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Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
@ben_golub
Aug 20, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
An agent prefers to do A but does B instead because it's his duty.

Ordinary revealed preference theory says he actually preferred B (whatever he might say), if he had any consistent preference at all.

Sarah Ridout has a nice paper giving a more helpful account of what happened. Image
The paper is here:
arxiv.org/abs/2003.06844

This little thread is inspired by @itaisher's example here, which fits Sarah's paper perfectly

Here's what she does: "I consider decision-making constrained by considerations of morality, rationality, or other virtues. The decision maker has a true preference over outcomes, but feels compelled to choose among outcomes that are top-ranked" by a "virtue/duty" preference.

3/
Being a decision theorist, she does decision theory on this.

In particular, she asks how we can identify the agent's notion of duty (or whatever other virtue he feels constrained by) if we know his true preference.

4/
She also shows that choice behavior substantially restricts both the true preference and justifications when neither is known, and gives a mathematical characterization of how.

5/
What I like about this is that it takes seriously the conflict that can arise between duty and preference. It doesn't insist on some dogmatic conflation of the two (as in my first tweet) but creates a formalism giving them both space to be real things.

6/
A wonderful example of decision theory being helpful by giving us good, clear ways to talk about (and "be economists about") things that we should talk about, but didn't yet have good language for.

7/7
PS/ I think this is a piece of decision theory that Bernard Williams (who unfortunately is not on Twitter) would have liked.

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More from @ben_golub

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Sep 24
Free disposal thought for theoretically inclined young economists:

Thinking through what AI means for the economy has a lot of upside.

Our toolbox is very powerful at structuring imaginative thinking about the big changes coming. Few others have these tools.

1/
Imagine a 2055 retrospective on economic thought over the past 30 years.

Seems very likely that a field called (roughly )"the economics of artificial intelligence" is the main character.

2/
Let's backward induct: many the big ideas in that field are going to be had roughly 2025-30.

It's unlikely that the really interesting questions will first be addressed with mainly empirical methods...

simply because empirical economics is fundamentally backward-looking.

3/
Read 8 tweets
Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Sep 23
This lovely paper by @SNageebAli, Mihm, and Siga — just revised for Econometrica — proposed a really striking theory of when voters rationally, but wrongly, think that policies are bad for them if they're good for others.



1/2 sites.psu.edu/nageebali/file…
Image
The paper has had a long childhood — I remember first seeing it in 2017 and finding the core adverse selection mechanism remarkable and compelling.

(Check out this study in abstract length, @ShengwuLi ! )

Hope it gets the attention it deserves in political economy.

2/2 Image
PS/

Scott Aaronson once defined an important theoretical idea as one that is hard to ignore in future discussions of the issue (in this case, zero-sum thinking), and I think by that standard, this is an important idea.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Aug 7
In the WSJ, Steven Landsburg proudly used this brain teaser to make an argument about where economics teaching is going wrong.

Instead he illustrates what’s wrong with his way of doing price theory: sloppy economic thinking, way more impressed with itself than it deserves to be. Image
It's worth thinking through the "answer" he expects, which you can guess based only on knowing his personality (never great):

marginal cost of the fruit is lower for the monopolist. He writes, "In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs."
Let's forgive the obvious incoherence of “in a competitive industry.” His answer is very bad even so.

What will happen to the profit of the monopoly? In the actual world, some of it will be invested in the capital markets, where it might support resource-intensive production.
Read 9 tweets
Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Apr 27
Small observation on research trajectory in economic theory.

When you first try to do it, most projects you propose are
(i) ridiculous/uninteresting to experts or
(ii) trivial
or, often, both!

This phase is very difficult and it's a big thrill to escape it.

1/
To escape, you have to sense

(i) what directions other scholars consider substantively interesting/promising;
(ii) what experts consider non-obvious.

Judging (i) and (ii) and doing well by these standards is pragmatically what makes young theorists successful
Succeeding at these is a fun, challenging sport.

So fun and challenging that it permanently reshapes how we direct our research.

I think perhaps because failing on these metrics is so painful in youth, once you can do well on them, you really prioritize that.

3/
Read 7 tweets
Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jan 28
The notion that amazing papers should not get rejected is an odd one.

Any genuinely important idea is more likely to be strongly disliked. (Some reasons below in a short thread.)

To publish important work, editors have to be bold and overrule some negative experts.
Non-exhaustive list of reasons

1. The first technical work in a new paradigm is often crude and simple relative to the sophisticated and elaborate papers written late in a paradigm, when methods are being polished by a large community of experts in those methods.
2. Good ideas are often counterintuitive and have obvious drawbacks. They often prove valuable mainly through their later consequences.

Experts see the reasons not to pursue the counterintuitive paths: often, they have thought about and rejected these paths themselves before.
Read 7 tweets
Ben Golub 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Nov 23, 2023
I generally recommend

1. Constructing an n-by-m matrix whose rows are people and columns are issues (or dimensions of issues).

2. Finding the largest few and smallest few singular values.

3. Looking at the corresponding singular vectors in issue space.

(cont.)

1/
The top few singular vectors in issue space will tell you about "bundles" of issues along which there are considerable distances in the group.

(If these have high singular values, that corresponds to those differences explaining a lot of the group's variation in opinions.)
For example, you might find an axis of disagreement between Buttigieg and Warren-inclined democrats, visible across issues.

Buttigieg people would be in favor of things like market-rate housing, while the Warren people would focus on poking Jeff Bezos with a sharp stick.

3/
Read 11 tweets

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