Frontiers of political correctness

This is from the terms of use for the American Psychological Association's analogue to the American Economic Association's publication Job Opening for Economists:

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY
The American Psychological Association endorses equal employment opportunity practices and accepts only ads that are not discriminatory on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, age, national origin, veteran status, or physical disability. In addition, APA encourages advertisers to not discriminate on the basis of marital status, the numbers and ages of dependent children, mental disability, or sexual orientation. In keeping with this policy, the use of "recent PhD" in the Monitor on Psychology, gradPSYCH, and the PsycCareers advertising is not allowed on the basis that it is potentially age-discriminatory (see U.S. Department of Labor prohibition on use of "recent graduate"). The term "beginning-level salary" may be used. Positions may also be defined in terms of teaching load, specified number of years away from a tenure decision, or requirements of certain skills. We reserve the right to edit all copy and to refuse ads that are not in consonance with the principles of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Veterans' Reemployment * Rights Act Handicap Bias, the Vietnam-Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, in addition to Public Law 100-238, makes specific legally permissible exceptions to discrimination in hiring by religious institutions, Indian tribes, and federal correctional facilities. For this reason, certain Position Openings advertisements will include job opening restrictions on the basis of religious, racial, and age factors.

The bit that is new to me is the prohibition of the use of the term "recent graduate" and its replacement by "beginning level salary". I am not sure what to say about this other than that I think we may be near some margin or another.

Hat tip: two anonymous colleagues

The ethics of random assignment

Tyler Cowen at MR asks for information related to the ethics of random assignment.

I am going to put my comments here as not everyone who reads this blog may delve into the comments (or even, gasp, the posts) at MR.

Most of my experience with these issues is in the context of randomized evaluations of social and educational programs rather than the clinical trials that are likely to be of greater interest at NIH.

I have the following comments:

1. Ethical concerns about random assignment in the social policy world are nearly always fake. They are a nice way of saying that the person has some interest in there not being compelling evidence on the effectiveness of the treatment being evaluated.

2. It is easier to sell random assignment for demonstration programs, which by design are going to leave many people who want service without it in any event, than on-going programs. With on-going programs it is easier to sell random assignment for programs that are capacity constrained, so that services will have to be rationed in some way even in the absence of random assignment. Random assignment then just becomes a way of doing the rationing that happens to yeild an informative byproduct. This is the line that was popularized by Judy Gueron during her days running MDRC, which did many of the welfare-to-work experiments in the US in the 1980s and 1990s.

3. An argument that is not often made, but which in my experience is quite convincing even to non-classical-liberal types is that there is a competing ethical claim associated with using tax money to fund the provision of services without solid evidence of their efficacy. Just as the shareholders of a firm would rightly be upset if it undertook major investments without doing its due diligence beforehand, taxpayers should rightfully be upset when government spends money on programs without doing the (in many cases) simple, obvious and relatively inexpensive things required to determine their efficacy, or lack thereof.

Health care myths - I

A common theme in the media of late has been the writing of articles that address various health care "myths" or even "lies". Let's look at three of these in separate posts.

The first comes from Newsweek. Helpfully, the article announces its political bias in the first sentence, which implicitly suggests that only the opponents of health care reform tell lies that need to be addressed.

This paragraph is a wonder:

"The general claim that care will be rationed under health-care reform is less a lie and more of a non-disprovable projection (as is Howard Dean's assertion that health-care reform will not lead to rationing, ever). What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions "are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies," says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement."

So, let's see, we have rationing now under private health insurance and under Medicare, but whether or not there would be rationing if current reform proposals are implemented is just a "projection". Do they have editors at Newsweek? A newsmagazine that wanted to do some good would make clear that the question is not whether there is rationing but how it is set up. Most introductory economics texts have some wording about how the price system allocates scarce resources in a market. Allocate is just a more apt term for rationing. Resources are always scarce, some mechanism has to sort them among individuals (taking note that the mechanism also affects the amount of resources available).

Next we learn that

"[t]he House bill does not use the word `ration.'"

I suppose there could be two reasons for this. One is that there is actually no rationing implicit in the reform. The other is that the politicians who wrote the bill avoided the very naughty word rationing. I wonder, which of these could it be?

Of course, it is great to know that

Nor does [the health care reform bill] call for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea that "it isn't cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip replacement.

What do we learn from this? To begin, we learn that the Newsweek writer does not know what cost-effectiveness research is, something one might consider odd given that she is writing about it in a major newsmagazine. We also learn that, whatever she thinks it is, she does not like it. That is too bad, because the lack of a serious cost-effectiveness component is a major flaw of the bill - not a feature, but a bug. A serious writer and a serious magazine would explain to its readers what cost-effectiveness research is, why it is a good thing, and why its absence indicates a lack of seriousness about controlling expenditures on the part of the bill's authors.

The article is on point about illegal immigrants and death panels. In particular, the right should be ashamed of itself about the death panel business. Counseling old people that it is okay not to waste a lot of taxpayer dollars on end of life care with little if any health payoff is a good thing, not a bad one. Moreover, it is much nicer to pass on at home in a warm environment with your family and familiar things nearby than in some hospital room with people you do not know.

Finally, we have:

The government will set doctors' wages.
This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July 19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5 percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. "Nobody is saying we want the doctors working for the government; that's completely false," says Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Apparently when government sets reimbursement rates for a large segment of the market it has no effect on wages in the rest of the doctor labor market. Any economist, including my friend Amitabh, whose quote here is unrelated to the point at issue, could have told the author that this is a very silly argument, indeed.

So, what are we left with at the end of the day? The article gets a couple of things right and a lot more things wrong, usually in ways that involve basic knowledge about the policy area under discussion or simple logic. Moreover, the article focuses exclusively on lies from the right and ignores the many lies offered up by proponents of the current reform proposoal. This piece is a D, at best.

You lie?

There have been lots of nice words from the Obama administration about free trade but when it came down to a decision between a small, well-organized group and both consumers as a whole and America's foreign relations interests, they caved on tire tariffs.

The AP story never mentions the effect of the tariffs on workers other than than the relative handful who produce tires in the US. That effect, of course, is higher prices for tires. It is always hard to tell whether omissions like this represent bias or just incompetence. My personal rule (a variant on Occam's razor) is to assume incompetence in preference to more malevolent explanations when it suffices to explain the phenomenon at hand.

Note too that free trade is an area where economists pretty much all agree on the right thing to do, so the administration is bucking the science here as well.

An extraordinary weekend of football

I only got to watch bits and pieces as I was at a wedding, but this has not particular constellation of winning teams has not happened in quite a while:

Washington 42, Idaho 23

Michigan 38, Notre Dame 34

Seattle 28, St. Louis 0

Washington avoided have sole possession of the longest losing streak in Pac-10 history. They remain tied with Oregon State (who has not one but two streaks of length 15 in its past).

Michigan made its way back into the top 25.

Marketing Denmark

Imagine a government tourism agency that produces a fake viral video of an attractive women looking for the father of her new baby, the result of a drunken one night stand with a tourist whose name she does not even remember.

Implausible? Perhaps.

But also reality in (you guessed this already) Denmark. The video has been pulled from Youtube but you can watch it here and read the story. You will find some comments from VisitDenmark, the Danish government tourist agency, in this story. Best bit:

VisitDenmark disagrees.

”Karen’s story shows that Denmark is a broad-minded country where you can do what you want. The film is a good example of independent, dignified, Danish women who dare to make their own choices,” says VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich.

Why have you chosen to market Denmark as a country with drunken women who have unsafe sex with casual acquaintances?

”That is not a story that I recognise. We tell a good and sweet story about a mature, responsible woman who lives in a free society and shoulders the responsibilty of her actions. And she uses a modern social medium,” Kiilerich says.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

A chewable mystery

Though it is not obvious from the packaging, this chewing gum is from Munich.

The question: what is it about this particular chewing gum that makes it "PROFESSIONAL"?

Addendum: Reader Don from Seattle suggests that perhaps you can call your gum professional if it receives a really positive review in Chewing magazine.