Papers by Jacob S Bower-Bir
Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science, 2017
Externalities are the "[b]enefits or costs of an individual's activity that the individual does n... more Externalities are the "[b]enefits or costs of an individual's activity that the individual does not receive or bear" (Ekelund et al. 2006, p. 415). They arise whenever the actions of one person affect the welfare of another. There are positive (when others receive a benefit) and negative (when others are burdened with costs) externalities that may arise from production and consumption decisions. When the production or consumption of a good carries externalities, the effects spill over outside of the market and consequently are not fully reflected in the good's price. Widespread consumption of schooling leads to a reduction in the crime rate, a positive externality (Lochner and Moretti 2004). Steel production generates air pollution, a negative externality. You receive a benefit living among educated citizens and you pay a cost living downwind of a steel plant, but neither is likely to influence the market price of schooling or steel without some coordination or intervention (for reasons discussed below). The production or consumption of a good can result in multiple, potentially opposite externalities with varying effects across a population. Air pollution from steel production will harm those with respiratory illnesses more than their healthy neighbors and may even benefit air-filtration salespersons. One can frame most negative externalities as positive externalities, or vice versa, by flipping the spillover's reference point. For example, air pollution is a net-negative externality from steel production, and cleaner air is a positive externality of reduced steel production.
arXiv (Cornell University), Oct 1, 2018
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by sheddi... more Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin discrimination. We argue that an interesting research direction would be to develop computational and experimental systems for studying evolutionary processes that involve multiple layers of inheritance (such as genes, epigenetic inheritance, language, and culture) and feedbacks (such as gene-culture coevolution and mate choice) as well as open-ended niche construction-all of which are important in human history and evolution. Such systems would also be a clear way to motivate evolution and computation to scholars and students across diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as to scholars and students in the social sciences and humanities. In principle, computational models of cultural evolution could be compared to data, given that large-scale datasets already exist for tracking cultural change in real-time. Thus, experimental evolution, as a laboratory and computational science, is poised to grow as an educational tool for people to question and study where we come from, why we believe what we believe, and where we as a species may be headed. Human history in light of experimental evolution Can evolution experiments help at all in the interpretation of human population genomics and history? Surprisingly, in some cases the answer may be yes. Reports that a small number of powerful men, possibly including Genghis Khan, have fathered millions of male descendants have garnered much attention in the
This will be inadequate, but. .. I was fortunate to enter graduate school when I did. My colleagu... more This will be inadequate, but. .. I was fortunate to enter graduate school when I did. My colleagues were inquisitive, able to better one another's work, and enjoy themselves. I am grateful to all of them, especially those with whom I lived and spent the most time: Nico, Nick, Josef, David, and Jean-Bertrand. Indiana University was a wonderful place to be an undergraduate and graduate student, and I was honored to have taught, learned from, and worked alongside Indiana students. I owe my committee-David Reingold, Stephen Benard, and Bradley Heim-a hearty thanks for their patience and their willingness to point out the more tangential, uninteresting, and misguided parts of my research. They gave me the freedom to pursue some eccentric, tangled lines of thought, but never let me get (too) lost. To Edward Carmines and William Bianco I offer special thanks. Ted stepped in to chair my committee after my original advisor died and Bill provided invaluable professional advice and opportunities throughout my (somewhat lengthy) graduate school tenancy. Tim Downey and Ben Calvin were prodigious in their programming efforts to make the online experiments reliable and beautiful. Grants from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and from the Social Science Research Commons funded much of my research. Thanks to James Walker, Ursula Kreitmair, and Michael McGinnis for their guidance: If my experiments were worthy of financial backing, they helped make them so. And thanks to Emily Castle,
Collective action
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Feb 23, 2023
Collective choice
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Feb 23, 2023
Marginal Benefit and Cost Heterogeneity Data
Data (*.DTA), cleaning and analysis script (*.DO), and codebook (*.XLSX) for the economic experim... more Data (*.DTA), cleaning and analysis script (*.DO), and codebook (*.XLSX) for the economic experiments first described in Kreitmair and Bower-Bir (2021).Data, cleaning and analysis script, and codebook for the experiments first described in Kreitmair and Bower-Bir (2021), "Too Different to Solve Climate Change? Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Production and Benefit Heterogeneity on Collective Action", Ecological Economics. That paper tests for the effects of two heterogeneities---benefit and production---in a linear public goods setting, allowing the identification of different drivers of cooperative behavior
arXiv: Populations and Evolution, 2018
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by sheddi... more Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin discrimination. We argue that an interesting research direction would be to develop computational and experimental systems for studying evolutionary processes that involve multiple layers of inheritance (such as genes, epigenetic inheritance, language, and culture) and feedbacks (such as gene-culture coevolution and mate choice) as well as open-ended niche construction---all of which are important in human history and evolution. Such systems would also be a clear way to motivate evolution and computation to scholars and students across diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as to scholars and students in the social sciences and humanities. In principle, computational models of cultural evolution could be compared to data, given tha...
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2017
Externalities are the "[b]enefits or costs of an individual's activity that the individual does n... more Externalities are the "[b]enefits or costs of an individual's activity that the individual does not receive or bear" (Ekelund et al. 2006, p. 415). They arise whenever the actions of one person affect the welfare of another. There are positive (when others receive a benefit) and negative (when others are burdened with costs) externalities that may arise from production and consumption decisions. When the production or consumption of a good carries externalities, the effects spill over outside of the market and consequently are not fully reflected in the good's price. Widespread consumption of schooling leads to a reduction in the crime rate, a positive externality (Lochner and Moretti 2004). Steel production generates air pollution, a negative externality. You receive a benefit living among educated citizens and you pay a cost living downwind of a steel plant, but neither is likely to influence the market price of schooling or steel without some coordination or intervention (for reasons discussed below). The production or consumption of a good can result in multiple, potentially opposite externalities with varying effects across a population. Air pollution from steel production will harm those with respiratory illnesses more than their healthy neighbors and may even benefit air-filtration salespersons. One can frame most negative externalities as positive externalities, or vice versa, by flipping the spillover's reference point. For example, air pollution is a net-negative externality from steel production, and cleaner air is a positive externality of reduced steel production.
Use vs. Production Clustering
Policy Studies Journal, 2021
Post-positivist scholars have shown that justice motivates personal behavior and policymaking, bu... more Post-positivist scholars have shown that justice motivates personal behavior and policymaking, but they have not adequately explained how such normative concerns exert their influence. I argue that justice is the rewarding of desert, and desert is an emergent social institution. As a social institution, community members have built-in incentives to enforce and perpetuate communal understandings of desert though external sanctions and inculcation. As an evolutionary phenomenon, what constitutes upright, moral behavior will vary across communities and contexts, constraining individuals and policymakers as they address community issues. In an empirical test of my theory, I find that an individual’s support for redistributive policies is driven by her (a) belief in desert’s reward and (b) definition of economic deservingness. People tolerate grave inequalities if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station. In short, people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert.
Economia Politica, 2020
I use a nationally representative survey to determine whether and which Americans associate perso... more I use a nationally representative survey to determine whether and which Americans associate personal responsibility with economic desert. Philosophers actively debate this relationship, but social scientists routinely take it for granted, foisting this assumed relationship on the people they study. Respondents, I find, generally want their economic fates to rest on criteria for which they are (or appear) personally responsible, but they express this belief with varying levels of conviction and with two notable exceptions. The first involves specific determinants of economic status. Respondents are divided on whether individuals exert control over their intelligence, creativity, health, and educational pedigree, but they are generally comfortable with the first two affecting peoples’ economic standing. The second concerns who considers personal responsibility morally relevant to economic status. Neoliberals, chiefly concerned with economic growth, are significantly less insistent that individuals be personally responsible for their economic standing. Same for non-white, lower income, and older respondents, and respondents from elite schools, though to a lesser degree. At best, ideal paths to economic success and ruin are moderately associated with personal agency, though many are weakly correlated. So it goes with respondents’ overall correlations between perceived control over economic determinants and the ideal-importance of those factors to economic standing. Researchers must look beyond their preferred philosophical dispositions and investigate justice as it is envisioned and lived by their subjects.
Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2014
This paper compares two solution concepts for majority rule decision-making in multi-dimensional ... more This paper compares two solution concepts for majority rule decision-making in multi-dimensional settings: the uncovered set and the strong point. Our goal is to determine which of these solution concepts is the appropriate generalization of the median voter theorem to more complex (and more realistic) multi-dimensional majority-rule settings. By making this comparison, we also contribute to the debate about the degree of sophisticated decision-making exhibited by experimental subjects and their real-world counterparts. Using data from eleven previously published majority rule experiments and analytic techniques drawn from geography, our analysis confirms expectations that the uncovered set provides accurate predictions of majority-rule decision-making; and, moreover, that the strong point provides little added insight, either as a solution conception its own, or as a predictor of where outcomes lie inside the uncovered set.
Recent research into the relationship between heuristic use and political sophistication suggests... more Recent research into the relationship between heuristic use and political sophistication suggests that these variables interact in helping a voter make a good choice at the ballot box. Such findings—which we believe result from poor measurement of heuristic use—contradict the theoretical underpinnings of heuristics, heuristics being simple diagnostic shortcuts used to equal effect by voters of varying political knowledge and sophistication. Using a new survey measure of heuristic use, we present evidence from four presidential elections that a voter’s level of political knowledge does not enhance or diminish the usefulness of specific voting heuristics. Rather, an important determinant of heuristic effectiveness is the electoral context in which it is used. We show that changes in the ideological proximity of presidential candidates influences the helpfulness of some voting heuristics and not others. Overall, our results indicate that, while a voter cannot hope to wield a given heuristic better than her fellow voters, the particular heuristics a voter employs will greatly influence her chances of making a correct vote.
This dissertation is about economic inequality and why it thrives in a country with professedly e... more This dissertation is about economic inequality and why it thrives in a country with professedly egalitarian values. I propose that people's economic behavior and policy preferences are largely driven by their understanding of deservingness. So long as a person believes that their compatriots are generally served their economic due, economic outcomes require no tampering, at least on moral grounds. People may tolerate grave inequalities &mdash inequalities that trouble them, even &mdash if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Resources meted to the undeserving, conversely, require correction. To begin, I show how desert unifies behavioral research into the otherwise disparate notions of justice that social scientists usually cite. Desert I treat as a social institution, one that helps resolve a common multiple-equilibria problem: the allocation of wealth and socioeconomic station. As a natural ph...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012
As an explanation for voter decision making under conditions of low knowledge and interest in pol... more As an explanation for voter decision making under conditions of low knowledge and interest in politics, scholars have turned to the idea of decision shortcuts, or heuristics. This paper focuses on answering three major questions in the literature on heuristic decision making: who is using heuristics, what heuristics are they using, and do these heuristics help individuals make good political decisions. One theoretically and empirically important variable in these questions is an individual’s political sophistication. Despite the agreement between scholars on the importance of sophistication, its role in heuristic decision making has been confused. We argue that the importance of political sophistication is primarily as a selection mechanism, leading high sophisticates to use a partisan heuristic and low sophisticates to use an affective heuristic. We additionally find, counter to previous research, that there is no interactive effect between sophistication and heuristics. The effectiveness of heuristics in helping individuals make good vote choices will vary depending on type. But, this effectiveness is constant across levels of sophistication.
Ecological Economics, 2021
Though a global phenomenon, climate change will impact different countries to varying degrees. Di... more Though a global phenomenon, climate change will impact different countries to varying degrees. Different countries and industries also vary in how cost effectively they can mitigate climate change. These heterogeneities—one in marginal benefits derived from greenhouse mitigation (“benefit heterogeneity”), the other in marginal productivity in organizing collective action toward greenhouse mitigation (“production heterogeneity”)—have not been sufficiently studied, nor have they been directly compared. The paper tests for the effects of these two heterogeneities in a linear public goods setting, allowing the identification of different drivers of cooperative behavior. We find that heterogeneous assemblies are less able to collectively provide a public good such as greenhouse gas mitigation. Crucially, the type of heterogeneity matters. When there are less-productive mitigators, or when mitigation benefits other actors more than oneself—scenarios that mirror the incentives facing many developed nations—collective action is least effective. Results suggest that emphasizing reciprocity may improve collective action toward mitigation, but this depends on whose behavior is reciprocated. In addition to these empirical findings, the paper advances a methodological innovation. Whereas previous studies manually sorted individuals into contribution groups, which is impractical in larger data sets and yields difficult-to-replicate classifications, this paper uses machine learning to classify players according to their conditional contribution behavior.
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2017
Low SES. Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to a person's income, education, and occupation, some ... more Low SES. Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to a person's income, education, and occupation, some combination of which determines her overall social standing. The relevant markers of social standing will vary across communities and cultures, but researchers afford these three variables special attention given their centrality to the increasingly global market system. A person with low SES will
Regional Science Policy & Practice, 2015
This paper discusses an innovative econometric approach for modelling how national or state-level... more This paper discusses an innovative econometric approach for modelling how national or state-level energy policies can affect state and sub-state economic outcomes using the new Indiana scalable energy-economy model (IN-SEEM). This model–which can be modified and scaled to investigate other states and sub-state regions–is used to analyze the economic effects of a carbon dioxide (CO2) tax on the state of Indiana and two of its most populous regions. Results of this analysis offer a proof-of-concept for an econometric approach that allows for sub-state analysis of energy policies. Further, the policy analysis finds that without a mechanism for recycling CO2 tax revenues back into the economy, a CO2 tax of between $15 and $45 per ton will have a significant negative effect on the state economy and the two regions examined. While we find the tax to be an effective means of reducing energy consumption and thus CO2 emissions, total employment and gross state product per capita are forecast to decline 4.0 and 3.2 per cent, respectively, for the state given a $15 per ton CO2 tax in the year 2025.
Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, 2018
I use a nationally representative survey to determine whether and which Americans associate perso... more I use a nationally representative survey to determine whether and which Americans associate personal responsibility with economic desert, a relationship that philosophers debate but that social scientists often take for granted, foisting this assumed relationship on the people they study. Americans, I find, generally want their economic fates to rest on criteria for which they are (or appear) personally responsible, but they express this belief with varying levels of conviction and with two notable exceptions. The first involves specific determinants of economic status. Americans are divided on whether individuals exert control over their intelligence, creativity, health, and educational pedigree, but they are generally comfortable with the first two affecting peoples' economic standing. The second concerns who considers personal responsibility morally relevant to economic status. Neoliberals, chiefly concerned with economic growth, are significantly less insistent that individuals be personally responsible for their economic standing. Same for non-white, lower income, and older Americans, though to a lesser degree. That people differ in their definitions of economic desert with respect to responsibility suggests that justice may be treated as an emergent social institution. Researchers must look beyond their preferred philosophical dispositions and investigate justice as it is envisioned and lived by their subjects.
Surveying a 1,000-person nationally representative sample, I find that an individual's support fo... more Surveying a 1,000-person nationally representative sample, I find that an individual's support for redistributive policies is driven by her (i) belief in and (ii) definition of economic deserving-ness. People will tolerate grave inequalities—inequalities that trouble them, even—if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert will oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station. In short, people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert. Underlying these findings is my approach to desert as a social institution that helps resolve the multiple-equilibria problems associated with allocating wealth and socioeconomic station.
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Papers by Jacob S Bower-Bir