order to make a contribution] is a lot further today than it ever was. The amount of knowledge you have to have as a scientist to be able to get to the frontier, to make these contributions, is just so much larger today. And you can see this from the amount of time of it takes to do a PhD, how old an inventor is the time they first take out a patent, the size of research teams. Ben Jones, he's a fantastic economics professor at Kellogg, has papers that document these things.

That means that for individuals, they could either end up spending more time studying, which is what you see in the PhD length, or you see that they just focus on narrower and narrower fields. For a given amount of time, you only learn something about a much, much narrower field. Which might mean that you just have less good insights if it turns out that for all you progress, the fields...The wider field you have to be combining with some knowledge from quite distributed science.

I had previously argued for exactly this idea as an explanation for technological stagnation (or, prior to that, increasing research inefficiency), and with admitted nerve called this ultimate economic heat death "Caton-Schumpeter stasis."

Another factor is the availability of talent, which operates on the assumption that talent is unevenly distributed in the population and is a constraint on technological progress. Consequently there are also the ideas of talent dilution and talent mis-selection.

Talent dilution is the idea that there are only so many Fermis and Oppenheimers, and there is a negative marginal utility to adding more people to the research endeavor. The otherwise productive people are overwhelmed with meetings and emails and swamped by mediocrity. This is actually optimistic, as it suggests that we could return to research productivity by restricting the size of research teams. That this is not already happening suggests that either this idea is wrong, or that people putting the teams together have perverse incentives (quite possible) but, since these are mostly private sector endeavors, somehow overwhelm the profit incentive without unsustainably driving the enterprise into the ground - which seems hard to believe on its face.

Talent mis-selection is a little more subtle. The track to become a physical scientist or semiconductor engineer in the mid-20th century was not as "artificial" (i.e., externally imposed) and clear as it is now. The cause of your having a career in STEM was likely early achievement in that field, because your primary motivation is to explore things in STEM, not to make money or move up in a hierarchy.* Getting good test scores, being a well-behaved student, and knowing how to game your applications is probably much more important now than it was then, and may not be sorting for the actual most productive talent. On top of this, the world today is just a lot more interesting, with a lot more (easy!) options, for someone who's good at quantitative thinking, and the best may not be going into research - they're going to Wall Street or heading to startups. (There are pretty solid statistics that med school applications drop when the economy is good and vice versa - I'd wager that the correlation is even more true for physical science and engineering graduate programs.) By selecting for the type of person who focuses for their first quarter century of life on collecting prestige coupons, climbing hierarchies and gaming applications, you are very likely selecting against exactly those people who will be most productive in STEM, i.e. the kind of person who is directly motivated and rewarded by work in STEM. (For a great discussion about the gap in social cognition or lack thereof between STEMmy and other types of people, see this Slate Star Codex post.)

To put a finer point on the idea of talent mis-selection, let's look at another domain of achievement. Imagine a national program claiming to identify "the nation's top talent in military conquest", complete with an entrance exam and rigorous interviews. You need a reference from a military historian. Those not wearing a tie to their interview are shown the door for their disrespectful and noncomformist behavior. How likely would it be to find the next Genghis Khan or Hannibal this way? The most interesting thing to do for a real potential conqueror would be to go wherever there is active conflict, and the "successful applicants" would likely be annihilated in a real war by the person who went to Syria and became a warlord.

[Update: you may be aware of the Thiel fellowship where students are paid to drop out of college and pursue a business. Business Insider has been following up on how its Fellows have been doing. The reporting certainly shows survivor bias since I don't see a clear "out of Y fellowships awarded, X are currently successful outside education" - and a lot of these students would have been successful anyway so we don't know the denominator. Still, I suspect the fellowship as an intervention is increasing the rate. Still: what gets measured gets addressed, which is why every metric ends up getting gamed, and looking entrepreneurial is no exception, so people are no doubt trying to game the fellowship, and we're back to the mis-selection problem again: "Entrepreneurship has become a line you put on your resume," Thiel says, apparently non-ironically - and to paraphrase Thiel's complaint, in the businesses his fellows are founding, he's getting lots of Facebooks but few flying cars (one exception in this list here.)

[Added later: here's great article summarizing a paper, which simulated how the funding and promotion incentives of scientists are degrading the average quality of work, and unsurprisingly a reproducibility crisis in multiple fields. This would be true even with good talent allocation - because the entire system is selecting for publishable but not necessarily true findings. You might call this third problem talent distraction.]

[Historical example: in discussing the erosion of China's technological and administrative lead over Europe during the second millennium CE, Brad DeLong offers the following as one among many causes:

Perhaps the root problem was that with triple-cropping rice strains the wet-rice fields were too fertile, the governmental bureaucracy too effective, and the avenues of establishment-oriented upward mobility to the striving and aggressive too open. After making a little money the logical next step was to buy some land. Because the land was rich, because labor was plentiful and cheap, and because the empire was (most of the time) strong internally, one could live well after turning one's wealth into land. One could also easily make the important social contacts to pave the way for one's children to advance further. And one's children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi. Those who had successfully written their eight-legged essays and made proper allusions to and use of the Confucian classics would then join the landlord-scholar-bureaucrat aristocracy that ruled China and profited from the empire. In the process of preparing for the examinations and mastering the material needed to do well on them, they would acquire the habits of thought and values of a Confucian aristocrat landlord-scholar-bureaucrat. Entrepreneurial drive and talent was thus molded into an orthodox Confucian-aristocratic pattern and harnessed to the service of the regime and of the landlord class: good for the rents of the landlords, good for the stability of the government, but possibly very bad indeed for the long-run development of technology and organization.

This is a nightmare, real-world example of talent distraction and would also produce talent mis-selection, and Delong's thesis merits further study.]

*I'm all for scientists getting paid. A statistician once pointed out to me that if statistician jobs were suddenly paying 10x more, you might not get the best statisticians - you would get the people best at obtaining stable large paychecks signed by someone else, and some of them will hopefully be good statisticians.

Treasure versus Currency

This scatter plot from Unenumerated is useful and fascinating.

Why Do People Remain Loyal to a Losing Team?

Cross-posted to the MDK10Outside and Cognition and Evolution.

tl;dr Sports fan behavior is explained by a combination of constant identity-forming team loyalty which is an end in itself, and status signaling by association which is modulated by team performance. These two factors differ between individuals and are associated with different cognitive styles, with constant loyalty more associated with moral foundations and intransitive preferences.

It's been observed that you can tell who a team's true fans are by noticing who remains loyal to the team even when that team is losing. I think this is meaningful, but it does beg the question: what are those fans getting out of it?[1] Of course any speculation about this must mention the very real example of the Cleveland Browns, who over the past 2 years have a 1-31 record, and this year after going 0-16 they were on the receiving end of a sarcastic "perfect season" parade.

Humans get utility from associating with others with high status. Much of the happiness that a sports fan gets from their emotional connection to their team derives from this, and many observations are consistent with what a status-by-association theory would predict: fans are happier when their teams win because they feel high status and can signal higher status, they engage in extreme dominance displays when their teams win important contests (i.e., people acting like idiots as they come out of a championship game if their team won, yelling, jumping on cars, setting off fireworks) but not if they didn't win, they attend games more when the team is winning and less when the team is losing, and they wear branded gear to identify themselves with the team and otherwise let others know of their association.[2]

But this theory falls short of explaining why, for example, there is any such thing as a team's consistent fanbase. By this model, everyone should just cheer for the best team, game by game (or even play by play!) It especially doesn't explain why the the Cleveland Browns have any fans left at all; supposedly they're a football team but I've seen a number of convincing arguments against that, for instance, every game of the 2017 season. During an 0-16 season you would expect that if fandom is about fully rational people maximizing utility by associating with high status teams, the fans would stop posting on forums, they would put their gear away and deny to others that they were fans, and the stadium would not just have lower attendance, it would be completely empty. Yet this is not what happened.

I think the answer here very likely has to do with the gap we see between two types of beliefs/behaviors that often produce apparent impasses in other domains of life, especially religion and politics, the intensity of which differs between individuals. This gap in rational and more instinctual behavior will seem very familiar to readers of books like Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind, or Simler and Hanson's Elephant in the Brain. Humans demonstrate some domains in their cognition which are inflexible and impervious to reason - to use Haidt's categories, harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. By "inflexible" I mean "not open to discussion, or conversion into money or other goods/services." For example, you likely do not believe that murdering children is morally acceptable. Are you interested in hearing arguments about why it might be morally acceptable? If you would never consider such a thing, and you're uncomfortable that I would even suggest it in a thought experiment, you're showing inflexibility in discussing it. Okay - would you kill an adult for $50,000? I see that also upset you, I'm sorry to have opened with such a low offer! $75,000 then? You're being inflexible (I hope!) in reacting by thinking "It's not about the number!" Okay, what's the conversion rate between adults and children? Forget murder, how about urinating on a picture of your family for money? etc., you get the point. "Inflexible" means it can't even be suggested as open for discussion, which includes not being allowed to convert between moral-foundation-violating acts and money, or between different types immoral acts. (A favorite of action movies and dramas to demonstrate the extreme evil of an antagonist is to have them force someone declare the relative value of immoral acts, e.g. Sophie's Choice.) To connect back to the abstract, the philosophical term for having values that cannot be negotiated, and for which there is no relative value like this, is that they are intransitive.

I took you on this little tour of moral darkness to illustrate that morally normal humans do not adhere to consistent rationality, and the ones that actually do are psychopaths.[3] (You may be interested to know that Haidt found that when he surveyed the business students he was teaching, they scored low on every single moral dimension, taught as they are that everything is negotiable.) So what does all this have to do with the Cleveland Browns? Many of us have noticed that "hardcore" sports fans - the ones who stick around with long faces even when the Browns are losing, and falsify the first model above - tend to have certain personality and cultural characteristics that fit well with some of these inflexible moral foundations: they tend to be more religious, more nationalistic, more conservative and more valuing of loyalty and authority.[4] Sports fans rarely become hardcore about a team after entering adulthood, and very often there is a family lineage of fandom - and these are exactly the times and ways in which characteristics of core identity are formed. Also telling, while there were about 3,000 people who showed up for the Cleveland Browns parade, there were many fans who were quite angry about it - but online objections were mostly that it was "embarrassing". (No mention of the 0-16 record that inspired the parade.)

Before I put into words what might be motivating them and make predictions, here's a summary of the two kinds of of beliefs, producing two kinds of motivation. While these beliefs exist in everyone, there is going to be a distribution in the population, with one category of beliefs dominating the fandom-related cognition of some fans, and the other category dominating that of others.

HARDCORE FAN	CASUAL FAN
motivated by moral foundations	by utility calculations
end in themselves	deliberate, external goal-oriented
higher value on loyalty	lower value on loyalty
adopted in childhood, maybe from family	adopted voluntarily in adulthood
not negotiable	negotiable
central to identity	not central to identity
unwilling or unable to verbalize	position clearly verbalized
more often encountered in person	more often encountered online
sees casual fans as untrustworthy, sleazy	sees hardcore fans as stupid, gullible

Of course it's a spectrum, and every fan is somewhere on this spectrum, but many of us clearly lean toward one or the other end. (If you're reading this, you're more likely in the right column than the left.)

To summarize the hardcore fan: he is motivated by more basic, instinctual moral drives, especially loyalty. Being a good fan is an end in itself, and an offer to burn a team jersey, to cheer for the other team, etc. in exchange for money is likely to not only be immediately refused but to provoke active offense. These fans consider their fandom a crucial part of their identity, to the extent of including team-related themes in their weddings or mentioning it in obituaries ("he lives and dies by the Browns"; "a Browns fan to the core.") He can get uncomfortable when the business aspects of a professional sport are discussed and overshadow the games on the field. Asking him to explain his fandom will be met with puzzlement, anger, or a jumbled set of team cheers and slogans, in the same manner as a person asked to explain why they are patriotic or follow a certain religion - "If I have to explain it to you, you'll never understand." And finally, because tribal loyalty sentiments are more warning-barks or team cheers than any kind of actionable proposition, you're more likely to hear such sentiments when talking to him in person, where the nonverbal (affect-laden and irrational) part of communication dominates. He will be a fan for life. When the bandwagon people disappear during losing seasons the hardcore fan says "Good riddance, good-time Charlie."

To summarize the casual fan: he is motivated by utility calculations about external goals (this team might win this year so I'll cheer for them, maybe I can make friends this way, maybe I'll look successful if I follow a good team.) He doesn't see what's impressive about staying loyal to losers, and really doesn't understand why making fun of your team when they lose is shameful or embarrassing. He probably picked up his fandom after college, maybe when he moved to a new city. He probably don't care either way about the business dealings of the team. If someone offered him money to stay home from a game or burn team logos, he would seriously consider the offer. He doesn't introduce himself to strangers as a fan, and five years from now he might not be following the team, or might not be following the sport at all. He can give clear reasons why he started following the team, and you're more likely to hear from people like him online. He shakes his head at the hardcores who keep shelling out cash for losing teams' jerseys.

Both the hardcores and non-hardcores gain utility in proportion to the team's performance. A team's performance can be negative, causing you to lose utility by associating with them.[5] But there must be another source of utility for the hardcores, who somehow gain utility from the association no matter the team's performance - and that source of utility is a constant ability to demonstrate loyalty, period, to others as well as to themselves to reinforce their own identity. And this signal is most informative when your side is losing.[6] Speaking quantitatively, in the utility equation for this model, there are two terms, loyalty (a constant for everyone, hardcore or not), plus the product of team performance times associative utility. Associative utility is how much your utility changes per team winningness. Both loyalty and associative utility vary by individuals, and team performance of course is determined by the team. The equation looks like this:

Total utility = Loyalty-based utility + (Team performance * associative utility)

Team performance can be positive or negative. For the hardcores, loyalty is such a large term that it doesn't matter how negative team performance is, loyalty will alway be greater and the total utility will always be positive (this could be the definition of "hardcore", "rain or shine", etc.) Further toward the other end of the spectrum, the value of loyalty signaling decreases and the team performance makes more of a difference in whether people keep following the team. It's also worth pointing out that this explains people who don't care about sports at all, because they have zero loyalty and zero associative utility - that is, it doesn't matter how much the team wins, they still won't care.


PREDICTIONS

Many of these predictions seem trivial, but the point is to relate these predictions to specific components of the hardcore fan's motivation structure as noted in the table above, which would be more informative.

• While utility is hard to measure directly, there are good proxies for it, like revenues, attendance, or Nielsen ratings. Given that there will be a distribution of hardcore to non-hardcore fans, there will be a non-zero floor to revenues so even 0-16 teams don't go to zero, as we observed. If we graph all of the teams on performance vs utility proxy, I would expect a mostly linear-looking scatter plot with an increase in the slope at the good end, for those teams with some expectation of a national championship, and possibly a flattening at the bottom. This may depend more on expected utility (if fans are pleasantly surprised by a win vs. they expect their team always to win.) I plan to try to collect some kind of utility-proxy data and see if this is in fact the case.
• In general a sport will be more successful in inspiring loyalty, the more similar it is to tribal warfare (always a reliable revenue stream for every team); maybe this is why football has eclipsed baseball as the national pastime.
• The more hardcore, the more they will pay attention to the outside charity activities of their own team, and the more outraged they will be by disloyalty-demonstrating acts, e.g. kneeling during the national anthem. They will also be more interested in the moral failings of opposing teams, especially rivals.
• The more hardcore, the less they will be interested in statistics, especially of other teams, even ones their teams are playing in important games.
• The more hardcore, the greater the difference in their interest in a player when he is on their team, vs. after he is traded. That is, hardcores think each of their players is a great person on and off the field - when he plays for their team - and any suggestion that they'll stop caring about him the second he is traded is likely to be met with hostility, but in fact this is the behavior they demonstrate. (He will also be annoyed when asked why, or when Seinfeld is cited - "Essentially you're cheering for clothing.")
• The more hardcore, the more they will feel sad or angry after a loss, and the more likely they are to attend or watch the next game despite having been very sad or angry at the last game's outcome.
• The more hardcore, the less tolerant they will be of fans behaving negatively toward the team, even when the team loses (very concrete and contra expectations here: you might expect hardcore fans to support a parade showing anger against the people making their Browns lose, but it seems to be exactly the opposite. Parallels to gay marriage here too: how exactly does the 0-16 parade degrade your fandom, when you didn't attend?)
• The more hardcore, the more they will confuse the team with a government agency or public good (i.e., demanding that the city finance a new stadium.)[7] More recent teams with cities that have highly educated and/or mobile populations (i.e. the coastal Pacific) will therefore find that they can't get what they want from those cities, because the voters don't care (Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego) where other cities filled with less mobile, less educated people would crucify their mayor for allowing a team to leave on their watch.
• It's often been noted that the Midwest with its brutal early winters has far more rabid sports fans than the mild West Coast. One possibility is that the loyalty-demonstration value of attending every game is diminished when all of those games are 70 F and sunny, vs some of them being freezing cold. (Think of the people who still wait in line in the cold and dark on Black Friday morning to buy things for their families. They do know that Amazon exists. So what do you think they're really doing?) Of course there could be a climate-independent cultural difference between east and west coast, but the model's prediction would be that Miami has equally low loyalty.
• The more hardcore, the more they will be upset if a star player leaves for another franchise, or the whole team moves to another city, and they use words like "betrayal."[7]
• The more hardcore, the less tolerant they will be of long-term, off-field strategies, especially ones that alter play and result in on-field losses. (Both the 2008 Detroit Lions and 2017 Cleveland Browns had 4-0 preseasons, then went 0-16. Tanking (here and here) and/or salary cap manipulation? Difficult to explain as mere incompetence. And if it were confirmed that this is what is happening, the hardcore fans would be angry; casual fans might say "Huh, that's kind of clever, although it means you've been putting a bad product on the field." "My team is not a 'product'!" the hardcore fan says.)
• I'm not sure what to predict about the impact of hardcoreness on betting. The hardcores' loyalty may make them become overconfident in their team's performance. On the other hand, moral foundations-related beliefs are often kept carefully separate from anything affecting real-world decision-making. By that I mean: sacred beliefs are often more tribal chant than actionable proposition, and in general, people desperately avoid any bet that touches their moral foundations (next time someone makes a verifiable statement about religion or politics that you disagree with, offer to bet them, and see what happens. Typically they backtrack to a non-verifiable version of what they said, and/or get very offended that you would "cheapen" such an important matter by betting on it - which are all moves to avoid testing their belief.) Then again, the hardcore fans presumably know more about their team than most others, which means they should be more confident in their predictions, and be more willing to bet. Consequently they may be less willing to bet proportional to their claimed confidence, than would a casual fan with equal knowledge of the team would be. In my one test of this during March Madness, I found that self-identified fans did more accurately predict the outcome of a game involving their team than non-fans, but I collected no information on willingness to bet.

Footnotes

[1] This very article is diagnostic. By trying to dissect loyalty, instead of taking it as an obvious good and discussing it in the context of a specific team, I mark myself as someone with a small loyalty term in my equation - whereas people whose sports utility equation is dominated by loyalty would not understand, and/or be actively be offended by, a question like "What do you get out of being a fan of your team?"

[2] One might argue that a purely rational human being would ignore sports altogether - what do a bunch of guys chasing a ball on a field somewhere else in my city have anything to do with me, I've never even met them! - and I'm sympathetic to that argument.

[3] I hope no one read the paragraph about the price of murder and thought, "Hmmm...What is my price to kill someone?" In the case of exemplar psychopath Richard Kuklinski, he got positive utility from harming people so he kept doing it even after he ran out of work.

[4] When people do not have VNM-consistent rationality (that is, they have these inflexible, non-negotiable, non-fungible beliefs - i.e., intransitive preferences) - they can be turned into money pumps, by observant and unscrupulous characters who can carve their motivation structure at the joints, i.e. focusing on the the inconsistencies. While this has been reproduced now in artificial settings, not only salespeople but politicians have been doing it since the dawn of civilization. The NFL and in particular the Cleveland Browns are doing exactly this to the fans by exploiting the intransitive preference of loyalty, and I would be very surprised if their marketing does not already have a model of their fans and spending patterns similar to what I've described here. Another follow-up is to look for literature on whether psychopathy allows one to see these disconnects more easily, or (hopefully) the ability to see them and the willingness to act on them are unrelated and therefore form a mercifully narrower sliver on a Venn diagram of the population.

[5] There's probably a Markovian/hedonic treadmill effect here too, where the utility multiplier from a team's win is not constant but rather influenced by expectations based on the team's record. Next year if the Patriots go 9-3, fans leaving a game after a win won't be as happy as Browns fans if the Browns have the same record.

[6] Remember Karl Rove dragging out the 2012 election night broadcast and refusing to accept the outcome, seeming a little nuts? But simultaneously advertising to ten million Republicans watching that he never ever gives up. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but "bad strategic thinker" was not among the many epithets hurled at him.

[7] When the Baltimore Colts were about to move to Indianapolis in 1984, the city actually tried to pass an eminent domain act (!) to take over the team, but the Colts escaped with the team's property under cover of darkness the night before. Other teams like the Chargers have found a much more lukewarm reaction on threatening to leave, and found themselves without many fans.

[8] While I wrote this post I was wearing a Garfunkel and Oates sportsball T-shirt, so you can guess which end of the spectrum I'm near.

Evil Gandhis and Poor Executive Function: How the World Looks if You Have Poor Impulse Control

Cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution.

Imagine that in some distant, cloudy mountain hideaway there is a city of evil Gandhis - or just unempathic but highly disciplined monks - who spend all their waking hours meditating. As a result of the self-control they've created in this manner, their executive function is superhuman - after all, extensive meditation builds not just cognitive discipline but EEG-measurable physical changes in the brain. Most dismiss this place as myth, but you come to believe it's real and that it still exists today. You follow the clues across blazing deserts and fetid swamps, and when finally you scale the last soaring frozen wall and scramble over the edge onto the floor of their lookout points, you have finally arrived in this storied, isolated monastery-city, a place of serene and severe carved granite with a glowing fire roaring in the center of the great terrace. You are greeted by intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic, studying you from their great central plaza with piercing eyes. You find that you are the first visitor from your country. Suddenly a horrific pain erupts from the back of your neck, and you turn to see one of the monks withdrawing a red hot brand that he has just poked you with.

Obviously you demand to know why you deserved that. As they are merely dispassionately interested in collecting knowledge, this one calmly explains that they would like to see if your skin burns in the same way theirs does. You turn to see several more of them calmly approaching you with various glowing metal rods; behind them, in the fire at the center of the plaza, someone is handing out even more. You tell them to stop, but they ignore you. Finally, you turn to the closest one approaching you, and punch him in the face. Your punch lays him flat out and as he falls his metal rod clangs to the ground.

"That's assault," one of the other monks says. "We're going to have to lock you up now."

"Assault?" you shout. "What was I supposed to do? You made me assault you!"

The monk rolls his eyes. Only then do you notice various burns, knife and whip scars all over his face and arms. "You're like a child. It's not our problem if your self-control is so poor that you can't stand being burned a few times."

To a person with a Cluster B personality disorder - including narcissistic PD or especially borderline - the world must seem to be filled with such evil cold-blooded monks. If I have BPD, then these people just can't see that when they withhold affection, that's so intolerable - it's just the same as a hot iron - that they're making me attack them to protect myself. (I have heard a severe narcissist in a psychiatric hospital, fighting while being restrained by staff after being refused special treatment, literally say "Look what you're making me do! You're making me do this!" The resemblance to what a five year-old might say is not coincidental.)

But this is more than just an interesting perspective - it's relevant to a critical assumption that we make in liberal democracies. Namely, that people have agency, and this agency allows them to be responsible for themselves, and to some degree others. While (so far as I know) pain-tolerating monks do not exist, people with severe borderline and narcissistic personality disorder - with poor executive function and low distress tolerance - do exist. And we do lock them up.

It turns out that "agency" has buried within it many components, which do vary quite a bit across the population, and which profoundly affect people's ability to run their own lives and live with others. The one case where we're comfortable saying that humans don't have agency is children - but even that is somewhat arbitrary and agranular (many of us can think of a sixteen year old more capable of running her own life than a twenty-eight year old.) The monks would lock you or me up because we're at the extreme bad end of their distribution, just like we lock up people in jails or long-term care facilities. But here's the thing - we wait for someone to commit an act, of the sort that they are guaranteed to commit at some point, if they're at the extreme end of the distribution. As society becomes more complex, more and more people will commit such acts, and we'll have to become more honest and clear about exactly how we deal with them.