Reflections  

Fraud as a research tool — Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan report in the American Economic Review (Sept. 2004) on an experiment to detect labor-market discrimination against African-Americans. The researchers answered help-wanted ads in newspapers by sending out nearly 5,000 résumés, some showing good, and others poorer, qualifications for the jobs advertised. The fictitious résumés carried randomly assigned names suggesting black applicants (e.g., Lakisha and Jamal) or white applicants (e.g., Emily and Greg). Résumés with black names drew fewer responses than those carrying white names.

The broad research method is not new. Black persons and white persons have been hired to pose as job applicants. Studies of honesty — yes, honesty! — have featured phony episodes of lost wallets. However, the authors claim advantages for their method. One is that "relatively low marginal cost" permits sending out many résumés and achieving the statistical advantages of large sample size. But for whom is the cost low? It seems not even to occur to the researchers that they were thrusting onto the targeted employers the costs of handling many distractions that kept them from actually filling job vacancies.

I do not seriously doubt that the results mean what the authors think. Even so, I wonder whether the results do not in part illustrate an unintended consequence of antidiscrimination laws. I even wonder whether they do not in part reflect some employers' vague sense that some of the applications looked fishy.

Above all, I am struck by the researchers' unapologetic lying with their untruthful résumés and cover letters. They were drafting employers into the role of involuntary guinea pigs. They are parasites, feeding on the honest communication between employers and potential employees; widely practiced, it would impair both that communication and the method's own usefulness.

Confronted with these charges, the researchers might offer some excuse about the end justifying the means, or that fighting discrimination was more important than padding their own lists of academic publications. Yet the victims of the supposed discrimination were not real people, but merely fictitious ones.

Are standards of honesty considered less binding in social science than in the natural sciences? — Leland B. Yeager

Predator and prey — A recent paper in Science on what caused the extinction of large North American canids (wolf-like carnivores) is startlingly parallel to what is happening to the government of the United States and its constituent states and leads us to a hypothesis concerning the death of democracies.

The paper reports that during the past 50 million years, successive branches of large carnivorous mammals have diversified and then gone into extinction. The authors argue that "energetic constraints and pervasive selection for larger size (Cope's rule) in carnivores lead to dietary specialization (hypercarnivory) and increased vulnerability to extinction." They explain that Cope's rule — the evolutionary trend toward larger size — is common in mammals because larger size makes it easier to evade predators and to capture prey. Moreover, larger size improves thermal efficiency, thus increasing the potential range of habitats into colder areas. As the size of carnivores increases beyond about 45 pounds, the amount of nutrition obtained from small prey becomes inadequate to cover the energy used in capturing them. Thus the larger carnivores became what the authors call "hypercarnivores," which hunt only large prey (as large as or larger than themselves). A plot of the index of hypercarnivory (PCI score) against estimated species duration shows that none of the hypercarnivorous species persisted for more than 6 million years, as compared to other, more omnivorous species that lasted as long as 11 million years. Hence, the authors propose, the hypercarnivores are more vulnerable to extinction. The researchers also note that hypercarnivores reverting to a more generalized diet and morphology was rare.

Reliance upon a smaller number of large prey increases the statistical variation in the nutritional intake. Moreover, the larger the carnivore, the lower their population density. Both of these are factors that increase the risk of extinction.

It is interesting that the government of the United States and of its constituent states are moving rapidly in the direction of targeting large prey, with an increasing statistical variance in the yearly revenue from these relatively small number of prey. The federal government relies heavily on a steeply progressive income tax (with the well-known result that the bottom 50% of income earners pay only 4% of income taxes). Relying upon the fat targets at the highest levels of earnings has resulted in greater statistical variation in revenues, as well as increasing demand for government services from those paying little or nothing for them. Worse yet, today's government is already preying upon the fat targets of the future by rapidly increasing government debt, something canids never had the option to do.

We suggest, therefore, that hypercarnivory may be one reason that democracies don't last much longer than about 200 years. If we start counting from the passage of the 16th Amendment on Feb. 3, 1913 (which provided the means to target most of the large prey via unlimited progressive income taxation) rather than from 1787, the United States theoretically could last another century or so, though for reasons given below we think it unlikely. — Sandy Shaw and Durk Pearson

Fictional Characters Welcome O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Bennett BOSTON — The Tartuffe Society, an organization of hypocritical characters drawn from the world's greatest literature, has voted to admit Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill Bennett as its newest two-faced, sanctimonious members. It marks the first time that the society, named after Moli�re's unctuous, conniving religious dissembler Tartuffe, has ever admitted real people. "Actually, their public facade is so blatantly phony that they're essentially fictional characters just like the rest of us," said the Rev. Elmer Gantry, who joined after being invented by Sinclair Lewis in the 1920s. He was seconded by Uriah Heep, a member since the mid-19th century, who said, "Dickens made me up out of thin air, but these American Uriah Heeps made themselves up out of hot air." All three of the new American members are known for the thundering, hectoring self-righteousness of their public pronouncements and their published books. After Bennett, the author of tracts and well-paid speeches berating contemporary Americans for their self-indulgence, admitted last year to being addicted to gambling after losing millions of dollars in Atlantic City and Las Vegas over a ten-year period, and Limbaugh, who has called for severe punishment of drug users, confessed to being addicted to painkillers that investigators believe he may have obtained illegally, O'Reilly, the seething, frothing host of "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News, was accused by a female producer at Fox of sexual harassment, consisting of repeated phone-sex calls to her in which he seemed to be obsessed with vibrators, lesbian scenarios, and masturbation. Several long-time members have quietly resisted admitting the three noisy Americans into the exclusive society. "At least I was discreet," said one of the first Americans to join, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, who qualified after his treacherous role in Hawthorne's classic "The Scarlet Letter." "And I was thoroughly ashamed of myself," he added. "These bums are brazenly trying to continue their careers as if nothing happened." And the Rev. Davidson, the South Seas missionary who succumbed to Sadie Thompson's charms after relentlessly denouncing her in Somerset Maugham's story "Rain," was also critical of the new members. "This club is supposed to be a quiet place where snakes like us can slink away, out of the public eye," he said. "Can you imagine having to come here and listen to these blowhards ranting all day about how right they are? They're going to give hypocrisy a bad name." — Eric Kenning

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