How the Ancient Greeks Invented Eye Movement Desensitizing and Reprocessing to Deal with Trauma

EMDR—eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing—is one of the stranger psychological treatments. But there is good evidence that it helps people who have been through traumatic experiences. About this, let me draw on the Angus Fletcher’s fascinating March 24, 2021 Wall Street Journal article “The Cathartic Technology of Greek Tragedy,” which in turn draws on his new book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations here are from “The Cathartic Technology of Greek Tragedy.” Angus writes:

… it can help to sweep our eyes from side to side while we mentally review the trauma. This curious fact was stumbled upon by researcher Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, and at the time it appeared so random, even magical, that it was regarded warily as a drift into pseudoscience. But recent studies on mice have suggested that side-to-side eye movement may stimulate a small region of our brain called the superior colliculus-mediodorsal thalamus circuit, which is involved in fear attenuation. Eye movement has proved effective enough in clinical trials to produce its own trauma therapy—eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing (EMDR)—that has been formally recommended by the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Intriguingly, the Ancient Greeks guessed this. (The Ancient Greeks had to deal with plenty of battle trauma from war.) “Catharsis” is the purging of fear that was supposed to come from tragedy. But the Greek tragedies didn’t just depict traumatic events, they moved the audiences eyes from side to side during the play:

… choral chants such as the ones found in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” from 458 BCE: “The law of our world is pain, the scar that teaches the hardness of days and leaves its mark in every heart.” …

… Like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right.

When Greek tragedies are performed now in a way that moves the audience’s eyes side to side, they help with post-traumatic stress disorder:

Performances of “Agamemnon” and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Productions and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company, which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR. These performances led the veterans to self-report a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance and other symptoms of post-traumatic fear.

Angus identifies one other aspect of some Greek tragedies that can help salve post-traumatic stress disorder: letting the audience know things the character doesn’t know. This puts them in a position of wishing they could help someone else rather than simply being absorbed in their own troubles:

This neural experience of supporting Oedipus in his time of need is deeply therapeutic. When we discover our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our confidence that we can cope with trauma ourselves.

Despite the name, EMDR isn’t always done with eye movement. Sometimes it is done with tappers near someones legs that alternately tap on the right side and then the left. As the Wikipedia article “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” currently says:

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro starting in 1988 in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images; the therapist then directs the patient in one type of bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye rapid movement or hand tapping.

Many standard treatments in psychiatry don’t work very well. It is great to have a treatment as safe as EMDR that works so well. Another example of a psychiatric treatment that seems to work surprisingly well is psychedelics or ketamine for people who are depressed or are thinking about suicide. See “Hope in Returning to the Road Not Taken in Psychiatry.” (My son Spencer committed suicide despite being under the care of a psychiatrist and having spent time in the psyche ward at a University of Michigan hospital. I wonder if psychedelics of ketamine could have helped him. See “The Shards of My Heart” on this trauma for us.)

Freud famously said “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” That is certainly true. And for those who are not in terrible shape, are not diagnosible with a psychiatric malady, but are suffering from “common unhappiness,” a life coach can be immensely helpful. I have links to some posts about that below.

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The Golden Mean as Concavity of Objective Functions

image sourceThe “Golden Ratio” corresponds to a rectangle where taking a square out of the rectangle leaves behind a smaller rectangle that is similar to the original rectangle. It is sometimes called the “Golden Mean.” Felicitously, the illustration above of the Golden Mean in action also provides a concave function, if you look at only the top of the curve..

image source

The “Golden Ratio” corresponds to a rectangle where taking a square out of the rectangle leaves behind a smaller rectangle that is similar to the original rectangle. It is sometimes called the “Golden Mean.” Felicitously, the illustration above of the Golden Mean in action also provides a concave function, if you look at only the top of the curve..

The Wikipedia article “Golden mean (philosophy)” currently begins:

The golden mean or golden middle way is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. It appeared in Greek thought at least as early as the Delphic Maxim nothing to excess and emphasized in later Aristotelian philosophy

It gives the example of recklessness and cowardice as the two contrasting vices; courage is the golden mean between recklessness and cowardice.

Where there is a golden mean, we often have maxims that seem like opposites, but can be thought of as both pointing to the golden mean. Think of the two maxims “Haste makes waste” and “They who hesitate are lost.” Unfortunately, people often listen only to the maxim they interpret as advising going further toward an extreme rather than realizing that one is meant for other people; they should be paying most attention to the contrasting maxim that could tug them toward the golden mean.

In economics, the golden mean shows up as the idea that there is often an interior optimum when the objective function is concave.

Despite being trained in the use of concave functions in economics, I find myself often lapsing into the idea that if a little is good, then a lot must be better. That would be true if the objective function were linear, but it often isn’t. Moderation in all things!

Except that sometimes the objective function is linear, or close to linear. Here are two important examples (neither of which is original to me):

  1. Suppose the objective function is stated in terms of a probability, and your preferences are expected utility preferences. If there are two possible outcomes, you always want a higher probability of the better outcome. There is no gain to flipping a coin between the two outcomes to “get something in the middle.”

  2. Suppose you want to give money to charity out of pure altruism. You aren’t trying to look good; you aren’t trying to make yourself feel good; you are just trying to do the most good in the world. If you are thinking of giving to large charities for which the amount of money you are giving is small compared to the total funds used by that charity, the marginal benefit is essentially the same for the last dollar you give as for the first dollar you give. In this case, you should just go with whichever charity you think can do the most good with every extra dollar, without worrying that the benefit from an extra dollar will be affected by your giving.

These are important examples, but usually the objective function is concave and extremes are a bad idea.

The bulk of corner solutions, where it is the best choice to go to an edge are because the edge is not extreme at all. In cases where the edge is close in, there can be quite a bit of concavity, yet the corner solution still be the right answer. (The curve is bending to have a lower slope, but is still upward-sloping when you hit the boundary.) For example, unless you you think the covariance between what economists are paid and the stock market is not only positive, but quite high, you should put 100% of your retirement savings contributions into risky assets as a new assistant professor, because “extreme” is measured by the stock of risky assets you have relative to the value of your full wealth including your human capital. It will be a while before you accumulate enough in your retirement savings accounts for those accounts to be a big fraction of the present-discounted value of your lifetime labor income. That is, the stock/flow distinction combined with mentally integrating human capital into your portfolio means that 100% of the contribution flow in the first while toward risky assets isn’t really extreme at all. After you have accumulated quite a bit in your retirement savings account, then you can reassess.

Although I have only a few clients, I am a certified life coach. It makes me happy when economics can feed into life coaching—as in this concept of the Golden Mean.

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Paul Stametz: 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World →

Don’t miss my other post about mushrooms: “Replacing Meat with Mushrooms—In Whole or in Part.”

Also, you might be interested in Eugenia Bone’s Wall Street Journal review shown below of Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard. The most interesting passage is this:

It has long been established that plants trade some of the sugar they make for micronutrients foraged in the soil by fungi, and there had already been some research done that showed the link between fungi and trees. Ms. Simard’s study discovered that fungi in fact attach to the roots of multiple trees of different species, creating pipelines by which a forest community might share nutrients and other molecules and thereby “challenge the prevailing theory that cooperation is of lesser importance than competition in evolution and ecology.”

Notice that in ecology they are clear the trade is a form of cooperation. Guess what: trade is a form of cooperation in economics as well!

I found the TED talk the title of this post links to from this passage:

… fungi as a metaphor for the common good.

This last notion derives from predominantly 21st-century research showing that the forest is not merely a collection of trees but a community connected by fungi. The idea has captured the imagination of the public, through movies such as “Avatar,” books like Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees” and the mycologist Paul Stamets’s TED talk, “Six Ways That Mushrooms Can Save the World,” which has been viewed almost 10 million times. 

Liz Cheney on Democracy and the Rule of Law

Link to the full text of Liz Cheney’s May 11, 2021 speech on the floor of the House of Representatives

For whatever length of time Donald Trump continues to have political influence, Liz Cheney’s six-and-a half-minute speech yesterday should be required viewing for all citizens of the United States.

I found myself getting choked up because she points powerfully to the blessing of having a political system that gives us freedom and our need to tend the foundations of that system.

In addition to invoking the principles of democracy and the rule of law, Liz Cheney also invokes many core principles of the Republican party. She bids fair to become the leader of the wing of the Republican Party not in bondage to Donald Trump.

Liz Cheney has shown a lot of courage. Challenging Donald Trump so directly may make it impossible for her to be reelected in Wyoming. She must have thought that through. Yet she went ahead anyway.

(Though Mitt Romney has also shown courage, I think the electoral danger is less for him than for Liz Cheney. The large contingent of Mormons in Utah are still very proud of Mitt as the first major party Mormon nominee for President of the United States. That gives him a floor of support even after bucking Donald Trump.)

The Rise of High-Quality Non-Prescription Hearing Aids

My Dad used to say that he had planned on reading a lot after he retired. But his eyesight got enough worse that it was hard for him to read. He never really got into audiobooks. That might have had something to do with the fact that he resisted hearing aids. My Dad was not alone in his resistence to using hearing aids. In her March 27, 2021 Wall Street Journal article “New Hearing Aids, iPhone Apps and Tech Mean More Hearing-Loss Options—But Also New Struggles” (from which all quotations in this post are taken), Julie Jargon reports:

After first experiencing hearing loss, people take an average of five to seven years to seek help, according to the Hearing Industries Association.

Fortunately, the market for hearing aids will soon become much closer to a free market; an efflorescence of hearing aid offerings in the broad sense should facilitate people trying hearing aids much earlier in life:

A new law is set to make over-the-counter hearing aids available to people without a visit to the audiologist, opening the door for a wider variety of inexpensive products marketed to people with only mild-to-moderate hearing loss.

Hearing loss is a big deal:

Hearing loss has been linked to increased depression, cognitive decline and greater risk of falls.

One of the big recent advances is using the power of smartphones to give hearing aids access to computing power:

Even Apple’s AirPods Pro can now amplify the quiet sounds without making loud sounds any louder so that people running iOS 14 on their iPhones can enjoy music, podcasts, audio books and phone calls more comfortably. Further sound customization is available for people who enter a personal audiogram—a graph showing how loud sounds need to be at various frequencies in order to be heard—into the Apple Health app. Third-party apps such as Mimi can test your hearing and generate an audiogram.

There also are apps that work with people’s existing devices—whether hearing aids, earbuds or headphones—to separate speech from noise.

…

… like some other app-based hearing devices, many hearing aids now use smartphones’ processing power to utilize machine learning, enabling the wearer to adjust their hearing to different settings. Older hearing aids simply amplified all sounds.

What I see as the big advance there is that perfectly adapting a hearing aid to the individual at the doctor’s office is no longer necessary. The user of the hearing aid can keep adjusting it every day until they get it right, even if they only figure out what “right” is gradually.

I am determined not to resist hearing aids as I get older. I had my hearing tested fairly recently. I am not hearing high frequencies as well as a used to, but the audiologist said I don’t need hearing aids yet.

One scientific fact connects the way hearing loss first shows up and the Linguistics I learned for my Master’s degree. (See “Miles's Linguistics Master's Thesis: The Later Wittgenstein, Roman Jakobson and Charles Saunders Peirce.”) Distinguishing consonants requires the higher frequencies that are the leading edge of hearing loss, while vowels can be distinguished based on lower frequencies. I can already notice some extra difficulty in distinguishing consonants in my own hearing. It wouldn’t be a problem yet, except that I really like to get every word when someone says something interesting!

Along these lines, you should be aware that there are higher and lower quality hearing tests. The low-quality hearing tests are mostly about whether you can detect that a sound is there, without testing whether you know what the sound is. High-quality hearing tests also test how well you can distinguish consonants.

We are all getting older—which, as they say, is better than the alternative. I hope you, too, will set a goal of not resisting hearing aids when the time comes. The new hearing aid options that will soon hit the market mean you have less excuse than ever to resist.

Update, June 9, 2021: The June 7, 2021 Wall Street Journal article shown below suggests that delaying getting a hearing aid could raise your Alzheimer’s risk:

Hearing loss may be one of the biggest potentially reversible factors for Alzheimer’s risk. Studies have shown that if you have hearing loss for a long period, it causes shrinkage of brain regions that are very close to the memory centers. So hearing aids and regular hearing tests are very important.

See also my post “Hints About What Can Be Done to Reduce Alzheimer's Risk.” On reducing the chance of other forms of cognitive decline in old age, see “Mental Retirement: Use It or Lose It—Susann Rohwedder and Robert Willis.”

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

The Federalist Papers #30: A Robust Power of Taxation is Needed to Make a Nation Powerful

The main message I took from Paul Kennedy’s gripping book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is that the ability to borrow large sums of money can help a nation win military conflicts. For example, the greater borrowing capacity of Britain helped enormously in defeating France in the Napoleonic wars. (The destruction of lender’s trust in the French government’s ability to repay was part of what began the train of events that led to the French Revolution. The Revolution and the rise of Napoleon did not, by themselves, make lenders trust the French government to repay that much more.

In the Federalist Papers #30, Alexander Hamilton argues that a robust power of taxation by the federal government is necessary for a robust borrowing capability, which in turn is crucial for national defense. He also argues that the federal government must itself have the power to tax in a way that does not depend on active compliance by state governments, since active compliance often doesn’t happen. Finally, he argues that raising money by impositions more arbitrary than taxes (“pillage”) is a bad idea.

On the deficiencies of a system of requisitions to the states, the core of Alexander Hamilton’s argument is this:

Congress, by the articles which compose that compact (as has already been stated), are authorized to ascertain and call for any sums of money necessary, in their judgment, to the service of the United States; and their requisitions, if conformable to the rule of apportionment, are in every constitutional sense obligatory upon the States. These have no right to question the propriety of the demand; no discretion beyond that of devising the ways and means of furnishing the sums demanded. But though this be strictly and truly the case; though the assumption of such a right would be an infringement of the articles of Union; though it may seldom or never have been avowedly claimed, yet in practice it has been constantly exercised, and would continue to be so, as long as the revenues of the Confederacy should remain dependent on the intermediate agency of its members.

On the importance of a robust power of taxation for the ability to borrow—and in turn for national defense, the core of Alexander Hamilton’s argument is that the ability to tax would greatly reassure lenders, while limitations on the ability to tax would greatly worry lenders:

… a war breaks out. What would be the probable conduct of the government in such an emergency? Taught by experience that proper dependence could not be placed on the success of requisitions, unable by its own authority to lay hold of fresh resources, and urged by considerations of national danger, would it not be driven to the expedient of diverting the funds already appropriated from their proper objects to the defense of the State? It is not easy to see how a step of this kind could be avoided; and if it should be taken, it is evident that it would prove the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety. To imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with, would be the extreme of infatuation. In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying? The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions.

To put these passages in context, the full text of the Federalist Papers #30 is below:

FEDERALIST NO. 30

Concerning the General Power of Taxation

From the New York Packet
Friday, December 28, 1787.

Author: Alexander Hamilton

To the People of the State of New York:

IT HAS been already observed that the federal government ought to possess the power of providing for the support of the national forces; in which proposition was intended to be included the expense of raising troops, of building and equipping fleets, and all other expenses in any wise connected with military arrangements and operations. But these are not the only objects to which the jurisdiction of the Union, in respect to revenue, must necessarily be empowered to extend. It must embrace a provision for the support of the national civil list; for the payment of the national debts contracted, or that may be contracted; and, in general, for all those matters which will call for disbursements out of the national treasury. The conclusion is, that there must be interwoven, in the frame of the government, a general power of taxation, in one shape or another.

Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish.

In the Ottoman or Turkish empire, the sovereign, though in other respects absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects, has no right to impose a new tax. The consequence is that he permits the bashaws or governors of provinces to pillage the people without mercy; and, in turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state. In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might require?

The present Confederation, feeble as it is intended to repose in the United States, an unlimited power of providing for the pecuniary wants of the Union. But proceeding upon an erroneous principle, it has been done in such a manner as entirely to have frustrated the intention. Congress, by the articles which compose that compact (as has already been stated), are authorized to ascertain and call for any sums of money necessary, in their judgment, to the service of the United States; and their requisitions, if conformable to the rule of apportionment, are in every constitutional sense obligatory upon the States. These have no right to question the propriety of the demand; no discretion beyond that of devising the ways and means of furnishing the sums demanded. But though this be strictly and truly the case; though the assumption of such a right would be an infringement of the articles of Union; though it may seldom or never have been avowedly claimed, yet in practice it has been constantly exercised, and would continue to be so, as long as the revenues of the Confederacy should remain dependent on the intermediate agency of its members. What the consequences of this system have been, is within the knowledge of every man the least conversant in our public affairs, and has been amply unfolded in different parts of these inquiries. It is this which has chiefly contributed to reduce us to a situation, which affords ample cause both of mortification to ourselves, and of triumph to our enemies.

What remedy can there be for this situation, but in a change of the system which has produced it in a change of the fallacious and delusive system of quotas and requisitions? What substitute can there be imagined for this ignis fatuus in finance, but that of permitting the national government to raise its own revenues by the ordinary methods of taxation authorized in every well-ordered constitution of civil government? Ingenious men may declaim with plausibility on any subject; but no human ingenuity can point out any other expedient to rescue us from the inconveniences and embarrassments naturally resulting from defective supplies of the public treasury.

The more intelligent adversaries of the new Constitution admit the force of this reasoning; but they qualify their admission by a distinction between what they call INTERNAL and EXTERNAL taxation. The former they would reserve to the State governments; the latter, which they explain into commercial imposts, or rather duties on imported articles, they declare themselves willing to concede to the federal head. This distinction, however, would violate the maxim of good sense and sound policy, which dictates that every POWER ought to be in proportion to its OBJECT; and would still leave the general government in a kind of tutelage to the State governments, inconsistent with every idea of vigor or efficiency. Who can pretend that commercial imposts are, or would be, alone equal to the present and future exigencies of the Union? Taking into the account the existing debt, foreign and domestic, upon any plan of extinguishment which a man moderately impressed with the importance of public justice and public credit could approve, in addition to the establishments which all parties will acknowledge to be necessary, we could not reasonably flatter ourselves, that this resource alone, upon the most improved scale, would even suffice for its present necessities. Its future necessities admit not of calculation or limitation; and upon the principle, more than once adverted to, the power of making provision for them as they arise ought to be equally unconfined. I believe it may be regarded as a position warranted by the history of mankind, that, IN THE USUAL PROGRESS OF THINGS, THE NECESSITIES OF A NATION, IN EVERY STAGE OF ITS EXISTENCE, WILL BE FOUND AT LEAST EQUAL TO ITS RESOURCES.

To say that deficiencies may be provided for by requisitions upon the States, is on the one hand to acknowledge that this system cannot be depended upon, and on the other hand to depend upon it for every thing beyond a certain limit. Those who have carefully attended to its vices and deformities as they have been exhibited by experience or delineated in the course of these papers, must feel invincible repugnancy to trusting the national interests in any degree to its operation. Its inevitable tendency, whenever it is brought into activity, must be to enfeeble the Union, and sow the seeds of discord and contention between the federal head and its members, and between the members themselves. Can it be expected that the deficiencies would be better supplied in this mode than the total wants of the Union have heretofore been supplied in the same mode? It ought to be recollected that if less will be required from the States, they will have proportionably less means to answer the demand. If the opinions of those who contend for the distinction which has been mentioned were to be received as evidence of truth, one would be led to conclude that there was some known point in the economy of national affairs at which it would be safe to stop and to say: Thus far the ends of public happiness will be promoted by supplying the wants of government, and all beyond this is unworthy of our care or anxiety. How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth? How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad? How can its administration be any thing else than a succession of expedients temporizing, impotent, disgraceful? How will it be able to avoid a frequent sacrifice of its engagements to immediate necessity? How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?

Let us attend to what would be the effects of this situation in the very first war in which we should happen to be engaged. We will presume, for argument's sake, that the revenue arising from the impost duties answers the purposes of a provision for the public debt and of a peace establishment for the Union. Thus circumstanced, a war breaks out. What would be the probable conduct of the government in such an emergency? Taught by experience that proper dependence could not be placed on the success of requisitions, unable by its own authority to lay hold of fresh resources, and urged by considerations of national danger, would it not be driven to the expedient of diverting the funds already appropriated from their proper objects to the defense of the State? It is not easy to see how a step of this kind could be avoided; and if it should be taken, it is evident that it would prove the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety. To imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with, would be the extreme of infatuation. In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying? The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same principles that usurers commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors, with a sparing hand and at enormous premiums.

It may perhaps be imagined that, from the scantiness of the resources of the country, the necessity of diverting the established funds in the case supposed would exist, though the national government should possess an unrestrained power of taxation. But two considerations will serve to quiet all apprehension on this head: one is, that we are sure the resources of the community, in their full extent, will be brought into activity for the benefit of the Union; the other is, that whatever deficiences there may be, can without difficulty be supplied by loans.

The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require. Foreigners, as well as the citizens of America, could then reasonably repose confidence in its engagements; but to depend upon a government that must itself depend upon thirteen other governments for the means of fulfilling its contracts, when once its situation is clearly understood, would require a degree of credulity not often to be met with in the pecuniary transactions of mankind, and little reconcilable with the usual sharp-sightedness of avarice.

Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious attention. Such men must behold the actual situation of their country with painful solicitude, and deprecate the evils which ambition or revenge might, with too much facility, inflict upon it.

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Why You Should Impute Equal Credit to Co-Authors in Economics

Having been tenured now for almost 28 years, I have been in many promotion meetings. There is a little dance that happens in a large fraction of these meetings. Someone raises the issue of whether one or more of the papers of the one being evaluated owed more to a coauthor than to the evaluee. Then, this concern is dismissed by invocation of the idea that there is a reasonably efficient market for coauthors. Those who contribute less than their share to a project are much less likely to be invited to be a coauthor a second time. I think this dismissal of the concern is right.

There is a key economic force at work in the market for coauthors in economics that is important for other economic applications as well. When a wage is fixed, the quality of the worker hired or the effort put in by the worker hired adjusts to bring the marginal product closer to the fixed wage. (Thus, for example, when an increase in the minimum wage pushes the wage up, increased worker effort per hour for fear of losing that now more attractive job, or a better class of worker can make up for a fair share of the strain on the firm from that higher wage.)

Some naively think that the most famous economist on a paper contributed more to it. But those with a little more experience now that the less famous coauthor usually has put in a lot more hours into the paper, tending to equalize the overall contribution even when the more famous coauthor is able to contribute more to the paper per hour expended.

As someone who has more ideas than I could possibly fully realize by myself, I get very annoyed at the idea that people would fail to give my coauthors equal credit for papers. If I can’t offer coauthors equal credit for papers, how can I get the help I need to realize those ideas? I, for one, appreciate that ideas by themselves are not published papers. It takes a lot to get from an idea to a paper ready to submit. And in economics it takes almost as effort to take a paper from first submission to acceptance and final publication.

It is wrongheaded to think that idea creation should get most of the credit. Many people have no picture of how many good ideas languish inside some economist’s head or in the space of casual conversation and never make their way into a published paper. Let me oversimplify: idea people and those who can execute on an idea need each other. A system that gives each of them ample credit can work well to help foster good matches and an efficient allocation of tasks within the coauthoring partnership.

I’m not saying that the systems of giving credit in other disciplines are a bad idea. They may also work. But given the “fixed wage” of equal credit for coauthors on a paper in economics, who is chosen as a coauthor and how much they are expected to do adjusts to make equal credit a good approximation on average, even when focusing on pairings between senior and junior coauthors.

Update, May 22, 2021: Michael Harris points to the paper “First Author Conditions,” which has this abstract:

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the persistent use of alphabetical name ordering on academic papers in economics. In a context in which market participants are interested in evaluating the relative individual contribution of authors, it is an equilibrium for papers to use alphabetical ordering. Moreover, it is never an equilibrium for authors always to be listed in order of relative contribution. In fact, we show via an example that the alphabetical name ordering norm may be the unique equilibrium, althoug multiple equilibria are also possible. Finally, we charaterize the welfare properties of the noncooperative equilibrium and show it to produce research of lower quality than is optimal and than would be achieved if coauthors were forced to use name ordering to signal relative contribution.

Don’t miss my related post:

Replacing Meat with Mushrooms—In Whole or in Part

In “Evaluating Sweden's Food Guidelines,” I write:

I worry about too much meat. But contrary to the conventional view, I seem it as problematic because of its protein, not because of its fat. Certain types of meat are also high on the insulin index. Overall, the story for meat is complex. My advice is to eat meat sparingly, and to lean toward fattier cuts in order to avoid eating too much protein when you do eat meat. (This applies to fish, too.)

(My reasons are based on my current understanding of the science, but the phrases “eat meat sparingly” is a quotation from one of the revelations dictated by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.)

One thing that can help in eating meat sparingly is to substitute mushrooms for meat. This can work well because mushrooms, like meat, have the savory fifth basic taste of umami. (The other four basic tastes are sweet, sour, salty and bitter.) In her March 26, 2021 Wall Street Journal article “What Explains Our Mania for Mushrooms,” Bee Wilson writes:

Mushrooms aren’t just for vegans. They can also be used to help meat lovers moderate their consumption. A research paper from 2014 in The Journal of Food Science found that when half of the meat in a beef taco was replaced with ground mushrooms, the taco was deemed by a tasting panel to taste meatier. I have started secretly adding mushrooms ground in a food processor when I make a ragout for a lasagna for my meat-crazy and mushroom-despising 12-year-old. I can use around a third less ground beef, and he hasn’t noticed the presence of mushrooms yet. His only comment was that it tasted extra good.

However, Bee writes that to get the meaty flavor from mushrooms requires cooking them like meat:

… Harold McGee, author of “Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells,” told me that “among non-meat ingredients they’re uniquely good at generating the same browning-reaction aromas that meats do when heated to the temperatures typical of frying, grilling, roasting and so on. … if you want to accentuate the meatiness of mushrooms, you should go for a high-temperature method. … white mushrooms taste the most umami when they are either seared in a hot pan or roasted in the oven, as with the shiitake bacon.

Don’t eat poisonous mushrooms. But there seems to be a consensus that nonpoisonous mushrooms are a quite healthy type of food. I use raw mushrooms to add variety to the salads I eat almost every day when I am not fasting.

Update, May 10, 2021: Gary Cornell vouches for the tastiness of the recipe in the Serious Eats article “Recipe Update: Even Better Vegan Mushroom Bacon” by J. Kenji López-Alt. There is probably a way to design a version of the recipe without the sugar or maple syrup.

Modal Papers in Various Fields

Please send links to more of these, and I’ll include them! I’ll bet there are more. Either tweet to @mileskimball or put the link in a comment.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE OF THE TWEET TO GET TO THE TWEET ITSELF. ANOTHER CLICK AFTER THAT TO SEE THE PICTURE FOR THE WHOLE TEMPLATE IN THAT TWEET

Improving Your User Illusion

It is becoming a commonplace among many who discuss consciousness to compare consciousness to a computer desktop and the things we see and hear, smell and taste, feel and sense as akin to the icons on that desktop. Some people go on to deny the existence of a real material world in a kind of Neo-Idealism (in the philosophical sense of “Idealism,” not idealism in the everyday sense of the word).

Yet, one doesn’t need to deny the existence of a real material world for the metaphor of everything we see and hear, smell and taste, feel and sense as desktop icons to have important practical implications. In particular, there are always two strategies to improve the quality of one’s experience:

  1. Change the material world that helps to stimulate the appearance of particular desktop icons;

  2. Change the settings for the desktop so that the desktop is more pleasing for any given set of external-world inputs.

One of the virtues of changing the material world is that, when you are focused on doing good, those changes in the material world can affect the experience of other people even when they don’t realize that they can change their own desktop settings. And even if you diligently pointing out to others how they can change their desktop settings, most people’s skill level at doing so is such that changing the material world in the right direction will continue to be important to the quality of their experience.

On the other hand, one of the virtues of changing one’s desktop settings and helping others see how to change theirs is in dealing with the many situations in which changing the external world in the desired direction, to the desired extent, is beyond our and their powers.

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The Expanding Shoreline of Ignorance

I love this analogy! First, I think it is true. For example, the more one knows about economics, the more potential research projects one can see. Second, it is an optimistic take on one’s growing sense of ignorance: if the island is close to circular, knowledge is growing with the square of the diameter of the island, while the boundary with ignorance is only growing in direct proportion to the diameter of the island. Third, it points up how titles such as The End of Science (by John Horgan) betray a lack of an extensive enough knowledge of science to clearly see the length of the shoreline of ignorance.