Economic moral inversion

Alex Tabarrok with a thought-provoking post on the stark difference in evaluating actions based on intention versus outcome. The real world example: Evan Thornley, founder of LookSmart, admitted he hired more women because of the market inefficiency for their talents.

“Call me opportunistic; I thought I could get better people with less competition because we were willing to understand the skills and capabilities that many of these woman had,” Thornley said.

…Thornley went on to say that by hiring women, he got better-qualified employees to whom he was able to give more responsibility. “And [they were] still often relatively cheap compared to what we would’ve had to pay someone less good of a different gender,” he concluded. To illustrate his point he showed a slide that said: “Women: Like Men, Only Cheaper.”

As you might expect, his comments were met with outrage. Tabarrok believes the outrage comes from judging Thornley on an intention-based heuristic. Looked at from an economist's consequentialist perspective, Tabarrok feels Thornley was judged too harshly.

If we judge actions by consequences, however, Thornley should be encouraged, perhaps even praised. Accepting for the sake of argument the truth of the story, it’s Thornley who has overcome prejudice (his or his society’s), recognized the truth of equality and taken entrepreneurial action to do well while doing good. It’s Thornley who is broadcasting the fact of equality to the world and encouraging others to do likewise. Most importantly, the consequence of Thornley’s actions are to increase the demand for women executives thereby increasing their wages.

Women’s wages aren’t pushed down by employers who hire women but by employers who don’t hire women. So why does Thornley get the blame? Instead of denouncing Thornley, whose actions push up the wages of women he hires and the wages of the women he does not hire, why not ask, How can we encourage employers not to overlook talented women and minorities?

For those wanting to break the bonds of discrimination whether they be women, blacks or Dalits, lower wages and a competitive market aren’t the cost of discrimination but the cure. It’s the lower wages that give employers an incentive to overcome prejudice, seek out talent, and experiment with new ways of doing business. And it is the self-interested pursuit of profit that is the surest means to increase the wages of the unjustly ignored and overlooked.

I'm sympathetic to both sides. On the one hand, a free market economy can be a natural corrective to many forms of discrimination when the discrimination happens to be economically inefficient.

On the other hand, let's not fit Thornley for a saint's cap. In this day and age, especially in the U.S., I don't perceive a huge societal retaliation threat for paying women equal pay for equal work. It's not as if Thornley was coming out against slavery in the Deep South when slavery was at its height. He clearly states that he believed the women were doing not just equal work but better work. So why not do the right thing and just pay them commensurate to their value as he saw it? I'm hesitant to laud someone for just being a smart business person, a rational economic actor.

Why infant mortality higher in U.S. than Europe?

The US has a substantial – and poorly understood – infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 2005 with comparable data from Austria and Finland to investigate this disadvantage. Differential reporting of births near the threshold of viability can explain up to 40% of the US infant mortality disadvantage. Worse conditions at birth account for 75% of the remaining gap relative to Finland, but only 30% relative to Austria. Most striking, the US has similar neonatal mortality but a substantial disadvantage in postneonatal mortality. This postneonatal mortality disadvantage is driven almost exclusively by excess inequality in the US: infants born to white, college-educated, married US mothers have similar mortality to advantaged women in Europe. Our results suggest that high mortality in less advantaged groups in the postneonatal period is an important contributor to the US infant mortality disadvantage.

From this research paper (PDF).

The contour of money

Meanwhile, the bullet train has sucked the country’s workforce into Tokyo, rendering an increasingly huge part of the country little more than a bedroom community for the capital. One reason for this is a quirk of Japan’s famously paternalistic corporations: namely, employers pay their workers’ commuting costs. Tax authorities don’t consider it income if it’s less than ¥100,000 a month – so Shinkansen commutes of up to two hours don’t sound so bad. New housing subdivisions filled with Tokyo salarymen subsequently sprang up along the Nagano Shinkansen route and established Shinkansen lines, bringing more people from further away into the capital.

The Shinkansen’s focus on Tokyo, and the subsequent emphasis on profitability over service, has also accelerated flight from the countryside. It’s often easier to get from a regional capital to Tokyo than to the nearest neighbouring city. Except for sections of the Tohoku Shinkansen, which serves northeastern Japan, local train lines don’t always accommodate Shinkansen rolling stock, so there are often no direct transfer points between local lines and Shinkansen lines. The Tokaido Shinkansen alone now operates 323 trains a day, taking 140 million fares a year, dwarfing local lines. This has had a crucial effect on the physical shape of the city. As a result of this funnelling, Tokyo is becoming even denser and more vertical – not just upward, but downward. With more Shinkansen passengers coming into the capital, JR East has to dig ever deeper under Tokyo Station to create more platforms.

From The Guardian on the effects of the Shinkansen bullet train on Tokyo (h/t Marginal Revolution).

We often analyze architecture and urban layouts for their purely functional and aesthetic utility, but it's just as important to understand the interplay between money and geography. They shape each other.

Soundtrack for Her

Grooveshark has posted Arcade Fire's soundtrack for the movie Her.

It was odd this was never put out on CD. Granted, no one buys recorded music anymore, but Arcade Fire has a reasonably large following. At a minimum I would've thought the soundtrack would have been released to one of the streaming music services.

Ah, well. Excuse me while I listen to this alone in my high-waisted pants while asking Siri over and over if she loves me.

(via Rands in Repose)

Information previews in modern UI's

[I don't know if Facebook invented this (and if they didn't, I'm sure one of my readers will alert me to who did), but it's certainly the service which has used it to greatest effect which I suppose is the case for anything they put to use given their scale.]

One problem with embedded videos as opposed to text online has always been the high cost of sampling the video. Especially for interviews, I'd almost always rather just have the transcript than be forced to wade through an entire video. Scanning text is more efficient than scanning online video.

Facebook has, for some time now, autoplayed videos in the News Feed with the audio on mute. Not only does it catch your eye, it automatically gives you a motion preview of the video itself (without annoying you with the audio), thus lowering the sampling cost. To play the video, you click on it and it activates the audio. I'm sure the rollout of this UI change increased video clicks in the News Feed quite a bit. Very clever. I've already seen this in many mobile apps and expect it to become a standard for video online.

[It's trickier when videos include pre-roll ads; it's not a great user experience to be enticed to watch a video by an autoplayed clip, then to be dropped into an ad as soon as you act on your interest.]

Someday, the autoplayed samples could be even smarter; perhaps the video uploader could define in and out points for a specific sample, or perhaps the algorithm which selects the sample could be smarter about the best moment to select.

It's not just video where sampling costs should be minimized. Twitter shows a title, image, and excerpts for some links in its Timelines, helping you to preview what you might get for clicking on the link. They show these for some but not all links. I suspect they'd increase clickthroughs on those links quite a bit if they were more consistent in displaying those preview Twitter cards.

Business Insider and Buzzfeed linkbait-style headlines are a text analogue, albeit one with a poor reputation among some. Given the high and increasing competition for user attention at every waking moment, it's not clear that services can leave any such tactical stones unturned.