Skepsis #37 - Set rules, not goals.
This year, set rules instead of goals. Also, economics, equality in education and why parenting doesn't matter.
What I'm thinking about
Good rules create good automatic behaviors
In 2021, instead of only setting goals, I'm creating rules around the behaviors I want to adopt. The idea is to make the rules automatic so you don't need to think about it. Avoid making a hundred decisions when you only need to make one, and so on. An example could be rules about what to eat at restaurants; do I drink alcohol or not, do I have dessert, what foods are off-limits? etc.
When I've made such a rule for myself, it means I don't need to spend any time deliberating about whether or not to eat dessert, the decision was already made. In addition, people generally don't question "hard" rules but they will question your aspirations (and so will you). If I say: "I really shouldn't eat any cake today, I'm on a diet", people will usually try to convince me otherwise: "Oh come on, a little bit of cake can't hurt right?". But If I instead pronounce my wish to not have any dessert as a hard rule: "I don't eat cake" or "I don't eat dessert on weekdays". People will usually accept it and not bother asking again.
Religious rules work like this too, and it's why they're so effective in controlling behavior. Most pious Muslims don’t need to think about whether or not to have a glass of wine after work, they just don’t drink. I'm also not going to try to force my Jewish or Muslim friends or coworkers to eat pork, it's off-limits, no need to even ask.
So this year, set rules instead of goals. Want to get fit? Do some exercise everyday, and make it a rule to never skip two days in a row. Want to publish a book? Make it a rule to write 500 words per day, regardless of if it's any good.
Make rules that make it effortless or trivial to do the right thing, without thinking twice. You probably have a few rules like this already, but they're so deeply ingrained as unconscious habits that you don't even think about it.
Here are some rules I'm adopting this year:
I’ll have my final meal of the day by 9 pm. (I want to avoid late-night binging.)
No alcohol after 10 pm and only drink Th-Su. (I want to have more energy and avoid hangovers so I can be productive.)
Only watch entertainment and use social media during pre-planned times of the day, such as 60 minutes in the evening. (I want to spend more of my time on activities I think are valuable, and avoid being distracted so I can be more present and focused.)
Don't book any meetings more than 7 days in advance. (I want to make the most of my time every day and avoid unnecessary commitments.)
There's a saying that "rules are meant to broken". Which is probably something people say when they are trying to convince themselves that whatever they're about to do is OK when it really isn't. Nevertheless, the point is not that you can never deviate from your rules, but that a good rule will make it more likely you stick to your desired behavior more of the time.
What I'm reading
Baumol's Cost Disease
An economic theory that explains why the price of services has risen so much more compared to the price of products.
The idea is that the economic productivity gains seen in technology and manufacturing industries, and economic growth more broadly, drive wages up and costs down. But costs don't decrease for most services and the arts since these don't see much productivity gain and cost as much to produce today as they did 200 years ago (like theater shows).
Producing a Broadway show requires as much labor today as it did 200 years ago.
Getting a haircut still requires someone to cut your hair, and they can't do anything else while they're giving you a haircut.
So while services costs as much or more, wages are driven up in general since the economy is growing and when wages grow for one type of work it usually affects the wages of workers in other industries as well.
When an engineer earns more money and is able to buy more expensive stuff, their wage increases drives demand for services and thus increases prices, especially for labor-intensive services. With higher wages it's possible and necessary to charge more for services, if anything to cover the increasing costs to deliver them.
Crucially, this helps explain why services such as healthcare and education have gotten so expensive and keep getting more and more expensive.
It's not fundamentally about them being public institutions vs private, or that government bureaucracy is inefficient. But rather that wage increases are not offset by productivity gains in those industries. In addition, the spending habits of very rich people also drive costs up even more, especially for things like art and special services, high-end education, and so on (since they increase the demand of a limited resource).
Further reading at Marginal Revolution and Vox.
Parenting doesn't matter
Ok, the title is a little hyperbolic, but parenting seems to matter much less than most parents assume. A widely recognized figure within psychology today is that about 50% or more of our personality is a result of our genes (the rest of our environment at home and elsewhere). A large chunk of that environment is outside the control of parents. The takeaway, I think, is that parents probably worry too much about some aspects of parenting like potty-training, and the long-term results of doing it “right” vs “wrong”. It probably doesn't matter. When your kid is in high-school they'll be perfectly capable of wiping their own asses regardless of when you start potty training - as long as you don’t do something really stupid (and maybe not even then).
"Let’s talk about the weird-shit rule of parenting. It’s a principle that I just made up. Here’s the gist: Provided that you have the means to satisfy your child’s basic needs, and assuming that you aren’t acting in a way that’s flagrantly abusive, the only way to really change her life—to alter her nature, for better or worse—is to do some weird, outrageous shit. I don’t know exactly what that shit would be; I guess it could be pretending that your baby’s French, or depriving her of toys, or suspending her inside a window cage. (To be honest, even that shit might not be weird enough to make a difference in the long run.) But otherwise, in the absence of weird shit, the weird-shit rule stipulates that as long as you love your kids in more or less the way that normal parents do, and try your best to be benign, you’ll be pretty much irrelevant."'
What I'm watching
The economic history of Argentina
What I'm listening to
Why Education Fails to Advance Equality (podcast)
Why is it OK to discriminate on grounds of intelligence? That might seem like an odd question. But for writer and academic Fredrik deBoer, it’s one we can't ignore. His new book, The Cult of Smart, argues that we’ve created an educational system that incessantly rewards the good luck of innate intelligence—while condemning the less clever to failure.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Fredrik deBoer discuss America’s broken schools, debate the damage done by overvaluing academic ability, and ask what sort of education system we need for a truly just society.
Janet Jackson - Got Til It's Gone
Happy new year folks, and as always, stay safe out there!
/Phil