Homo EconomSickus. Har, har, har...
Monthly Archives: December 2008
On Human Rationality
Oh, how this bugs me. I think behavioral economics is a great thing. However, the language that is used to discuss behavioral economics -- and specifically, the types of problems it addresses -- is hugely problematic. There is this pervasive idea, largely arising from economics, that because people do not behave according to the predictions of some narrow pecuniary incentive structure, they are somehow not rational. Rebecca Bird and I recently wrote a brief essay in which we bemoaned this perspective, noting particularly in the case of indigenous peoples, the diagnosis of irrationality is the ticket to paternalism, allowing "marginalized people to be further marginalized and fail to reap the benefits of even well-intentioned [development] projects." In many traditional social contexts, pecuniary rewards may trade-off with social prestige. People could be hyper-rational in their optimization of social capital and fail utterly to meet the bar for narrow-sense economic rationality.
This is all I have time for right now, but there is more to come (both scholarly a paper and probably more blog posts).
Plotting Networks in R
Using the network package, you can plot graphs in a flexible and powerful way. Often, when plotting a network, we want to vary the color, size, or shape of the vertices based on some attributes. Let's say that we have a freewheeling sexual network (easier to simulate) and we would like to color the vertices of the graph according to their HIV sero-status. Let's also say that we want to make the shape of each vertex reflect the sex of the individual. We use the following code:
[r]
# begin with randomly constructed edgelist
set.seed(12345)
n1 <- round(1+10*runif(50))
n2 <- round(1+10*runif(50))
eee <- cbind(n1,n2)[order(n1),]
net <- network(eee,directed=FALSE) # this will be a dense network!
hiv <- rbinom(50,size=1,prob=0.2) # random infections!
sex <- rbinom(50,size=1,prob=0.5) # random sexes!
set.vertex.attribute(net,"hiv",hiv+1)
set.vertex.attribute(net,"sex",sex+3)
## now plot
plot(net,
vertex.col="hiv",
vertex.sides="sex",
vertex.cex=5,
vertex.rot=-30,
edge.lwd=1)
[/r]
I definitely wouldn't want to be part of that party.
Guild of Scientific Troubadours
It's been a while since I've posted anything. The ongoing quarter and my travel schedule have interfered with posting.
I just discovered a super cool organization known as the Guild of Scientific Troubadours. In order to become a member of the Guild, you must pledge "to write, record and submit one song per month based on a story in one of a number of scientific publications." The basic idea is that songwriters write catchy pop songs about current scientific discoveries. Can't wait until someone writes a little ditty about epidemic thresholds in two-sex network models.