Thursday, March 13, 2008

Marginal Revolution Watch

MR is my second favorite blog and the source of much KPC traffic, but I have to take a bit of issue with a couple of their recent posts:

(1) First, Tyler, quoting himself, says that Wikipedia is more likely to be true than the "median refereed journal article on economics" and that this should "give us pause".

Well, I think so too (but didn't give myself pause in doing so), but that's mainly because few journal articles are about people's life histories or historical events or giving definitions of well established concepts. The median refereed journal article in economics is almost surely empirical which means it is making a probabilistic argument based on inductive reasoning from a sample. By definition it's not "true".

Now if the question is whether there are more active attempts to deceive in econ journals vs. Wikipedia, I think that is less of a sure thing but even there the basic fact that we are comparing apples to oranges makes it problematic to say anything definitive.

(2) Meanwhile, Alex presents a curious defense of swinging ex-Gov. Spitzer:

"If Governor Spitzer wanted to have sex with a younger woman then instead of hiring a prostitute he could have gotten a divorce and remarried, just like so many other rich and powerful men. Or he could have had an affair. Of these options hiring a prostitute is the least threatening to marriage but it's the only option which is illegal. In contrast, getting a divorce and remarrying a younger woman is so common it doesn't even stop a man from running for President."

Now, I favor legalized prostitution and I found Dershowitz's WSJ editorial convincing in its arguments that the case against Spitzer is most probably an example of prosecutorial abuse of power, but I do not agree that divorce is more harmful to the institution of marriage than cheating and lying. That is pretty much like saying staying with an abusive spouse is less harmful to "marriage" than leaving her and starting over. I guess the best way to say this is that I reject "protecting marriage" as some kind of gold standard by which to judge the morality or correctness of people's actions. Being honest, getting a divorce and then taking up with someone else is clearly a morally preferable course of action to secret affairs or secret expenditures.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's worth noting that my longer discussion, recognizing your point, was cut by the editors for reasons of space. That said, there may be *a good reason* for journal articles to be wrong so often but still they are. If you are wondering about the reliability of a source, probabilities are probabilities, no matter how good the reasons which put them there.
Tyler