As you might remember from a few months ago, there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy, including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was actually good, a subplot in which a do-gooder from the outside just doesn’t understand the real world, and an ethnic slur! What more could you possibly ask for?
Well, you could ask that, if the story is being reported as being true, that there was any evidence it actually happened.
Below are a few versions of the story.
From Stephen Cheung in 2018:
In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen! My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. . . . However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!
From Michael Munger in 2018:
There’s a famous example in China, where a group of coolies … have to pull a barge up the Yangtze River … There’s a trade-off … how do you make the 30 guys work hard? The insight of the team production problem is we need … division of labor. … If I’m pulling, I can’t spend my time watching you and you can’t spend your time watching me. We’ll create a new job, called the monitor. … We’ll give the monitor a whip. Now this looks like slavery. The great thing about this, and this is from an article by an economist named Steven NS Cheung. He found that this guy with a whip—and this is the most incredible thing Russ!—this guy with a whip was hired and paid by the coolies!
Interesting how, when a story is described as “incredible,” it often is literally not credible.
Clement and McCormick (1989):
[the] famous Chinese boatpullers fable [where] the monitor uses his vision, intuition, and experience to determine shirking, counseling the loafers with his whip.
Super-clever and counterintuitive to describe whipping as “counseling”: that’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking that will take you far in academia.
Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan (2015):
. . . in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”
This one’s notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes, but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all—not on page 8 or anywhere else in that article—it actually came from a collection from 1998 of old Harvard Business School exam questions.
It’s an awesome transposition in that it adds the “titled English woman,” who is a stand-in for all those soft-headed non-economists out there who aren’t willing to think the unthinkable etc., and also it changes various details, for example the people pulling the boat became oarsman, and of course the word “coolie” was introduced. I guess he had to be “burly,” what with all the flogging he had to do! In a particularly modern touch, the host was there to “explain” the principles of Econ 101 to the silly lady.
And what about the woman being “titled”—that particular elaboration seems gratuitous, no? But it fits in well with economists’ view of themselves as tribunes of the people, consumer sovereignty and all that. The story wouldn’t work so well if the person who “complained” was herself poor and maybe some had experience with physical pain herself.
On the plus side, Kaur et al. issued a correction:
While the incorrect quote also appears in other earlier sources, it does not appear in Cheung’s original article. . . . The inaccurate quote was included simply as a way to illustrate the idea that joint production might necessitate the need for monitoring. . . . However, the quote is in no way central to the core point of the paper, or even for the discussion in section VI of the paper. . . . this incorrect quote can be omitted from the paper without any impact on the substance of the paper.
I think they’re right—the paper would’ve been just fine without the quote—it’s just funny that 3 authors and some number of reviewers and journal editors all read the paper, and none of them noticed how ridiculous the story was.
And just one more thing. Let’s accept that the substance of the paper is unaffected by the whipped-boatmen story. But, the fact that many economists have presented the story as true, even though it’s actually the result of a series of wild embellishments from an initially speculative source . . . that’s interesting, right? I don’t have it in me to write an article on the topic that would pass muster at the Journal of Political Economy (or any journal at all!), but I think there’s something there!
To put it another way, if the whipped-boatmen story is so consistent with the substantive message of the paper that it was included as an example to demonstrate the theory,(as the authors put it in their rejoinder, “The inaccurate quote was included simply as a way to illustrate the idea that joint production might necessitate the need for monitoring.”), and then it turns out the story is false, then maybe this should cast some doubt on said theory? Maybe joint production might not necessitate the need for monitoring as often as they think? At least not in the sense of “counseling the loafers with his whip”?
A good story with a twist that illustrates how unenlightened and naive the opposition’s (i.e., enemy’s) opinions are, is always the way to go. If no fantasy story is readily available, there is the ever-present fallback position of gematria to make the point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
————————————
A mathematical formula for finding a letter’s corresponding number in Mispar Gadol is:
f ( x ) = 10 ⌊ x − 1 9 ⌋ × ( ( x − 1 mod 9 ) + 1 ) , {\displaystyle f(x)=10^{\left\lfloor {\frac {x-1}{9}}\right\rfloor }\times ((x-1\mod 9)+1),}
where x is the position of the letter in the language letters index (regular order of letters), and the floor and modulo functions are used.
————————————-
Chinese “boatmen” (i.e., boatpeople), the last/next election, or the Oxford Comma, it is all included.
I think there is a more serious issue here. The idea that joint production may necessitate monitoring is a potentially important economic idea. But it is common for economists to resort to hypothetical or fictional examples – because the real examples are actually hard to find and usually not so clear cut. This has always been one of my primary complaints about textbooks (and not just econ textbooks, but they are especially good (poor) examples). Monitoring can be one “solution” to issues arising from joint production, but monitoring itself is costly. And there is a sociological dimension which can be quite complicated and which may involve difficult to measure costs and behaviors – things that economists don’t like to deal with and love to use to disparage other social sciences. It’s much easier to make up this hypothetical account that avoids all such messiness.
That is actually not a bad thing to do if you want to illustrate a point that is not always easy to understand. However, it has a dark side – examples such as this serve to downplay motives such as empathy and altruism and elevate self-serving incentives. It is a useful tactic for pointing out a real part of behavior – that people may engage in seemingly disturbing behavior due to a real problem (in this case, imperfect information). Many important examples could be used: for instance, use of strong incentives can be counterproductive when monitoring is difficult – so sole use of commissions for compensation of retail employees can backfire if multiple objectives (such as collecting customer feedback) are involved. That same issue arises with basing K-12 teacher compensation on test score results.
So, the common economics tactic of appealing to striking examples like this, often fictional ones, can serve to educate people to important principles. My objection is that they (inadvertently in many cases) also serve to selectively “educate” people concerning the relative importance of other factors. Hiring someone to whip fellow employees can easily jeopardize any sense of teamwork. Is that not important? What is the point of highlighting only part of the full picture without evidence that it is an important part or needs to be balanced against other objectives?
Dale:
Yes, this problem of reliance on fictional examples reminds me of Daniel Davies’s famous dictum, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”
What you’d need here is a cultural evolution story if there is enough data, which there may not be. Try to use bibliographic citations as a crude marker to figure out the patterns of diffusion – which version of the story leads to which version of the story (if there are enough variants to make this interesting). Then look at the patterns – how the details diverge, and ramify – if there is convergent evolution across different lines towards common patterns, then you’ve got an interesting plausible-but-hardly-provable set of hypotheses about the deep structures that guide just-so stories in economics.
The point is the story has anecdotal value. An anecdote is seen to be both surprising and representative. Its value is the way it represents (surprisingly, succinctly) a reality the teller wants it to.
— @anecdotal
this seems to me like a bitter and unnecessary post. Andrew is gleeful at the embarrassment of researchers he doesn’t like (economists) for making a minor mistake with no scientific repercussion. Kaur and coauthors’ only mistake here is attributing the quote to Cheung, when they really copy-pasted it from some other source (possibly the Harvard Business Exam from 1996, or some other unknown-to-us third source that both were based on). i don’t get it
Kd:
1. All these posts are unnecessary; it’s a blog we got here!
2. So, which is it, “bitter” or “gleeful”? These seem different to me. In all seriousness, I feel neither bitterness nor glee here. The whole thing makes me sad, the idea that all these credentialed social scientists—not just the authors of these articles but also the journal editors and reviewers at the time—took a ridiculous story as if it were true. Also the jokey bit about “counseling the loafers”—that’s just obnoxious. And the gratuitous introduction of the “titled English woman” which gives this story a spuriously populist air . . . I find all of this unpleasant.
Touting a false story to crate buzz for their “research” is not a minor mistake.
What’s a good slur for economists, and who are we going to pay to watch over them and whip them when they do bullshit. Also, how many will survive even an afternoon of such treatment?
Daniel:
I don’t think economists are any worse on average, or individually, than other social scientists. They just get more attention.
The thing is, as social scientists go, I think economists have by FAR the most opportunity to do either good, or major damage, mainly through policy. So far, I think they’re definitely net negative, and they’re seemingly incredibly smug about it as a group.
I mean the ESP researchers or psychologists or sociologists just aren’t going to screw up the money supply and cause a couple decades of secular stagnation and misallocation of resources. Fed economists could.
To be fair, the Cheung (1983) article does refer to that same “voluntary whipping” arbitration. He seems to have picked it up from those two old “UCLA school” economists Alchian and Demsetz. Quote follows:
“As examples of the gain from collaboration and the difficulty of delineating contributions, Alchian and Demsetz, cite the examples of loading and of fishing. My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China
before the communist regime, when a large group of workers marched
along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of
this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a
monitor to whip them. The point here is that even if every puller were
perfectly “honest,” it would still be too costly to measure the effort each
has contributed to the movement of the boat, but to choose a different
measurement agreeable to all would be so difficult that the arbitration of
an agent is essential.”
Emf:
Yeah so annoying how he used the word “actually” when he really meant, “not actually, it’s just a story.”
Cheung picked it up from Alchian and Demsetz? I thought it was Cheung who personally saw the workers and the monitor with the whip, albeit when he was seven years old.
I have to say, I don’t find the story quite as absurd as Andrew seems to. The recollections of a seven-year-old may be weak evidence, but they are evidence.
> To put it another way, if the whipped-boatmen story is so consistent with the substantive message of the paper that it was included as an example to demonstrate the theory,(as the authors put it in their rejoinder, “The inaccurate quote was included simply as a way to illustrate the idea that joint production might necessitate the need for monitoring.”), and then it turns out the story is false, then maybe this should cast some doubt on said theory?
Now I don’t agree with that. There’s a ton of cases of misleading or fictional examples used where the dubiousness of the example really shouldn’t cast doubt on the theory.
The cookie example being wrong you blogged about earlier shouldn’t cast doubt on Bayesian statistics. The classical picture of that WWII plane with alleged bullet marks is probably fake, but that shouldn’t mean survivorship bias isn’t a thing. Snow’s investigation of that cholera outbreak probably was mostly a matter of luck, but that doesn’t mean epidemiology is bunk. The criticism of the peppered moth example shouldn’t break all of Darwinian evolution.
It seems to me that using such stories is similar to using anecdotes about amazing cures in homeopathy. I am not sure they increase my trust in either discipline.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but the true story is essentially the same as the fake story. The fake one is simply embellished. So what’s the big deal? The citation was incorrect, but the story was basically the same.
What true story? The only basis for this story which our host could find is a conversation between Stephen Cheung and his mother when he was 7 (as remembered more than 30 years later!)
Also, China is a big country. If the moral of the fable was obviously correct, then there should be lots of evidence for this practice, and not just one person’s memory of what his mother told him when he was 7. I could find one person who always wears blue socks to play in sports tournaments, but that does not mean that the cold laws of nature necessitate that blue-socked players have an advantage and only a sentimental bourgeois could deny it! It means that people have lots of contradictory ideas about what causes victory and defeat in sports (see magical thinking, pattern recognition, post hoc rationalization).