The threshold project: Recruiting post-docs

I am recruiting two post-docs to join us (in the Evolution and Social Cognition team, based in the Institut Jean Nicod, in the garden of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, here in Paris) for a new project called THRESHOLD. The advert is here. The deadline for applications is 11 December 2024. This blog post gives some more information about the projet.

Theories of human economic decision making are based on a simple model called a value function, or utility function; a mapping between the amount of money people have (or will receive), and their valuation of the situation. The typical function assumed is the dotted line in figure 1: the function is smooth; people like having more money better than less; but the amount of extra value they get with each additional euro is less than the last (aka diminishing returns). This means that people should always be risk-averse, since dropping down from where you currently are is always worse than going up by an equivalent number of euros.

Figure 1. Two value or utility functions: smooth (dotted); and with a desperation threshold (solid)

In recent work, we’ve been considering the consequences of entertaining an alternative model, where the value function is more jagged: more like a cliff-edge than Pareto’s smooth hills of pleasure. For example, you need to make rent, so you need say 600 euros on the 1^st of the month. As long as you have the 600, it’s ok; the difference between 601 and 610 is not a big deal. But the difference between 601 and 599 is a huge deal. It could be the difference between keeping your apartment and losing it, which would mean a huge bump in your welfare. If you do lose the apartment, things could not be much worse: missing paying your rent by 10 euros or 200 euros might have much the same welfare consequence. In other words, there might be abrupt steps in the value function, and other bits where it is more or less flat; like the solid line in figure 1.

If there are abrupt steps – which we call desperation thresholds – then we would expect people’s behaviour to be rather variable (see the paper for the full set of predictions). With resources just above a threshold, people should be super risk-averse, because their main preoccupation should be not to fall down the cliff. This might mean they fail to take risks it would otherwise be rational to take. On the other hand, if their resources are currently below a desperation threshold, they may become super risk-prone, and take risks it is otherwise irrational to take. This is because those risks hold a small chance of moving them into a state where their immediate welfare would be enormously improved.

In the project, we want to apply this kind of thinking to the decision making of people living in conditions of resource scarcity (urban poverty, in particular). In essence, we want to understand the paradox of poverty. On the one hand, many studies show that people with lower incomes are more risk averse than those with higher incomes. On the other hand, all the gambling shops and fixed-odds betting terminals are in the places where the people on lowest incomes live. And a lot of really risky (and low yield) crime is committed by people at the bottom end of the income distribution. How can we square this paradox? People in poverty are both the most risk averse and the most risk prone? Desperation threshold models suggest that people might undergo quite rapid flips in behaviour – from risk averse to risk prone – due to very small fluctuations in the resources available to them, if those fluctuations move them over a threshold of urgent need in either direction. This would give life near the threshold an unpredictable and volatile quality.

The project, funded by the ANR, will run from January 2024 and last for four years. It will have three work packages. Work package 1 will be a community study of a population living in challenging economic circumstances, using mixed methods. We want to understand what material resources mean to people. In particular, we want to understand how people represent their material situation, and how they understand its possible changes and their possible responses to those changes.

Work package 2 will take an experimental approach. We want to investigate whether, when you confront people with a desperation-threshold situation, they respond in the ways the theoretical models predict they will. Moreover, by creating multi-participant experimental microsocieties, we can try to understand what the emergent consequence will be for an interacting network if some of its members are facing desperation. Work package 2 will build on this already published work that lays out the experimental paradigm.

Finally, work package 3 will apply the insights of the other two packages to public policy and institution design. How would you design a welfare system if your goal was to make sure no-one would ever face desperation (as opposed, for example, to channeling resources to those you deem most deserving, or those for whom the productivity benefit would be greatest)? Can we predict the consequences of distributional changes and economic shocks for societal indicators like crime and addiction, by taking desperation thresholds into account?

The people I am looking for are, specifically: a researcher to concentrate on the field study for work package 1; and a researcher who will lead the experimental program of work package 2. For work package 1, the ideal would be someone with community research experience, good enough French to work in France, and maybe even existing community relationships. However, I can work around any of these three (for example, we could do the study in a different country for someone whose experience is elsewhere). The main criterion is skill in, and commitment to, working in the field in a community facing economic adversity. For work package 2, the person would need to be excited by the design and analysis of experimental studies. The two researchers would work together and would be able to gain experience in the other’s work package too.

The two positions could start as early as April 2024, but it can wait until later in the year two. Please circulate the link if you think there are people who should see it; and please apply!

Figure 2. The ENS. Yes, it was founded in the year III. Though it wasn’t *that* year III. And it was somewhere else at the time. And then it stopped existing for a bit. But still, it’s really nice.

Universal Basic Income already is a targeted system
4 Dec 2023

A common response to our work on Universal Basic Income as an anti-poverty policy is the following: ‘Well, that’s going to cost a lot of money. Rather than giving money to everyone, including lots of people who don’t need it, it would be better to target all that money on the poorest people, who really need it. You will have create a bigger anti-poverty effect that way’. There is a version of this argument here, for example. Though this argument seems intuitively right, it’s actually not, oddly. UBI schemes of the kind we have advocated are in fact both universal (everyone gets them) and really well targeted at the poor. In fact, UBI schemes can be designed to have any precision and profile of social targeting that a policy-designer could imagine. In this post, I try to explain why. The important thing to bear in mind is that the fiscal interaction between the state and the citizens is a two-way thing: there are both taxes (citizen to state) and transfers (state to citizen). When assessing how targeted a system is, you have to consider both of these: what is the net effect of the taxes and transfers on the income … Continue reading “Universal Basic Income already is a targeted system”
The threshold project: Recruiting post-docs
20 Nov 2023

I am recruiting two post-docs to join us (in the Evolution and Social Cognition team, based in the Institut Jean Nicod, in the garden of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, here in Paris) for a new project called THRESHOLD. The advert is here. The deadline for applications is 11 December 2024. This blog post gives some more information about the projet. Theories of human economic decision making are based on a simple model called a value function, or utility function; a mapping between the amount of money people have (or will receive), and their valuation of the situation. The typical function assumed is the dotted line in figure 1: the function is smooth; people like having more money better than less; but the amount of extra value they get with each additional euro is less than the last (aka diminishing returns). This means that people should always be risk-averse, since dropping down from where you currently are is always worse than going up by an equivalent number of euros. In recent work, we’ve been considering the consequences of entertaining an alternative model, where the value function is more jagged: more like a cliff-edge than Pareto’s smooth hills of pleasure. For example, … Continue reading “The threshold project: Recruiting post-docs”
It probably is that bad
9 Nov 2023

The discipline of psychology is wringing its hands about its failure to make enough substantial and dependable scientific progress over the last fifty years of effort. First, we blamed our methods: hypothesizing after the results were known, researcher degrees of freedom, p-hacking and the rest. Then, we went after the theories: theories in psychology were so arbitrary, so vague in their relation to anything we could measure, so foundation-less, and so ambiguous, that tests of them were both much too easy, and much too hard. They were much too easy in that they could always be deemed a success. They were much too hard, in that the tests did not generally lead to substantive, cumulative, coherent knowledge. Reforms to the theory-building process were urged (here, here, here). Actually, these critiques were not new: Paul Meehl had made them floridly decades earlier. Writing in the last century, but in a parlance that would have been more at home in the century before, he compared the psychology researcher to: “a potent-but-sterile intellectual rake, who leaves in his merry path a long train of ravished maidens but no viable scientific offspring.” I read all this with interest, but I remember thinking: “it can’t … Continue reading “It probably is that bad”
Phoebe and the paradox of tragedy
23 Oct 2023

All summer long, our little cat Phoebe spent much of her time squeezed onto the kitchen window bar, gazing out into the garden. How sweet, I thought, she is looking out on the sunshine and flowers. Coming home and encountering her yet again in position, we would say ‘she must really like sitting there’. Weeks went by and it began to unsettle me. This is starting to seem obsessive; she has become like Edward in Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache, staring up the lane from the scullery to see if the silent match-seller is in sight. Finding her unresponsive, curled up in her bed when I came down to make the morning tea gradually went from being charming to worrying. Has she worn herself out with her vigil? What if looking out all day and night is actually a horrific and exhausting chore? What if it is making her ill? Eventually, in an insomniac moment, I could not stop myself descending at 3am, to discover the silhouette of Phoebe by moonlight, at her post, peering fixedly into the gloom. We took her to the country for a couple of weeks. My anguish heightened a notch when, on returning and … Continue reading “Phoebe and the paradox of tragedy”
Does greater inequality cause worse health? No! And: kind of yes!
9 Oct 2023

The question of whether greater economic inequality makes people’s health and wellbeing worse is an important one. The literature has been moving fast over recent years, and the debate has moved on somewhat since my previous essay. It can all get a bit technical and econometric at times. The questions most people care about are: (1) is the relationship between inequality and health really a cause and effect one?; and: (2) if we make our country more equal, for example by increasing benefits or cutting taxes on the rich, will we improve health? Somewhat paradoxically, I am going to answer (from my current understanding of the literature): ‘kind of no’ to the first question; and ‘yes’ to the second. First, let’s look at the very brief history. Act One: In which a slew of papers appears, showing that countries, or US states, with greater inequality in incomes had lower life expectancy, worse health and mental wellbeing, and a host of other poor outcomes like lower trust and higher crime, when compared to countries or states with lower inequality. Inequality here was measured as the dispersion of the distribution of incomes, typically captured by the Gini coefficient; and many of these … Continue reading “Does greater inequality cause worse health? No! And: kind of yes!”
What do people want from a welfare system?
21 Sep 2023

All industrialised societies feature some kind of welfare system: institutions of the state that transfer material resources to certain categories of people or people who find themselves in certain kinds of situation. Non-industrialised societies have systems of social transfers too, albeit sometimes more informal and not organised by the state. People seem to think this is a good thing, or at least necessary. This raises the question: what do the public think a good welfare system would be like? How generous do they want it to be, and how would they like it to distribute its resources? Polls in European nations consistently find most people expressing strong support for the welfare state. But there is a problem with this: when asked, a lot of people express support for tax cuts too. And for lots of other things, things that probably can’t all be achieved at the same time. This has led to one view in political science that most people’s policy preferences are basically incoherent (and hence, not much use in setting public policy). There is another interpretation, however. Imagine you ask me whether I would like more generous benefits for people with disabilities, and I say yes; and you … Continue reading “What do people want from a welfare system?”
How can I explain this to you?
11 Sep 2023

One of the big problems of the social and human sciences is the number of different kinds of explanations there are for what people do. We invoke a great range of things when we talk about why people do what they do: rational choice, conscious or unconscious motivations, meanings, norms, culture, values, social roles, social pressure, structural disadvantage…not to mention brains, hormones, genes, and evolution. Are these like the fundamental forces in physics? Or can some of them be unified with some of the others? Why are there so many? It is not even clear what the exhaustive list is; which elements on it could or should be rephrased in terms of the others; which ones we can eliminate, and which ones we really need. It’s bad enough for those of us who do this for a living. What do the general public make of these different constructs? Which ones sound interchangeable to them and which seem importantly different? The explanation-types are sometimes grouped into some higher-order categories, such as biological vs. social. But how many of these higher groupings should there be, and what should be their membership? In a recent paper, Karthik Panchanathan, Willem Frankenhuis and I how … Continue reading “How can I explain this to you?”
Treating causes, not symptoms
14 Jul 2023

Yesterday saw the launch of our report ‘Treating causes not symptoms: Basic Income as a public health measure’. The report presents the highlights of a recently-ended research project funded by the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research. This has been an interdisciplinary endeavour, involving policy and political science folk, health economists, behavioural scientists, community organizations, and two think tanks. The public has Manichean intuitions about health. On the one hand, people feel very strongly that an affluent society should compensate and protect its members against the spectre of ill health. This is particularly true in the UK with its strong tradition of socialized care. They will support spending large amounts of money to make good health inequalities. But when you suggest that the best way for society to make good health inequalities is by removing the poverty that lies upstream of them, people often baulk. You can’t do that, surely? I think there are a few reasons for this reaction. One is that different lay models of causation govern the two domains. Ill health seems to be all about luck, the kind of luck society should insure us against. No one sets out to get ill. Poverty seems, … Continue reading “Treating causes, not symptoms”
On poverty and addiction
4 Jul 2023

Reading descriptions of the lives of people living in adverse economic conditions, something that will strike you over and over again is how often addiction comes up: to alcohol, to tobacco, to other drugs, or to behaviours such as gambling. There is addiction in all strata of society, but, from the novels of Zola to today, it seems specially prevalent where people have the least access to money and power. Is this really true, and, if so, how could we possibly explain it? Epidemiological evidence confirms that it is really true. In the USA, the prevalence of smoking is about twice as high amongst those in routine/semi-routine occupations compared to managers and professionals. Smokers of all classes try to quit; managers and professionals are more likely to succeed. Addictive substances often show double dissociations with class: people with more money can afford to consume more of the substance, since they have more money; but people with less money are more likely to end up consuming to the point where it causes them life problems. So, for example, higher-SES young people in France consume more cannabis overall; but lower-SES young people are more likely to be frequent users. The double dissociation … Continue reading “On poverty and addiction”
Innateness is for animals
21 Jun 2023

Innate or acquired? Genes or culture? Nature or nurture? Biological or psychological? People are inveterately fond of trying to divide human capacities into two sorts. Commentators often seem to think that determining which capacity goes in which box is the main preoccupation of the evolutionary human sciences. (And because there is ‘evolutionary’ in the name, they think the evolutionary human sciences must be about claiming capacities for the innate/genes/nature side that the social sciences had wanted to put in acquired/culture/nurture; not really.) In fact, innate/acquired, nature/nurture sorting is not something most of us are especially interested in. Our main hustle is that it is always both, rendering the distinction (at least as applied to mature adult capacities) somewhere between arcane and unhelpful. If it’s acquired, it’s because there are innate resources that make this possible; if it’s culture, it’s because the human genome enables this possibility, and so on. We are not interested in sorting, but in figuring out how and why things actually work. To butcher the famous exchange from The African Queen: the nature/nurture distinction, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. But still, the widespread desire to sort capacities into two … Continue reading “Innateness is for animals”