"Electroencephalographic Topography Measurements of Experienced Utility", emphasis on experienced. Pedroni A. et al, The Journal of Neuroscience, 20 July 2011, 31(29): 10474-10480. The response they measured unexpectedly increased disproportionately increasing reward, i.e. it did not demonstrate diminishing returns but rather the opposite.
A measure of the mismatch between decision and reward utility, and understanding its biological basis and how it differs between individuals, would be excellent for psychology as well.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
If There Were a DEA and FDA For the Software Industry
[Note: Aaron Agostini responded critically to this post at his blog, A Polite Gunfight.]
Imagine if, long ago, we established not only an FDA for drugs, but also a parallel agency for software. The software industry's FDA would exist in order to protect computer users from bad programs - harmful, or low quality - and would require central approval of every single program writter. Of course this would produce grumbling for software engineers who just want to make a living, but the arrangement would indeed allow software-FDA to stop nasty malware before it made it onto the market.
Unfortunately, software-FDA then becomes inconsistent and over-conservative - always more reasons to say no than yes - and hurts computer users in the long run by decreasing the number and quality of programs available to them. For example: programs released back in the 1980s, even if they slowed your computer down and crashed all the time, would be allowed to remain by an unspoken grandfather agreement (too messy to recall them or investigate them now!) The old-school software makers would certainly not rock this boat, and the newer software companies wouldn't speak out for fear that they would be punished by software-FDA. The rules that you had to follow when developing software would be so byzantine that software companies would have to hire their own legal experts, who are expensive and say "No" a lot to developers' plans. Needless to say, it would be very hard for small software companies to survive, and software would cost more for consumers.
Meanwhile, new programs would be scrutinized even for infrequent damage, i.e. to one out of a thousand computers, and if the programmers couldn't explain exactly how the programs worked in every situation, they wouldn't be allowed to sell them. (Nobody knows how the old programs work, but they're still allowed to be sold; and certainly nobody is allowed to make an informed choice about the acceptable risk to them. The software consuming public doesn't understand enough to make these decisions.) Investors in new software companies are scared off by any program that shows real innovation, and the number of programs released per year starts to drop. Finally, the software-FDA does allow computer technicians to sell programs to consumers for uses other than for what the programs are specifically approved to do - even though software-FDA clearly doesn't trust these same technicians to evaluate whether the programs should be on the market in the first place. But people get used to this crazy inconsistency, so hardly anyone says anything.
And there would be a whole other government agency (the software-DEA), for the worst programs of all. There are certain programs, software-DEA says, that are SO BAD that they don't trust ANYBODY to use them responsibly - consumers OR computer technicians - so they put people in jail for buying and using them. Software-DEA even puts people in jail when these programs harm only the consumers' own computers, by their own consent. In fact software-DEA keeps putting people in jail even when some of the programs have been conclusively shown by computer scientists NOT to harm their computers. Not surprisingly, a black market will form around these programs, some of which are fun to use and pretty safe, and software-DEA will say, completely bass-ackwards, this proves these programs are bad, and must be kept illegal.
Imagine if, long ago, we established not only an FDA for drugs, but also a parallel agency for software. The software industry's FDA would exist in order to protect computer users from bad programs - harmful, or low quality - and would require central approval of every single program writter. Of course this would produce grumbling for software engineers who just want to make a living, but the arrangement would indeed allow software-FDA to stop nasty malware before it made it onto the market.
Unfortunately, software-FDA then becomes inconsistent and over-conservative - always more reasons to say no than yes - and hurts computer users in the long run by decreasing the number and quality of programs available to them. For example: programs released back in the 1980s, even if they slowed your computer down and crashed all the time, would be allowed to remain by an unspoken grandfather agreement (too messy to recall them or investigate them now!) The old-school software makers would certainly not rock this boat, and the newer software companies wouldn't speak out for fear that they would be punished by software-FDA. The rules that you had to follow when developing software would be so byzantine that software companies would have to hire their own legal experts, who are expensive and say "No" a lot to developers' plans. Needless to say, it would be very hard for small software companies to survive, and software would cost more for consumers.
Meanwhile, new programs would be scrutinized even for infrequent damage, i.e. to one out of a thousand computers, and if the programmers couldn't explain exactly how the programs worked in every situation, they wouldn't be allowed to sell them. (Nobody knows how the old programs work, but they're still allowed to be sold; and certainly nobody is allowed to make an informed choice about the acceptable risk to them. The software consuming public doesn't understand enough to make these decisions.) Investors in new software companies are scared off by any program that shows real innovation, and the number of programs released per year starts to drop. Finally, the software-FDA does allow computer technicians to sell programs to consumers for uses other than for what the programs are specifically approved to do - even though software-FDA clearly doesn't trust these same technicians to evaluate whether the programs should be on the market in the first place. But people get used to this crazy inconsistency, so hardly anyone says anything.
And there would be a whole other government agency (the software-DEA), for the worst programs of all. There are certain programs, software-DEA says, that are SO BAD that they don't trust ANYBODY to use them responsibly - consumers OR computer technicians - so they put people in jail for buying and using them. Software-DEA even puts people in jail when these programs harm only the consumers' own computers, by their own consent. In fact software-DEA keeps putting people in jail even when some of the programs have been conclusively shown by computer scientists NOT to harm their computers. Not surprisingly, a black market will form around these programs, some of which are fun to use and pretty safe, and software-DEA will say, completely bass-ackwards, this proves these programs are bad, and must be kept illegal.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Refine Your Taste, Pay the Price
I argued previously that the main benefit of drinking wine is the ability it confers on you to signal your cultural refinement. At the end of the post I stated the reasons for intentionally destroying one's taste in wine:
Of course the counterargument is that if your ability to signal results in increased attraction of mates, business partners, or some other benefit, it may offset the greater expense of achieving the same hedonic experience.
So it was with some amusement that today I read about how Seth Roberts did the opposite - he inadvertently destroyed his enjoyment of sake by greatly refining his taste - all in a single day.
I apply the same dismissal to wine as I do to sake. I've come to the conclusion that intentionally refining one's palate is a form of masochism that any self-respecting hedonist should reject. Why the hell would I ever deliberately make my palate more difficult to please? By developing your taste, you're intentionally making your marginal unit of pleasure more expensive - you're making yourself more difficult to please. If you have a bad case of wine signal-itis and you enjoy announcing to dining compatriots all the flaws you've found in the wine on the table in front of you, you might put it in perspective this way...That's why I'm intentionally letting what little refinement I've achieved go fallow, and I automatically order the cheapest table wine on the menu. Or I don't, and get a Coke.
Of course the counterargument is that if your ability to signal results in increased attraction of mates, business partners, or some other benefit, it may offset the greater expense of achieving the same hedonic experience.
So it was with some amusement that today I read about how Seth Roberts did the opposite - he inadvertently destroyed his enjoyment of sake by greatly refining his taste - all in a single day.
54'40" Was Fought: Alternate History #3
Previous entry in the alternate history series: The Alternate vs. Actual History Test.
Next entry in the alternate history series: Colonial Megafauna.
Added later: information about why the border between post-Mexican-War Mexico ended up where it did, and what an alternate "lesser" Mexico would have been like if the border had ended up even further south - and what the American Civil War might have been like if Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua had been absorbed and admitted as states.
We're fortunate that today the land border between the U.S. and Canada is the longest undefended border on the planet. But there was an actual U.S. invasion plan for Canada for the 1920s and 30s, in anticipation of U.S. and U.K. interests' running afoul. (H/T Luke Muehlhauser.)
[Added later: guest-blogging at the Daily Dish, Alex Massie shares my rather pessimistic view of American military's chances against the British in the first half of the nineteenth century, specifically discussing the War of 1812.]
Keeping in the military mindset of the previous century, the U.S. planned to capitalize on its proximity and its access to the interior of the continent. The same considerations were likely what brought a reasonable end to the War of 1812. The British knew the U.S. couldn't match them on the seas, and demonstrated this by burning selected targets in Washington after sailing right up the Potomac, in retaliation for the American burning of Toronto. But they also knew that a military campaign to conquer the American interior was hopeless, and this is what the later War Plan Red capitalized on. Of course, fortunately (in the most perverse possible sense) World War II occurred and stopped a second War of 1812, and suddenly the idea of invading Canada – or the idea of worrying about British troops more than Japanese troops – seemed absurd. Britain was fighting for its life and there were friends of Britain's enemies bombing American territories.
There are actually several interesting but terrible ways that the U.S.-Canadian (and –British) relationship could have turned out much worse than it did as a result of war. The first is the possibility of a nineteenth century Canadian war. Immediately following the War of 1812 some admirably cool heads prevailed in London and Washington, and an agreement was made to co-develop the Pacific Northwest. (You will look a long time in world history for agreements between competing powers as rational as this one.) Then of course came the end of the agreement, with the 1845 slogan "54'40" or fight". (54'40" is the southern border of the Alaska panhandle. The U.S. was essentially demanding all of BC, and the southern half of the prairie provinces to boot.) Had this led to war, it is very likely that it would've meant a sound naval defeat for the U.S. that had major territorial implications, since most settlement and trade in the Oregon Country at that point moved by river. Oregon Country was far enough from Washington that it would effectively have been a foreign war for both countries along the coast and rivers; in those circumstances you'd be a fool to bet against the nineteenth century British Navy. A worst case scenario would have meant the Americans losing the entire Oregon Territory, all the way back to what are today the American northern Rockies. The U.S. would certainly not have held the coast, and would not have held the Columbia. (Don't even try to tell me they could have held the Fraser.) As a result the northern Rockies could well have become an international boundary, just like the Andes on the other American continent. Yellowstone would have been on a hostile tripartite border.
Also keep in mind that, in actual history, the U.S. was scheduled to fight Mexico the following year, gaining such familiar territories as California and Texas. With a military demoralized and battered by the British, and likely a new administration elected that was far less interested in expansion, it's hard to argue we would have started the Mexican War when we did, or at the very least had fewer gains. Our border with Mexico after the earlier Florida purchase was the Arkansas River, which cuts through Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, so substantial chunks of the southwestern Midwest would also not have been gained. It's also less much less likely under these circumstances that the Alaska purchase would have occurred; it almost didn't as it was. Sadly New Kamchatka would not have been able to produce beloved governors and Vice Presidential nominees for the far-away American capital. Consequently, Going to war over 54'50" could very likely have meant the U.S. lost its entire Pacific Coast. Worst case scenario map below, with international boundaries darkened and changed sub-national territories named.
In alternative histories, the best-known rendering of a U.S.-Canadian war was in Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series, where in 1914 the Confederacy allies with England and the Allies, and the North comes in with Germany and the Central powers. The Central powers win, the U.S. pushes the U.K. completely out of Canada, and sets up an independent Quebec as a client state.
As an aside, my favorite part of the War Plan Red article: "The best practicable route to Vancouver is via Route 99." I hope no one got paid for that. That's not war planning, that's buying a map at a gas station. Or being a Seattle commuter.
Previous entry:
The alternate vs. actual history test
Next entry: Lewis and Clark vs. the Sabretooth
Next entry in the alternate history series: Colonial Megafauna.
Added later: information about why the border between post-Mexican-War Mexico ended up where it did, and what an alternate "lesser" Mexico would have been like if the border had ended up even further south - and what the American Civil War might have been like if Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua had been absorbed and admitted as states.
We're fortunate that today the land border between the U.S. and Canada is the longest undefended border on the planet. But there was an actual U.S. invasion plan for Canada for the 1920s and 30s, in anticipation of U.S. and U.K. interests' running afoul. (H/T Luke Muehlhauser.)
[Added later: guest-blogging at the Daily Dish, Alex Massie shares my rather pessimistic view of American military's chances against the British in the first half of the nineteenth century, specifically discussing the War of 1812.]
Keeping in the military mindset of the previous century, the U.S. planned to capitalize on its proximity and its access to the interior of the continent. The same considerations were likely what brought a reasonable end to the War of 1812. The British knew the U.S. couldn't match them on the seas, and demonstrated this by burning selected targets in Washington after sailing right up the Potomac, in retaliation for the American burning of Toronto. But they also knew that a military campaign to conquer the American interior was hopeless, and this is what the later War Plan Red capitalized on. Of course, fortunately (in the most perverse possible sense) World War II occurred and stopped a second War of 1812, and suddenly the idea of invading Canada – or the idea of worrying about British troops more than Japanese troops – seemed absurd. Britain was fighting for its life and there were friends of Britain's enemies bombing American territories.
There are actually several interesting but terrible ways that the U.S.-Canadian (and –British) relationship could have turned out much worse than it did as a result of war. The first is the possibility of a nineteenth century Canadian war. Immediately following the War of 1812 some admirably cool heads prevailed in London and Washington, and an agreement was made to co-develop the Pacific Northwest. (You will look a long time in world history for agreements between competing powers as rational as this one.) Then of course came the end of the agreement, with the 1845 slogan "54'40" or fight". (54'40" is the southern border of the Alaska panhandle. The U.S. was essentially demanding all of BC, and the southern half of the prairie provinces to boot.) Had this led to war, it is very likely that it would've meant a sound naval defeat for the U.S. that had major territorial implications, since most settlement and trade in the Oregon Country at that point moved by river. Oregon Country was far enough from Washington that it would effectively have been a foreign war for both countries along the coast and rivers; in those circumstances you'd be a fool to bet against the nineteenth century British Navy. A worst case scenario would have meant the Americans losing the entire Oregon Territory, all the way back to what are today the American northern Rockies. The U.S. would certainly not have held the coast, and would not have held the Columbia. (Don't even try to tell me they could have held the Fraser.) As a result the northern Rockies could well have become an international boundary, just like the Andes on the other American continent. Yellowstone would have been on a hostile tripartite border.
Also keep in mind that, in actual history, the U.S. was scheduled to fight Mexico the following year, gaining such familiar territories as California and Texas. With a military demoralized and battered by the British, and likely a new administration elected that was far less interested in expansion, it's hard to argue we would have started the Mexican War when we did, or at the very least had fewer gains. Our border with Mexico after the earlier Florida purchase was the Arkansas River, which cuts through Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, so substantial chunks of the southwestern Midwest would also not have been gained. It's also less much less likely under these circumstances that the Alaska purchase would have occurred; it almost didn't as it was. Sadly New Kamchatka would not have been able to produce beloved governors and Vice Presidential nominees for the far-away American capital. Consequently, Going to war over 54'50" could very likely have meant the U.S. lost its entire Pacific Coast. Worst case scenario map below, with international boundaries darkened and changed sub-national territories named.
In alternative histories, the best-known rendering of a U.S.-Canadian war was in Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series, where in 1914 the Confederacy allies with England and the Allies, and the North comes in with Germany and the Central powers. The Central powers win, the U.S. pushes the U.K. completely out of Canada, and sets up an independent Quebec as a client state.
As an aside, my favorite part of the War Plan Red article: "The best practicable route to Vancouver is via Route 99." I hope no one got paid for that. That's not war planning, that's buying a map at a gas station. Or being a Seattle commuter.
Previous entry:
The alternate vs. actual history test
Next entry: Lewis and Clark vs. the Sabretooth
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Alternate vs Actual History Test: Which Really Happened (Alternative History #2)
Previous entry in the alternate history series: Homo Erectus Never Went Extinct
Next entry in the alternate history series: 54'40" Was Fought
No Googling now. If you don't know, guess which of these really happened, THEN click through. No mousing over to look where the links go either, smart guy. In chronological order of when they occurred or would have occurred:
- The U.S. military investigated LSD as a potential chemical warfare agent in the 1960s - but the first intentional use of biological or chemical warfare was in the seventh century B.C., when the Assyrians deliberately poisoned wells with ergot, a fungus which produces LSD-like compounds.
- A lost phalanx of Alexander the Great entered China and crushed the Qin outpost they encountered
- People living along the Mediterranean in ancient Greek times travelled to central Africa and had a hostile skirmish with pygmies controlling an oasis in the Sahara
- A purge of Buddhists from the Imperial Court in Japan
- The Moorish conquest of a Swiss village
- A Norse Kingdom in Sicily
- An Islamic khanate in Siberia which included Uralic-speaking subjects? (i.e. related to Finnish and Estonian)
- A Tibetan Buddhist republic in recent European Russia
- A Tokugawa naval expedition to Mexico
- Sacagawea's son moved to Europe as a young man with his German prince buddy, touring Europe and North Africa
- A United States of Central America
- Monterey, California "accidentally" taken over by American naval forces when it was still part of Mexico, several years before any war broke out, then given back
- A civil war between Mormons and the rest of the U.S., when Mormons considered everything out to California to be part of the state of Deseret
- A Scottish Colony in Panama
- U.S. and Germany fighting each other after being drawn into the Samoan Civil War on opposite sides
- A serious twentieth century effort to overthrow the U.S. government funded by major corporations, which resulted in criminal prosections
Did you click through? Here's a hint: only one of these was made up. The rest are true. The world is strange.
Previous alternate history post: What if Homo erectus still existed today?
Next entry in the alternate history series: 54'40" Was Fought
No Googling now. If you don't know, guess which of these really happened, THEN click through. No mousing over to look where the links go either, smart guy. In chronological order of when they occurred or would have occurred:
- The U.S. military investigated LSD as a potential chemical warfare agent in the 1960s - but the first intentional use of biological or chemical warfare was in the seventh century B.C., when the Assyrians deliberately poisoned wells with ergot, a fungus which produces LSD-like compounds.
- A lost phalanx of Alexander the Great entered China and crushed the Qin outpost they encountered
- People living along the Mediterranean in ancient Greek times travelled to central Africa and had a hostile skirmish with pygmies controlling an oasis in the Sahara
- A purge of Buddhists from the Imperial Court in Japan
- The Moorish conquest of a Swiss village
- A Norse Kingdom in Sicily
- An Islamic khanate in Siberia which included Uralic-speaking subjects? (i.e. related to Finnish and Estonian)
- A Tibetan Buddhist republic in recent European Russia
- A Tokugawa naval expedition to Mexico
- Sacagawea's son moved to Europe as a young man with his German prince buddy, touring Europe and North Africa
- A United States of Central America
- Monterey, California "accidentally" taken over by American naval forces when it was still part of Mexico, several years before any war broke out, then given back
- A civil war between Mormons and the rest of the U.S., when Mormons considered everything out to California to be part of the state of Deseret
- A Scottish Colony in Panama
- U.S. and Germany fighting each other after being drawn into the Samoan Civil War on opposite sides
- A serious twentieth century effort to overthrow the U.S. government funded by major corporations, which resulted in criminal prosections
Did you click through? Here's a hint: only one of these was made up. The rest are true. The world is strange.
Previous alternate history post: What if Homo erectus still existed today?
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Film Quality vs. Profit: Is There Any Connection, and Does Talent Matter?
Bottom line: film studios are profit-making entities. Film quality as assessed by critics does not seem to closely correlate with profits. So do studios care about quality, and if so, why? To what extent do directors and actors affect critical evaluation and profit, and how is such an effect mediated? At times the film industry behaves inconsistently and seems to make decisions in terms of things other than profit. There are clear analogies to be made with the sports business, in terms of apparent paradoxes that can be resolved by being reminded that profit and winning games are not the same thing.
An article on Slate contains a Rotten Tomatoes-based gadget that tracks the performance, as measured by critical reception, of directors and actors over the last 25 years. (This choice of metric is important. The first question should be more obvious than it is: why should they use critical reception your yardstick? Would studios rather work with a Michael Bay, a director who reliably produces top-selling shiny shoot-em-ups, or a Terry Gilliam, who makes movies which are a tremendous joy to watch, and well-received critically - and which are tremendously expensive and run over budget and schedule? Now you see what I'm getting at. Most industries don't have the opportunity to lose focus on profit after getting confused by the artistic value of their products.) In the same way, a sports franchise with loyal fans can afford to have losing seasons, at least for a while, as long as the team can keep those fans filling seats, glued to TV sets to see commercials, and buying branded jerseys.
Reading through the Slate article about this new career-tracker gadget, you will note that John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers) is the "winning" American actor. That is to say, he is the American actor who has made 10 or more films since 1986 whose films' average ratings were rated the highest by critics, at 76.1%. Compare to Chuck Norris, the worst actor, for whom the same statistic 18.4%.
"It's over, Mr. Anderson...I mean Prime." You'll get it in a second.
This might seem strange because Chuck Norris would seem to have more name recognition than John Ratzenberger, and (at a guess) I bet commands a higher quote. Also interesting is that in terms of total gross of films-appeared-in, the top actor in the United States is - wait for it - Frank Welker! You know, Frank Welker, the original voice of Megatron? In 2006 he passed Samuel L. Jackson with a career gross of US$4.9 billion. Of course in the U.S. we don't regard seiyuu as a separate career, as they do in Japan.
Why Would Studios, or Directors, or Actors Care About Ratings?
If you assume that critical ratings (i.e. quality) and profits are the same thing, then even the few statistics above present a real puzzle. Of course if commercial culture has taught is anything, it's that the just-stated assumption is a very false one, hence the existence of movies like Star Crash and Transmorphers (see point #3 here), which have little delusion about themselves as art but are safe bets as business propositions. At the very least there is likely to be a diminishing return on profits by improving critical perception of quality; a dollar you spend on a movie budget to raise it from just-okay to not bad might bring back more sales than a dollar that raises it from pretty good to critically stellar. Even if the critics care enough to spend a dollar more, the broader film-consuming public might not. As in sports, the film industry's product has a cultural value separate from its sales value, and because the cultural value is more salient to the public, film consumers confuse the two - just as sports consumers are puzzled about bowls and college ratings. But the film industry usually has its head screwed on straight and is focused on the real prize; they're (presumably) composed of materially self-interested agents and is not confused by this. Right?
Not necessarily. On its face the film industry would seem to be maximizing something besides profit, at least some of the time. Assuming Frank Welker's career-film-gross indicates a real contribution to films, and because as a voice actor you could probably get him to work for less than a big screen actor, then it would seem to be a no-brainer to keep using Welker in the Transformers franchise - as opposed to, say, Hugo Weaving, who will undoubtedly cost more and cut into the bottom line. But they still went with Weaving. (Now you get the little joke in the caption above.) What's the justification in cases like this? Did Weaving really want the part, and got his agent to call in a big favor to the studio to get him? Is the studio afraid of looking cheap by keeping the old-series voice actor, and signaling financial weakness to the rest of the industry? Did they actually project how many more tickets and rentals they would get from people who liked the Matrix, to prove that he would pay for himself? Or is it even less rational than that, and people at the studio and film crew just insist on having more prestigious people to associate with (like Weaving) and they're effectively willing to trade away profits to bask in his company? I have nothing against Weaving or his performance in Transformers, but decisions like these are curious from a financial standpoint, and they raise question about what's really being maximized.
Smart, i.e. rationally self-interested studios that win best picture would always auction these off, or melt them down for scrap. Imagine the rational, curmudgeonly studio exec. "Who cares if the academy liked it. I just want to make sure winning this thing doesn't hurt sales."
Going further, you wonder why a studio ever bothers at all with trying to get good critical reception. Yes, the Pixar movies that Ratzenberger is in have done well financially and tend to be highly rated by critics, but Chuck Norris's movies have been financially successful - but only financially successful. If you can sell tickets when Roger Ebert is bashing you, who cares? It's reasonable to think there's some negative impact on sales if the media hates you, but it would be interesting to see the actual relationship. How to measure? Movies are made for different amounts and intended to bring in different amounts; so perhaps compare on one hand each film's profits as a percentage of the film's budget, versus its Rotten Tomatoes average on the other. Either there will be some relationship between the two - or there will be none, or it will be too noisy to care about the correlation. If there's not a clear relationship between critical opinion and sales (or there's one that's grossly non-linear) it's worth asking what the value of the critics is, to the industry and to the public. To make sure we know what their film school wants us to like?
Frank Welker's take-earned-by-films-I've-been-in statistic raises another question. What's the average per film, and more crucially, to what degree was that Welker's influence? There's probably an 82 year-old key grip somewhere with a spreadsheet showing how his own takes are higher than Welker's. But even if you're looking at the average takes as opposed to absolute, what do you compare to? We don't know how much the movie would have made had X been in it instead of Y, and doing an average % take relative to budget wouldn't give us a comparison. That is, even if Welker has a good average %, how do we know that's higher than what the movies would have made otherwise? What counterpart would we use? (Even if we solved that, this is only correlation; the actor might just pick good-selling movies, as opposed to making them good-selling.) If there are measurable effects, do actors or directors on average have more impact on quality and/or take? Analogously, analyze NBA teams, and you'll find that on average their records from year to year are more closely related to who's coaching than who's playing; when I did this, I didn't investigate whether this is from recruiting skill or on-the-court coaching.
Finally, and I have no proposal for how to measure this, even if there are measurable effects from a certain actor appearing in the film, what mediates that? Is the public going because they think they'll get a good performance, or do they just like the actor because they're familiar with him or her? The fact that studios are willing to pay a premium for well-known actors instead of just using unknowns that can act just as well as the people who had a break (which comprise a large portion of the LA population) suggests that the studios believe familiarity is at least part of the effect.
Of course we might assume big studios investing tens or hundreds of millions in projects aren't stupid; they're businesses looking for an ROI, and they must already doing something like these analyses. Then again that assumes that their decision-making process is profit-maximizing, when the choice of actors as discussed above strongly suggests otherwise (status signaling? ego-stroking by association with celebrities vs. unknown actors? quality, among LA's artistic idealists?)
Depressed by how all description of how much the creation of art is dictated by eonomic considerations? Then move to a much less capital-intensive endeavor with smaller teams, like writing. One person risking only their solo time at a keyboard can and does usually produce more innovation.
In conclusion: I'm not the curmudgeon about the value of film quality that you might assume from this post. In fact I'm a huge Darren Aronofsky fan and I'm very much looking forward to his next film Human Nature, which will star George Clooney. But with The Fountain (easily my favorite film of the last decade) Aronofsky came perilously close to Gilliam territory in terms of his production stopping and starting again. I'm glad that he's able to keep making high-quality films but I recognize that he's no doubt compromising what would have been an even better film, all the time, for business purposes. But the mystery remains about why studios care to invest in films like his at all. Whatever un-focused fuzzy calculations distract them from profit for long enough to fund projects like this, I'm glad.
Find the Rotten Tomatoes career-tracker here.
An article on Slate contains a Rotten Tomatoes-based gadget that tracks the performance, as measured by critical reception, of directors and actors over the last 25 years. (This choice of metric is important. The first question should be more obvious than it is: why should they use critical reception your yardstick? Would studios rather work with a Michael Bay, a director who reliably produces top-selling shiny shoot-em-ups, or a Terry Gilliam, who makes movies which are a tremendous joy to watch, and well-received critically - and which are tremendously expensive and run over budget and schedule? Now you see what I'm getting at. Most industries don't have the opportunity to lose focus on profit after getting confused by the artistic value of their products.) In the same way, a sports franchise with loyal fans can afford to have losing seasons, at least for a while, as long as the team can keep those fans filling seats, glued to TV sets to see commercials, and buying branded jerseys.
Reading through the Slate article about this new career-tracker gadget, you will note that John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers) is the "winning" American actor. That is to say, he is the American actor who has made 10 or more films since 1986 whose films' average ratings were rated the highest by critics, at 76.1%. Compare to Chuck Norris, the worst actor, for whom the same statistic 18.4%.
"It's over, Mr. Anderson...I mean Prime." You'll get it in a second.
This might seem strange because Chuck Norris would seem to have more name recognition than John Ratzenberger, and (at a guess) I bet commands a higher quote. Also interesting is that in terms of total gross of films-appeared-in, the top actor in the United States is - wait for it - Frank Welker! You know, Frank Welker, the original voice of Megatron? In 2006 he passed Samuel L. Jackson with a career gross of US$4.9 billion. Of course in the U.S. we don't regard seiyuu as a separate career, as they do in Japan.
Why Would Studios, or Directors, or Actors Care About Ratings?
If you assume that critical ratings (i.e. quality) and profits are the same thing, then even the few statistics above present a real puzzle. Of course if commercial culture has taught is anything, it's that the just-stated assumption is a very false one, hence the existence of movies like Star Crash and Transmorphers (see point #3 here), which have little delusion about themselves as art but are safe bets as business propositions. At the very least there is likely to be a diminishing return on profits by improving critical perception of quality; a dollar you spend on a movie budget to raise it from just-okay to not bad might bring back more sales than a dollar that raises it from pretty good to critically stellar. Even if the critics care enough to spend a dollar more, the broader film-consuming public might not. As in sports, the film industry's product has a cultural value separate from its sales value, and because the cultural value is more salient to the public, film consumers confuse the two - just as sports consumers are puzzled about bowls and college ratings. But the film industry usually has its head screwed on straight and is focused on the real prize; they're (presumably) composed of materially self-interested agents and is not confused by this. Right?
Not necessarily. On its face the film industry would seem to be maximizing something besides profit, at least some of the time. Assuming Frank Welker's career-film-gross indicates a real contribution to films, and because as a voice actor you could probably get him to work for less than a big screen actor, then it would seem to be a no-brainer to keep using Welker in the Transformers franchise - as opposed to, say, Hugo Weaving, who will undoubtedly cost more and cut into the bottom line. But they still went with Weaving. (Now you get the little joke in the caption above.) What's the justification in cases like this? Did Weaving really want the part, and got his agent to call in a big favor to the studio to get him? Is the studio afraid of looking cheap by keeping the old-series voice actor, and signaling financial weakness to the rest of the industry? Did they actually project how many more tickets and rentals they would get from people who liked the Matrix, to prove that he would pay for himself? Or is it even less rational than that, and people at the studio and film crew just insist on having more prestigious people to associate with (like Weaving) and they're effectively willing to trade away profits to bask in his company? I have nothing against Weaving or his performance in Transformers, but decisions like these are curious from a financial standpoint, and they raise question about what's really being maximized.
Smart, i.e. rationally self-interested studios that win best picture would always auction these off, or melt them down for scrap. Imagine the rational, curmudgeonly studio exec. "Who cares if the academy liked it. I just want to make sure winning this thing doesn't hurt sales."
Going further, you wonder why a studio ever bothers at all with trying to get good critical reception. Yes, the Pixar movies that Ratzenberger is in have done well financially and tend to be highly rated by critics, but Chuck Norris's movies have been financially successful - but only financially successful. If you can sell tickets when Roger Ebert is bashing you, who cares? It's reasonable to think there's some negative impact on sales if the media hates you, but it would be interesting to see the actual relationship. How to measure? Movies are made for different amounts and intended to bring in different amounts; so perhaps compare on one hand each film's profits as a percentage of the film's budget, versus its Rotten Tomatoes average on the other. Either there will be some relationship between the two - or there will be none, or it will be too noisy to care about the correlation. If there's not a clear relationship between critical opinion and sales (or there's one that's grossly non-linear) it's worth asking what the value of the critics is, to the industry and to the public. To make sure we know what their film school wants us to like?
Frank Welker's take-earned-by-films-I've-been-in statistic raises another question. What's the average per film, and more crucially, to what degree was that Welker's influence? There's probably an 82 year-old key grip somewhere with a spreadsheet showing how his own takes are higher than Welker's. But even if you're looking at the average takes as opposed to absolute, what do you compare to? We don't know how much the movie would have made had X been in it instead of Y, and doing an average % take relative to budget wouldn't give us a comparison. That is, even if Welker has a good average %, how do we know that's higher than what the movies would have made otherwise? What counterpart would we use? (Even if we solved that, this is only correlation; the actor might just pick good-selling movies, as opposed to making them good-selling.) If there are measurable effects, do actors or directors on average have more impact on quality and/or take? Analogously, analyze NBA teams, and you'll find that on average their records from year to year are more closely related to who's coaching than who's playing; when I did this, I didn't investigate whether this is from recruiting skill or on-the-court coaching.
Finally, and I have no proposal for how to measure this, even if there are measurable effects from a certain actor appearing in the film, what mediates that? Is the public going because they think they'll get a good performance, or do they just like the actor because they're familiar with him or her? The fact that studios are willing to pay a premium for well-known actors instead of just using unknowns that can act just as well as the people who had a break (which comprise a large portion of the LA population) suggests that the studios believe familiarity is at least part of the effect.
Of course we might assume big studios investing tens or hundreds of millions in projects aren't stupid; they're businesses looking for an ROI, and they must already doing something like these analyses. Then again that assumes that their decision-making process is profit-maximizing, when the choice of actors as discussed above strongly suggests otherwise (status signaling? ego-stroking by association with celebrities vs. unknown actors? quality, among LA's artistic idealists?)
Depressed by how all description of how much the creation of art is dictated by eonomic considerations? Then move to a much less capital-intensive endeavor with smaller teams, like writing. One person risking only their solo time at a keyboard can and does usually produce more innovation.
In conclusion: I'm not the curmudgeon about the value of film quality that you might assume from this post. In fact I'm a huge Darren Aronofsky fan and I'm very much looking forward to his next film Human Nature, which will star George Clooney. But with The Fountain (easily my favorite film of the last decade) Aronofsky came perilously close to Gilliam territory in terms of his production stopping and starting again. I'm glad that he's able to keep making high-quality films but I recognize that he's no doubt compromising what would have been an even better film, all the time, for business purposes. But the mystery remains about why studios care to invest in films like his at all. Whatever un-focused fuzzy calculations distract them from profit for long enough to fund projects like this, I'm glad.
Find the Rotten Tomatoes career-tracker here.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Economic Freedom and Happiness
I was recently looking at the economic freedom numbers for countries around the world and I wanted to know what the connection to actual outcomes was; in particular, the happiness of the people in those countries. All the rest are surrogates. Political and economic debates sometimes lose focus on this fact.
I looked at the following data, for all countries that had them (evident in the datasets); for each, it was always a clear majority of countries on the planet.
- The Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index for 2011
- White's Life Satisfaction Index
- GDP per capita (IMF data, supplemented by CIA for small countries, non-reporting countries, or inaccurately reporting countries)
- Gini index (from the U.N., or for some countries in the midst of conflict the Global Peace Index statistic)
- Economic growth for countries 1990-2007 (data from United Nations Statistics Division)
As I've done previously, rather than show a bunch of scatter-plots, I'll give you the statistical highlights. I'm happy to share the spreadsheet if anyone is interested, although this is not quite graduate-study-level QC'd data.
Map of White's life satisfaction index in 2006. This is what counts.
Highlights:
1. Interestingly, economic freedom correlates more closely with life satisfaction than with economic growth (R^2=0.239 vs 0.1075). This suggests that economic freedom adds to utility other than through direct material gain. Freedom does correlate better with per capita GDP than with growth (more below).
2. Economic freedom is associated (albeit weakly) with a decrease in Gini, that is with a more equitable income distribution.
3. There were a number of outliers in the plot of economic growth vs. life satisfaction. Most of these were very high Gini countries.
4. In the "unsurprising" cateogry: there were two R^2 that rose above 0.3 were the correlation between per capita GDP and life satisfaction (0.3106, stronger without outliers). The correlation between economic freedom and per capita GDP was even stronger at 0.3873. The curve appears to flatten at the high end of per capita GDP (removing three outliers raised the R^2 to 0.4665) reinforcing the conclusion that once basic needs are met there is a diminishing return. It bears emphasizing that this is a correlation, not a cause; economic growth may CAUSE economic freedom, or they may both be caused in parallel by the same thing.
CONCLUSIONS:
Unsurprising, but interesting to see in this form. Adopt policies that expand economic freedom in order to make people happier, partly by increasing growth. The best way to produce happiness is to reach a target high per capita income, but there is a diminishing return. Economic freedom has a weak beneficial effect on Gini, but Gini can offset the happiness effects of high PCI and good growth.
Future questions:
- There are a number of countries that, looking merely at per capita GDP, aren't as life-satisfied as they should be. These countries usually have large Gini; a surface in a 3D scatterplot would show this distortion. It might be informative to see which countries are "off the surface" in terms of how much we expect their Gini to distort their happiness:PCI ratio, and then ask how this effect is transmitted - a first guess to investigate would be degree of media saturation. Prediction: countries with more media and a high Gini will tend to be less happy that those with less media but the same Gini. Seeing how the other half lives forces everyone into the same status game.
- Are certain regions of the world off these curves in predictable ways because of cultural commitments? (See the World Values Survey.) E.g., are Confucianist countries less happy per dollar of PCI? Or are cultures with more family-oriented, traditional values differentially susceptible to the effects of Gini distortion?
- (Added later: personal economic freedom in the 50 U.S. States can be found by category here.)
I looked at the following data, for all countries that had them (evident in the datasets); for each, it was always a clear majority of countries on the planet.
- The Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index for 2011
- White's Life Satisfaction Index
- GDP per capita (IMF data, supplemented by CIA for small countries, non-reporting countries, or inaccurately reporting countries)
- Gini index (from the U.N., or for some countries in the midst of conflict the Global Peace Index statistic)
- Economic growth for countries 1990-2007 (data from United Nations Statistics Division)
As I've done previously, rather than show a bunch of scatter-plots, I'll give you the statistical highlights. I'm happy to share the spreadsheet if anyone is interested, although this is not quite graduate-study-level QC'd data.
Map of White's life satisfaction index in 2006. This is what counts.
Highlights:
1. Interestingly, economic freedom correlates more closely with life satisfaction than with economic growth (R^2=0.239 vs 0.1075). This suggests that economic freedom adds to utility other than through direct material gain. Freedom does correlate better with per capita GDP than with growth (more below).
2. Economic freedom is associated (albeit weakly) with a decrease in Gini, that is with a more equitable income distribution.
3. There were a number of outliers in the plot of economic growth vs. life satisfaction. Most of these were very high Gini countries.
4. In the "unsurprising" cateogry: there were two R^2 that rose above 0.3 were the correlation between per capita GDP and life satisfaction (0.3106, stronger without outliers). The correlation between economic freedom and per capita GDP was even stronger at 0.3873. The curve appears to flatten at the high end of per capita GDP (removing three outliers raised the R^2 to 0.4665) reinforcing the conclusion that once basic needs are met there is a diminishing return. It bears emphasizing that this is a correlation, not a cause; economic growth may CAUSE economic freedom, or they may both be caused in parallel by the same thing.
| Correlation | R^2 | Relationship Means? |
| Econ free & PCI | 0.3873 | Every point increase in econ freedom (range 0-100), raise PCI US$70 |
| PCI & life sat. | 0.3106 | Raise PCI US$1,000, increase life sat. 1.14 pts (range 100-250) |
| Econ free & life sat. | 0.239 | Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), increase happiness 1.67 points (range 100-250) |
| Econ free & growth | 0.1075 | Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), increase growth 0.001% |
| Econ free & Gini | 0.0837 | Add a point in econ freedom (range 1-100), decrease Gini 0.2685 |
| Growth & life sat. | 0.0544 | Every 10% increase in growth, get 25 points happier (range 100-250) |
| Gini & life sat. | 0.0258 | Increase Gini by 1, life sat. drops by 0.5 (range 100-250) |
CONCLUSIONS:
Unsurprising, but interesting to see in this form. Adopt policies that expand economic freedom in order to make people happier, partly by increasing growth. The best way to produce happiness is to reach a target high per capita income, but there is a diminishing return. Economic freedom has a weak beneficial effect on Gini, but Gini can offset the happiness effects of high PCI and good growth.
Future questions:
- There are a number of countries that, looking merely at per capita GDP, aren't as life-satisfied as they should be. These countries usually have large Gini; a surface in a 3D scatterplot would show this distortion. It might be informative to see which countries are "off the surface" in terms of how much we expect their Gini to distort their happiness:PCI ratio, and then ask how this effect is transmitted - a first guess to investigate would be degree of media saturation. Prediction: countries with more media and a high Gini will tend to be less happy that those with less media but the same Gini. Seeing how the other half lives forces everyone into the same status game.
- Are certain regions of the world off these curves in predictable ways because of cultural commitments? (See the World Values Survey.) E.g., are Confucianist countries less happy per dollar of PCI? Or are cultures with more family-oriented, traditional values differentially susceptible to the effects of Gini distortion?
- (Added later: personal economic freedom in the 50 U.S. States can be found by category here.)
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