Beyond Rivalry

I read (present tense) these essays and articles, save them to talk (write) about, and then realise the effort all that thinking and writing will be. I don't have energy for it this week, but I think the original links are worth reading, so I'm passing them along with sparse annotations. Count your blessings.

I. 

Range of Desire: In the Military, I Learned to Love Women and Guns by K.G. Schneider, who is also a librarian. Evocative:

"Guns, I am told, are dangerous. But women are dangerous, too. A woman can rip your heart from your chest and drop it like a child discarding a candy wrapper, or stand in front of you, a disdainful smile on her face, tossing your heart from one hand to another while your blood drips through her fingers. It is much worse when your heart is not left behind.

"No one explains the cruelest trick of life. You are happy, and life is good, and the years roll on, until you wake up one night, terrified, because you realize that the worse thing that can ever happen to you is for something to happen to her, and there is no way to avoid that eventual tragedy other than dying first, which is almost as frightening. It is all infinitely worse because she is a woman and the logic of your heart insists there is nothing better than a woman, particularly this woman. You are caught in this conundrum; your attention to detail failed you miserably and completely, way back when it was still possible to leave. So you lie fretting in the dark while your beloved breathes in and out in the night air, and you sense the entrapment of desire, the very danger of life itself.

"Compared to that, a gun is harmless."

II.

Conspicuous Consumption and Status Signaling: Politically Incorrect Paper, a continuing series, at Marginal Revolution. The argument is made, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and a National Bureau of Economic Research study, that "Blacks and Hispanics [in the U.S.] devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that they are relatively constant over time, and that they are economically large."

As Tabarrok clarifies in the comments, by "blacks and hispanics" they mean "people of low income," including whites.

Lots of (Girardian) suggestions in the comments for how to explain this, mostly based on 'signaling,' how we choose to convey our status to others, and how we choose to enhance others' perception of our worth, sometimes using very different actions to convey the same idea (dressing expensively to enhance a perception of our income, dressing down to convey that our status is so high that we don't have to signal -- although this can be a signal in and of itself). As some commenters note, an expensive but unnecessary higher education, McMansions, eating out, high-end tech items, and other 'visible goods' are not included as 'conspicuous consumption' in the study. (Commenter 'hipparchia' does a nice job teasing the details from the 'shoe' data.)

Related:  'Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.' -- Christopher Lasch

III.

Planning Fallacy at Overcoming Bias, about how we think things will take less time than they do. More studies, and more explanations:

"A clue to the underlying problem with the planning algorithm was uncovered by Newby-Clark et. al. (2000), who found that:

    * Asking subjects for their predictions based on realistic "best guess" scenarios; or
    * Asking subjects for their hoped-for "best case" scenarios...

"...produced indistinguishable results.

"When people are asked for a 'realistic' scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes -- the same vision as their 'best case'.

"Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the 'worst case'.

"Unlike most cognitive biases, we know a good debiasing heuristic for the planning fallacy. ... Just use an 'outside view' instead of an 'inside view'."

Briefly, the 'inside view' is to consider all aspects of the task and plan based on those. The 'outside view' "is when you deliberately avoid thinking about the special, unique features of this project, and just ask how long it took to finish broadly similar projects in the past." 

I rarely err in this way when predicting task timeframes; in fact, I am usually ahead of schedule for getting places and doing things. I don't take the outside view, though; I just factor in delays, laziness, bathroom and meal breaks, outside interruptions, technical difficulties, traffic, and so on when I plan. I hate being in a hurry, I like wiggle room -- and I make plans to avoid the first and have plenty (or at least a little) of the second, which amount to the same thing: leisure. I thought most people operated this way.