Category: Jane Jacobs

Phone Hacking and Jane Jacobs (Roberts/Jacobs emails: Part 1 of 3)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

After I wrote about the relation between Jane Jacobs’s ideas and the British phone-hacking scandal, I heard from Jim Jacobs, one of her sons. He wrote:

Mary Rowe forwarded your post about News of the World and Systems of Survival. It’s an interesting observation. Here’s my take on it:

The moral principle we all value most in our news media is ‘Be honest’. Even the slightest deviation is viewed with alarm. Among other types of dishonesty, when newspapers get too close to government or filter their presentations through ideology they become worthless, often destructive. This requirement for honesty pervades the work of searching out the news too, just as it does for scientists searching for an understanding of something. (We expect reporters to respect ‘off-the-record’ confidentialities, for example.) Together with honesty, the entire commercial moral syndrome fits a newspaper, whatever its size. I won’t repeat the list here, but just look at it and see if you don’t think every one of the commercial moral principles are considered admirable in a newspaper, right down to ‘Be optimistic’ – newspapers are frequently criticized for too much doom-and-gloom. Note that there is no moral principle of ‘Sell more newspapers’: commercial morals don’t always lead to financial success. In fact, what Jane dubs ‘Monstrous Hybrids’ are often the roads to quick, immoral, riches. Media empires frequently drift toward guardian morals, immoral for them, and Murdoch’s is no exception. Therein lies their destructiveness, and eventual demise.

I hope this helps.

I replied:

It’s great to have your take on this. Here’s what I think about the points you raise.

For newspapers the overwhelming value isn’t “be honest” but “be accurate”. Honesty is saying what you think; accuracy is being accurate in what you say. It’s easy to be honest and inaccurate.

I believe that powerful newspapers consider themselves a fourth branch of government, and rightly so. Publication of the Pentagon Papers, for example, had nothing to do with selling more papers; it was all about fulfilling their responsibilities — which included loyalty to readers.

“Shun trading” is a part of newspaper practice in the sense that paying for interviews is thought to be bad. “Respect contracts” is not supposed to apply to them — it is bad for a magazine to strike a deal with a celebrity in order to get their cooperation.

“Be optimistic”. Sure, some readers want newspapers to be different, including more optimistic. They want more entertainment listings, for example. They want more stories about celebrities (and Murdoch gave them this). But the people who run powerful papers don’t agree. Editorials are usually preachy: this is bad, that is bad. That’s not entertaining at all — which is why Us magazine has no editorials — but whoever writes them thinks it is their job to make the world a better place by telling others what to do. When one of Murdoch’s lieutenants took over the Wall Street Journal, he said something about other papers being too concerned with their status in the eyes of other journalists (an example of “treasure honor”) than selling newspapers. Whereas to NY Times journalists, Murdoch’s papers “pandered”.

“Respect contracts”. I agree with you there.

“Come to voluntary agreements.” Newspapers are supposed to be nonviolent, yes. But when they have something important to say — e.g., some dirt to reveal — they are supposed to ignore legal threats. For example, the CBC is now being sued by a nutrition researcher because they aired a negative program about him.

“Deceive for the sake of the task.” Journalists do this all the time. For example, a restaurant reviewer will wear a disguise.

“Treasure honor”. There is now talk of a Hippocratic oath for journalists.

“Dissent for the sake of the task.” I don’t see that. I see newspapers with a party line. For example someone was fired from NPR recently for expressing views his bosses didn’t agree with.

“Be open to inventiveness and novelty.” I don’t see this. Perhaps newspapers are no more stagnant than other powerful companies however.

Because newspapers are actually businesses, they do value certain commercial values. But they see themselves as quite different from other businesses. Few people in other businesses are so concerned with “truth” and “the public interest”.

I will post Jim’s reply tomorrow.

Phone Hacking and Jane Jacobs

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I am fascinated by the British phone hacking scandal. Jane Jacobs has helped me understand it.

Should police officers be paid per arrest? Most people think this is a bad idea, I imagine, but the larger point (what can we learn from this?) isn’t clear. In Systems of Survival, Jacobs tried to spell out the larger point. She wrote about two sets of moral rules. One set (“guardian syndrome”) applied to warriors, government officials, and religious leaders. It prizes loyalty and obedience, for example. The other set (“commercial syndrome”) applied to merchants. It prizes honesty, avoidance of force, and industriousness, for example. The two syndromes correspond to two ways of making a living: taking and trading. The syndromes reached the form they have today because they worked — different jobs need different rules. When people in one sort of work (e.g., guardian) follow the rules of the other, things turn out badly. Ayn Rand glorified the commercial syndrome. When Alan Greenspan, one of her acolytes, became a governor, he did a poor job.

What about journalists? As a journalistic business becomes more powerful, it becomes more guardian-like. A powerful newspaper isn’t inherently bad; we want a powerful newspaper to keep other powerful institutions (government, large businesses) in check. Murdoch’s News International, of course, has became very powerful. Yet Murdoch newsrooms retained commercial norms, especially an emphasis on selling many copies. Reporters in Murdoch newsrooms were under intense pressure to produce — like policemen paid per arrest. Other journalists, with guardian norms (e.g., at the New York Times), didn’t like the commercial norms of Murdoch newspapers. The mixture of commercial values and guardian power led to the phone hacking scandal. Friends of mine blame Murdoch himself — but commercial norms are not unique to Murdoch. The problem is their mixture with great power.

When newspapers are small, they are not powerful, not guardians, and must adopt commercial norms — they must try to sell more copies or they will be crushed. When a small newspaper becomes large and powerful, however, its norms must change to guardian ones or things will turn out badly. This suggests that the phone-hacking scandal happened because Murdoch became very powerful too fast — too fast for a shift in values to accompany much greater power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sterilities of Scale and What They Say About Economics

Seth Roberts17 Comments

You have surely heard the phrase economies of scale — meaning that when you make many copies of something each instance costs less than when you make only a few copies. Large companies are said to benefit from “economies of scale” — so there is pressure to become bigger. Every introductory economics textbook says something like this.

Here’s what none of them say: The more of Item X made by one company, the more “sterile” Item X becomes, meaning the less Item X is able to spark innovation. Call this sterilities of scale. You have never heard this phrase — I invented it. (I cannot find it anywhere on the Web.) But it is just as obviously true as the notion that when you make more of something you can make each one more cheaply. If 100 widgets are made by one company, there is going to be less innovation surrounding widgets than if 100 widgets are made by 10 different companies. Sterility of Scale 1: When ten different companies make something, more people are studying and thinking about and pursuing different ways of making it than if only one company makes it. Sterility of Scale 2: The more profitable a single item becomes (due to low cost of manufacture), the more pressure not to change anything — not to kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Sterility of Scale 3: The larger the company, the more employees who care only about preservation of their fiefdom (comparing 10 companies of 10 people each to 1 company of 100 people). See how obvious it is that sterilities of scale exist?

The two concepts — economies of scale and sterilities of scale — are equally elementary. But only one is taught. Study of innovation should be 50% of economics but in fact is close to 0%.

This is why Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation is so important — because it begins to point to this great gap. Jane Jacobs did so, but had little or no impact. (At a Reed Alumni Gathering I was seated next to a professor of economics. “What do you think of the work of Jane Jacobs?” I asked her. “Who’s Jane Jacobs?” she replied.) I think human decorative preferences are so diverse (chacun a son gout, no accounting for taste) for exactly this reason, to avoid sterilities of scale. Diversity of preference makes it easier for many different manufacturers to thrive, which increases innovation. For example, diversity of furniture preference makes it easier for dozens of furniture companies to survive, thus increasing innovation surrounding furniture. Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma describes many examples where large companies were much less innovative than smaller companies — so much so they often went bankrupt. Which suggests sterilities of scale can be fatal.

If there were more understanding that ten small things are going to be more innovative than one big thing, I like to think that scientists would better understand the value of very small research and grant sizes would go down. An illustration of the general cluelessness is someone who wrote to Andrew Gelman complaining that a sample size was only 30.

I started thinking about this after hearing Nassim Taleb discuss economies of scale (e.g., here).

 

Growth of Quantified Self

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The first Quantified Self (QS) Meetup group met in Kevin Kelly’s house near San Francisco in 2008. I was there; so was Tim Ferriss. Now there are 19 QS groups, as distant as Sydney and Cape Town.

I believe this is the beginning of a movement that will greatly improve human health. I think QS participants will discover, as I did, that simple experiments can shed light on how to be healthy — experiments that mainstream researchers are unwilling or unable to do. Echoing Jane Jacobs, I’ve said farmers didn’t invent tractors. That’s not what farmers do, nor could they do it. Likewise, mainstream health researchers, such as medical school professors, are unable to greatly improve their research methods. That’s not what they do, nor could they do it. They have certain methodological skills; they apply them over and over. To understand the limitations of those methods would require a broad understanding of science that few health researchers seem to have. (For example, many health researchers dismiss correlations because “correlation does not equal causation.” In fact, correlations have been extremely important clues to causality.) Big improvements in health research will never come from people who make their living doing health research, just as big improvements in farming have never come from farmers. That’s where QS comes in.

The first QS conference is May 28-29. Tickets are still available.

Monocultures of Evidence

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

After referring to Jane Jacobs (“successful city neighborhoods need a mixture of old and new buildings”), which I liked, Tim Harford wrote this, which I didn’t like:

Many medical treatments (and a few social policies) have been tested by randomized trials. It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut practice of denying treatment to some and giving it to others. Yet such lotteries — proper lotteries, too — are the foundation of much medical progress.

The notion of evidence-based medicine was a step forward in that it recognized that evidence mattered. It was only a small step forward, however, because its valuation of evidence — on a single dimension, with double-blind randomized trials at the top — was naive. Different sorts of decisions need different sorts of evidence, just as Jacobs said different sorts of businesses need different sorts of buildings. In particular, new ideas need cheap tests, just as new businesses need cheap rent. As an idea becomes more plausible, it makes sense to test it in more expensive ways. That is one reason a monoculture of evidence is a poor idea.

Another is that you should learn from the past. Sometimes a placebo effect is plausible; sometimes it isn’t. To ignore this and insist everything should be placebo-controlled is to fail to learn a lot you could have learned.

A third reason a monoculture of evidence is a poor idea is that it ignores mechanistic understandings — understanding of what causes this or that problem. In some cases, you may think that the disorder you are studying has a single cause (e.g., scurvy). In other cases, you may think the problem probably has several causes (e.g., depression, often divided into endogenous and exogenous). In the latter case, it is plausible that a treatment will help only some of those with the problem. So you should design your study and analyze your data taking into account that possibility. You may want to decide for each subject whether or not the treatment helped rather than lump all subjects together. And the “best” designs will be those that best allow you to do this.