• Juan Dubra
    3
    Hello everybody. I am an academic economist, and I have a question.
    There is a "common" type of error I see in some of my colleagues, and I would like to see what epistemologists have said about it.
    Here are two examples.
    From the 60s to the 80s, wages rose and at the same time males worked less while females worked more.
    When wages rise, there are two competing forces in the determination of hours worked: on the one hand working becomes more attractive (or leisure more expensive; this is the substitution effect); on the other hand, if you worked the same number of hours, you would be richer and would like to consume more leisure (that is the income effect).
    If somebody asks "why did males work less and females more in response to rising wages?", an incomplete answer would be "because for males the income effect dominates, while for females the substitution effect dominates." That is almost tautological.
    A "real" explanation (there are some out there) would explain why that is the case. One explanation, for example, works with fertility decisions and says that since women spent a lot of time with kids, having kids became more expensive, and that reduced the number of kids families had.
    The "informal fallacy" in this case would be "I have explained why males work less and females more in response to rising wages, by arguing that males have a stronger income effect, while females a stronger substitution effect".

    The second example has to do with polarization as studied by Lord Ross and Lepper (J. Personality and Social Psychology, 1979, "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence"). In those experiments two groups of people who disagree about an issue (say, the effectiveness of a policy, like the death penalty to deter crime) are shown a common piece of evidence, and their beliefs polarize further (those who believed the policy was effective become more convinced of their initial views; those who believed it was ineffective become more convinced of their initial views).

    For economists trying to explain the phenomenon with a "rational" framework (where people apply Bayes rule to form their beliefs) the first puzzle was "how can two people's beliefs move in opposite directions, when faced with common evidence, if they are processing information in a rational (Bayesian) way? how can the same evidence be "good news for the effectiveness of the policy" for some, and "bad news" for others?".

    The possibility of two people polarizing was first pointed out by Walley (1991), and studied further by Teddy Seidenfeld and L. Wasserman (1993), "Dilation for Sets of Probabilities," Annals of Statistics 21(3), pp. 1139-54.

    Then, an informal fallacy in this case is the following. "A person with a high belief that a policy is effective can raise her beliefs about its effectiveness when presented with a given piece of evidence, while at the same time a person with low initial beliefs might revise her beliefs downward after being shown the same piece of evidence. Hence we have explained why people with high beliefs increase their beliefs, while people with low beliefs decrease their beliefs."

    I think there is some error in that conclusion as it has not been explained why it is that those with high beliefs increase, and those with low beliefs decrease.

    The analogy with the wages case is the following: males are people with high beliefs and females those with low beliefs; just pointing out that males can have a larger income effect (people with high beliefs can see their beliefs increase) is not enough to explain why we observed the systematic pattern (of males working less overall, or people with high beliefs increasing their confidence in the policy).

    The bottom line of this post is that I want to know if this kind of "faulty reasoning" or "faulty explanation" has been studied or been given a name. Can anybody point to a reference?

    Much appreciated

    Juan
  • T Clark
    13k


    So:
    • We define a Type 1 person as one who is lazy.
    • We define a Type 2 person as one who works hard.
    • T Clark is lazy - he really is.

    Q: Why is T Clark lazy.
    A: Because he is a Type 1 person.

    Is that it? Isn't that just begging the question? Not sure about that. Tautology?
  • T Clark
    13k


    By the way, we're philosophers here. We don't really like questions that have any application in the real world. :-}
  • mcdoodle
    1.1k
    The bottom line of this post is that I want to know if this kind of "faulty reasoning" or "faulty explanation" has been studied or been given a name. Can anybody point to a reference?Juan Dubra

    I think the word of Kahneman and Tversky should be your first port of call. They did a lot of empirical work on 'faulty reasoning', and the use of common-sense heuristics that lead one up the garden path. When I did a quick Google search just now I easily found a Tversky chapter summarising some of their findings. They were/are however psychologists rather than philosophers.

    I think your exemplary case about males working less and females working more has, incidentally, some faulty reasoning of its own, but perhaps you were summarising a complex idea quickly. The period from the 60's to the 80's involved in Western countries a steadily increasing proportion of women coming to the workplace at all, i.e. non-economic factors had been excluding them from the workforce before that. I am old enough to remember such non-economic factors: middle-class mores, and male power over gateways to work. The feminist argument that their domestic labour was hidden from the economists' view is now a pretty old one. But maybe you were allowing for all this in your argument.
  • mcdoodle
    1.1k
    By the way, T Clark is a nice chap, but some of us are empiricists here all the same, don't listen to him. And welcome to the forum.
  • Juan Dubra
    3
    Hi to all. Thanks for your comments and replies.
    T Clark: regardless of your views about empirical realities, I think philosophers set the right standard for asking questions, so comments are of course useful.
    You are right that it seems like "begging the question", but my argument (I don't know if it matters) has two parts (there is a hard working person and a lazy person). In particular, in both of my examples there is something that needs to be explained (differential reaction to a common factor: rising wages in one case, common information in the other) even for two people. Then, the real question is why populations of males act one way and of females a different way (or why those with high initial beliefs increase them, while those with low beliefs decrease them).
    McDoodle: female labor force participation is indeed it is a complex question. As you said, I was just trying to summarize and simplify to present the argument in as clean a way as possible.
    I will check the Tversky chapter you mention.
    Thanks again, and if anything else comes to mind, I'll be grateful.
  • sime
    1k
    It doesn't make sense to refer to the semantics of expressions as being equivalent unless we can define what we mean by "equivalent semantic use" of expressions . A simple rule of syntactical equivalency as written in a dictionary is not sufficient.

    I can imagine a lazy economist saying "men are working less because of the income effect" when he really means "men are working less because of particular income effects pertaining to gender which I presume are obvious and can't be bothered to elaborate".

    So unless we are quibbling over dictionary definitions who nobody exactly conforms to in practice, I would describe the first example as a fallacy-fallacy.

    As for the second example, suppose that a house security alarm is triggered by Burglars and Cats. If a house owner who is rarely burgled owns a cat that frequently triggers the alarm, it is in some circumstances rational for him to lower his belief of being burgled on hearing the alarm. This might be the case if he believes that the presence of his cat in his house and the presence of a burglar in his house are mutually exclusive possibilities.

    Indeed, a common pattern i notice when reading political arguments is beliefs that elitist interests are mutually exclusive to common interests, or that a healthy welfare state is mutually exclusive to individual enterprise. So given this foundational belief of mutually exclusive causes, subsequently paradoxical belief revisions are perhaps understandable.
  • Juan Dubra
    3
    Hi Πετροκότσυφας and Sime, thanks for your comments, and for the references.
    Sime, you are right that the "mutually exclusive causes" can generate polarization. Interestingly, this need not be irrational. The project I am working on is precisely about that (here is the paper).

    https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/dubra_-_attitiudepolmarch15.pdf

    Sime, why do you say it "is" a fallacy-fallacy? From wiki (sorry, I don't know the right references) a fallacy-fallacy is

    If P, then Q.
    P is a fallacious argument.
    Therefore, Q is false.

    I don't quite see the connection.
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