[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

Jayson_Virissimo

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

To follow up handoflixue's points:
(1) many of the correlations you noted are very weak, relatively speaking (particularly dangerousness and mental illness) some of these labels are social coding, not bare fact (some people who are "voluntarily unemployed" are called housewives. are they lazy?)
(2) why do you care? even if voluntarily unemployed = lazy, what difference does that make in your life? That's the central problem of intolerance - it's mostly concealed, unstated judgment about how society should be.

It's also possible that I'm in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment

It's possible that some of this is US v. Europe. Not sure how much. The popular culture use of "tolerance" doesn't match well with the real issue. Popular-culture-tolerance seems to do better in Europe.

Note that Caplan's argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I'm not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion.

Once upon a time, having a pager was weird - all sorts of social strangeness associated with them. Would they have been invented sooner if society was more open to social strangeness? Would mobile communication technology generally have progress faster?

About your (1) and (2): I'm not saying such negative judgements are justified! Sure, people make stupid judgements about risk and probability and correlation all the time, I'm discussing whether a negative judgement is due to "dislike for the weird and different" as a general tendancy, or to a specific (possibly wrong!) judgement against something.

The pager is a good example of an innovation hampered by intolerance; I remember a time where cell phones were negatively judged too; though even that could maybe be explained by it's association to a d... (read more)

5

[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

5

5

5

[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

5

5