Author Archive
Opening Lines You’re Glad You Didn’t Write
| Dick Langlois |
Now here is an opening line you will be glad you didn’t write. (From our local newspaper, the Willimantic Chronicle, November 25, 2009.)
WINDHAM — After being vacant for six years, former Windham First Selectman Jean de Smet appointed two co-town historians to preserve and share their knowledge about the town.
This is especially funny in light of the controversial character of de Smet’s administration, although vacancy wasn’t among the complaints, and indeed increased vacancy actually might have improved things. (She was elected on the Green Party slate.)
I have added this article to my file of amusing pedagogical examples of faulty agreement and misplaced clauses. Here are two of my favorites from that file, one from the UConn Daily Campus and another from the Chronicle.
The Igon Value of Football
| Dick Langlois |
My last post implicitly lauds the science reporting of the New York Times. And I think they generally do a good job. But, still basking in the glow of UConn’s remarkable football win over Notre Dame on Saturday, I am reminded of a — presumably unintentionally — funny bit of science reporting recently in the Times. Reporter Alan Schwartz has been waging a (perhaps justified) campaign about the problem of head-injury risk in football. In one article last month, he quotes a neurosurgeon on the physics of football collisions.
“I go back to Einstein and E = mc2,” said Julian Bailes, a former Pittsburgh Steelers neurosurgeon and one of the leading researchers in the neurological effects of football concussions. “The players are definitely much more massive and that’s one factor. But you have 300-pound linemen running 4.3s — and that factor is squared. The impacts that players face today, not just the big ones that everyone sees but the routine ones in the trenches, is what really worries me.”
Converting the mass of a 100Kg football player (light by NFL standards) into energy according to the Einstein formula would yield about 2,000 megatons of energy, probably enough to cause head trauma even in an NFL lineman. (It is the quoted source who makes the mistake, but the reporter and his editors didn’t catch it or at least didn’t remark on it or change it.)
When I was in high school, the assistant football coach was also the physics teacher. He tried to psych us up for one game against (as always) a bigger and more talented opponent by quoting the correct version of the mechanics of collision — energy goes up as the square of your velocity, not the square of the speed of light. How fast you get going, he was telling us, is much more important than the weight of the opponent. I found this a refreshing change from the usual cliché about the manner in which the opposing players were likely to don their athletic supporters. But under the circumstances, and especially as I was one of the few who had any idea what he was talking about, I declined to point out that smacking into another football player is an inelastic collision, so energy isn’t conserved. Momentum is always conserved, but that’s linear in both mass and velocity. I didn’t play football very seriously or for very long, but I am happy to blame the experience for my increasing mental lapses as I grow older.
Extra point. By the way, the inelastic collision pictured above is between Notre Dame running back Armando Allen and UConn middle linebacker Greg Lloyd (son of the former Pittsburgh Steeler of the same name) at the goal line on Saturday. UConn won the game in the second overtime. In college football, each overtime session allows both teams a single possession from the 25-yard line. In the first overtime, both teams scored a touchdown and an extra point. In the second overtime, UConn held ND to a field goal and then scored a touchdown on their turn, thus winning the game. This differs from the professional rule: sudden death. On Sunday, the Patriots beat the Jets in overtime because they won the coin toss and then quickly got close enough to score a field goal. Thus, in the pro game, the coin flip determines the outcome with high probability, a circumstances that rightly causes consternation among fans. Economists have suggested auctioning off possession in overtime, with the currency being the field position from which you are willing to start. At the very least, they ought to use something like the college system.
The Igon Value of Cognitive Dissonance
| Dick Langlois |
Some of you may have seen Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book in the New York Times this weekend. Pinker praises Gladwell’s writing and his instinct for interesting topics, but skewers him for his bad grasp of the underlying science of what he writes about, especially statistics. In Pinker’s view, Gladwell is in the end a character from one of his own essays, “a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.” One blunder seems to epitomize Pinker’s assessment: Gladwell’s report on an expert who talks of “igon values” instead of eigenvalues. Pinker call this the igon value effect.
As I read this, I thought back to a department seminar I had attended a couple of days earlier. Keith Chen from Yale gave one of the most dazzling presentations I’ve heard in a long time. He basically demolished 45 years of experimental results in social psychology that claim to have discovered cognitive dissonance in choices. According to this literature, it is among the best-documented results in psychology that people change their preferences after making a choice so as to rationalize the choice and make themselves feel better about their decision. Chen argues — persuasively — that essentially all these results are statistical artifacts. At a much more sophisticated level, social psychologists have fallen victim to the igon value effect. Here is the abstract of a working paper, though it gives only a hint of how clever this research is.
Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested this suffers from a fundamental methodological flaw. Specifically, these studies (and the free-choice methodology they employ) implicitly assume that before choices are made, a subject’s preferences can be measured perfectly, i.e. with infinite precision, and under-appreciate that a subject’s choices reflect their preferences. Because of this, existing methods will mistakenly identify cognitive dissonance when there is none. This problem survives all controls present in the literature, including control groups, high and low dissonance conditions, and comparisons of dissonance across cultures or affirmation levels. The bias this problem produces can be fixed, and correctly interpreted several prominent studies actually reject the presence of choice-induced dissonance in their subjects. This suggests that mere choice may not be enough to induce rationalization, a reversal that may significantly change the way we think about cognitive dissonance as a whole.
Chen was also written up in the New York Times last year.
Oh, and by the way, that was our second seminar of the day. Earlier we listened to Bob Lucas, whom the grad students brought in to give a major lecture. (First time I had met him.) He talked about his paper in the inaugural issue of the new AEA macro journal: “Trade and the Diffusion of the Industrial Revolution.” (There wasn’t actually much trade in it.) Lucas and I had a nice conversation at lunch about Jane Jacobs, who we agreed was fantastic. “She was a theorist!” was Lucas’s assessment. High praise.
The Limits of Antitrust Revisited
| Dick Langlois |
I also just returned from an interesting conference, this one at the Searle Center at Northwestern Law School. The topic was the 25th anniversary of Frank Easterbrook’s 1984 paper “The Limits of Antitrust.” Here’s the agenda. I don’t think the papers are all available online, but the plan is to publish them eventually.
Thursday, October 29th
Welcome and Introduction
Henry N. Butler, Executive Director, Searle Center on Law, Regulation and Economic Growth
Opening Remarks: “The Limits of Antitrust” and the Chicago School Tradition, George Priest, Yale Law School
Session One – Easterbrook on Errors, Fred S. McChesney, Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law, Northwestern Law
Session Two – The Limits of Antitrust in the New Economy, Joshua D. Wright, George Mason University School of Law, and Geoffrey A. Manne, Lewis & Clark Law School and ICLE .
Dinner Keynote Address: Ronald A. Cass, Dean Emeritus, Boston University School of Law.
Friday, October 30th
Session Three – The Limits To Simplifying the Application of Current U.S. Antitrust Law, Richard S. Markovits, John B. Connally Chair, University of Texas at Austin, School of Law.
Session Four – Microsoft and the Limits of Antitrust, William H. Page, Marshall M. Criser Eminent Scholar, University of Florida, Levin College of Law.
Closing Remarks: Hon. Frank H. Easterbrook, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Making and Unmaking Economic Orders
| Dick Langlois |
The new issue of the online journal Capitalism and Society has a number of articles that should interest readers of this blog. Each is probably deserving of its own post. (Ah, but time prohibits.)
Jon Elster has a piece called “Excessive Ambitions” that criticizes not only mainstream rational-choice models (as we would expect from Elster) but also modeling in general. Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg have a piece that applies something like Leijonhufvud’s “corridor” to risk regulation: when swings of asset values are small, government should stay out, since such swings are actually beneficial; but when asset prices get too far from “underlying values,” government regulation is called for.
My favorite paper is by Thorbjørn Knudsen and Richard Swedberg. Here’s the abstract:
This is a theoretical paper in which we attempt to present an economic and sociological theory of entrepreneurship. We start from Schumpeter’s idea in Theory of Economic Development that the economy can be conceptualized as a combination and innovations as new combinations. Schumpeter also spoke of resistance to entrepreneurship. By linking the ideas of combination and resistance, we are in a position to suggest a theory of capitalist entrepreneurship. An existing combination, we propose, can be understood as a social formation with its own cohesion and resistance — what may be called an economic order. Actors know how to act; and profit is low and even in these orders. Entrepreneurship, in contrast, breaks them up by creating new ways of doing things and, in doing so, produces entrepreneurial profit. This profit inspires imitators until a new order for how to do things has been established; and profit has become low and even once more. Entrepreneurship is defined as the act of creating a new combination that ends one economic order and clears the way for a new one. The implications of this approach for a number of topics related to entrepreneurship are also discussed.
This has some affinities to arguments I have made in the past. I am thanked in the acknowledgements, presumably for conversations that Richard and I had at a Schumpeter conference at Harvard last year; but I’m not cited. (Assume sad-faced emoticon here.)
I will talk about the fourth paper in the issue soon in a separate post.
Ripped from the Headlines
| Dick Langlois |
In my European Economic History class this morning, I was talking about the medieval open-field system. As I always do, I made Ostrom’s point that the medieval open fields were not an example of the tragedy of the commons and were not over grazed. And, in talking about Carl Dahlman’s “hold-up” theory of scattering in the open fields, I got to work in Williamson. I told my students: I bet you didn’t expect that a lecture in medieval economic history would be ripped from the headlines.
So I add my congratulations to Olly and Elinor. I don’t know Olly as well as Peter does, but I have known him since the early 80s, when he participated in the conferences that led to my 1986 book, in which he has a chapter. I have met Elinor a couple of times, most recently at a small gathering at the Max Planck Institute in Jena.
Bentham and Hume in the West Wing
| Dick Langlois |
From a perhaps uncharacteristic source — David Brooks at the New York Times — comes a funny and spot-on column about Bentham and Hume as present-day DC policy advisors.
The people on Mr. Bentham’s side believe that government can get actively involved in organizing innovation. . . . The people on Mr. Hume’s side believe government should actively tilt the playing field to promote social goods and set off decentralized networks of reform, but they don’t think government knows enough to intimately organize dynamic innovation.
So let’s have the debate. But before we do, let’s understand that Mr. Bentham is going to win. The lobbyists love Bentham’s intricacies and his stacks of spending proposals, which they need in order to advance their agendas. If you want to pass anything through Congress, Bentham’s your man.
QWERTY in the Long Run
| Dick Langlois |
The new issue of Industrial and Corporate Change has an article by Andreas Reinstaller and Werner Hölzl called “Big Causes and Small Events: QWERTY and the Mechanization of Office Work.” Although it’s an interesting paper in many respects, I think it fails in its avowed aim to defend Paul David against the attack of Liebowitz and Margolis. Mostly, they don’t get L&M right (and explicitly get them wrong in footnote 1). The issue is whether the QWERTY keyboard is an example of what L&M call “third-degree” path dependency, that, is path dependency leading to an outcome that is both regrettable ex post and would somehow have been remediable ex ante. The criterion of “remediable” to R&H seems to be whether contemporaries “knew about” superior alternatives. That’s not quite right, of course: the real issue is whether any alternative institutional structure could have done a better job of choosing a standard under the conditions of knowledge at the time. Their only example is the existence of a French “Ideal” keyboard layout (which some people “knew about”) that was swept aside by the tidal wave of the American QWERTY standard (and became AZERTY in France). But they have no evidence about how much better this keyboard was — or if it was better at all. In footnote 1 they cite Donald Norman’s interesting book on design to the effect that the Dvorak keyboard is 10 per cent faster than QWERTY. But (A) Norman’s point in the book is how insignificant this difference is and (B) that doesn’t demonstrate third-degree path dependency, since no one “knew about” the Dvorak keyboard until Dvorak invented it (an extremely laborious process, according to Norman).
Again, I don’t want to be too hard on R&H: I think there’s a lot that’s interesting in the paper, especially the discussion of the mechanization of office work. What really struck me in this context, however, is how irrelevant, or at least dated, the QWERTY saga is. And I say this not for the usual reason: that computers now allow us to have any keyboard layout we like. Rather, what struck me is that the production of documents has long since become demechanized, making even more-than-nominal differences in typing speed irrelevant. Since we now all (or almost all) compose right on the computer, and never send our documents out to the typing pool, manuscript production has become a craft again. What is slowing us down is how quickly we think of something to say, not how fast we can type. And I doubt that, fifties nostalgia notwithstanding, we are unlikely to see the return of the typing pool anytime soon. So, from a historical perspective, QWERTY will have been technically inefficient (though not therefore economically inefficient) only for that brief historical period between the invention of Dvorak and the coming of the personal computer.
The same issue of ICC also has a paper by Ashish Arora and coauthors that’s worth a look.
Not Even the Slightest Soupçon of Correlation
| Dick Langlois |
Another interesting article from the Journal of Wine Economics:
The lead article is again by Robert T. Hodgson, who analyzes the reliability of Gold medals awarded at 13 California Wine Fairs. “An analysis of over 4000 wines entered in 13 U.S. wine competitions shows little concordance among the venues in awarding Gold medals. Of the 2,440 wines entered in more than three competitions, 47 percent received Gold medals, but 84 percent of these same wines also received no award in another competition. Thus, many wines that are viewed as extraordinarily good at some competitions are viewed as below average at others. An analysis of the number of Gold medals received in multiple competitions indicates that the probability of winning a Gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a Gold at another competition, indicating that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone.” The full article can be accessed free of charge at Abstract Full Text (PDF).
Preaching from the Choir
| Dick Langlois |
It’s hard to top Bruce Kogut on the Daily Show. But by sheer coincidence I happened upon a video that offers a quite different perspective on corporate social responsibility.
Another Nanosecond of Fame
| Dick Langlois |
Warm thanks to Art Diamond for his very nice review on eh.net of my book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler and the New Economy. I am most pleased that Art recognizes the book to be primarily theory, albeit with much discussion of economic history and economic ideas.
The History of England and the Future of the Archive
| Dick Langlois |
I just received a newsletter from our Humanities Institute announcing (among other things) a graduate student conference at Yale in February on “The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities.” Here are some of the suggested possible topics:
- The Future of the History of the Book
- Public Humanities
- Determining Irrelevance in the Archive
- Defining the Key-Word
- The Material Object in Archival Research
- Local Knowledge, Global Access
- Digital Afterlives
- Foucault, Derrida, and the Archive
- Database Access Across the Profession
- Mapping and Map-Based Platforms
- Interactive Research
I draw your attention to the fourth from the bottom. It reminds my childhood, which I spent in Catholic schools through twelfth grade: no matter how secular the topic, there had to be at least a perfunctory mention of religion. (We were even encouraged to inscribe JMJ, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, at the top of our papers, though as I recall only the girls actually did this.) In the humanities, there has to be some obeisance to Postmodernism, however irrelevant to the topic.
The newsletter also mentioned, and rightly praised, a fascinating article in the Harvard alumni magazine called “Who Killed the Men of England?” My Scandinavian colleagues may want to take particular note.
Attack of the Public Finance Utility Monsters
| Dick Langlois |
I just saw this amusing abstract from Greg Mankiw. I think it will be far too subtle for most people.
The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution
Should the income tax include a credit for short taxpayers and a surcharge for tall ones? The standard Utilitarian framework for tax analysis answers this question in the affirmative. Moreover, a plausible parameterization using data on height and wages implies a substantial height tax: a tall person earning $50,000 should pay $4,500 more in tax than a short person. One interpretation is that personal attributes correlated with wages should be considered more widely for determining taxes. Alternatively, if policies such as a height tax are rejected, then the standard Utilitarian framework must fail to capture intuitive notions of distributive justice.
Extra credit: how would such a tax affect NBA salaries — like that of UConn’s seven-foot-three Hasheem Thabeet, who was taken number two in the recent draft?
The Zen (or Feng Shui) of Copyright
| Dick Langlois |
Peter blogged some time ago about intellectual property rights in comedy. Turnabout is fair play; and here, in a kind of post-modernist twist, is a comedic take on intellectual property rights — from the Onion.
Intellectual Property Rights as Fleeting as the Scent of Jasmine, Mayfly’s Wing
BEIJING — Settling not on the industrious sons of China, nor on their ware-covered blankets, ownership rights of intellectual property fluttered silently by, unseen, on Monday, as does the gentle mayfly on a warm harvest-time breeze. “Is this a pirated DVD of Transformers 2 dreaming it is an original? Or is it an original Transformers 2 dreaming of an adventurous life as a pirate?” a sidewalk merchant in Tiananmen Square whispered to a moment already gone, as his hands clutched some worldly illusion of the Michael Bay film. “Eight dollars. Plays anywhere in the world.” In their great wisdom, the merchants also carried forth the ancient teachings of Zhuangzi — who spoke of how time is a riddle answered by eternity — to the equally fleeting earthly conceits of trademarked wristwatches, electronics, clothing items, Starbucks, and automobiles.
The piece is part of a new online issue whose conceit is that the Onion has been sold to Chinese interests. It’s quite good — the Onion is at its best when it has an overarching theme, as in the Our Dumb Century book. Of course, one of the multiple layers of meaning in the joke may have to do with the fact that the real magazine actually is apparently up for sale.
Factor-Biased Technological Change
| Dick Langlois |
Back in October, I blogged about Daron Acemoglu’s presentation at the Economic History Association meeting. There now seems to be an NBER working paper version of that talk, called “When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation?” Here is the abstract.
This paper studies the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption. In standard endogenous growth models, which feature a strong scale effect, an increase in the supply of labor encourages technological progress. In contrast, the famous Habakkuk hypothesis in economic history claims that technological progress was more rapid in 19th-century United States than in Britain because of labor scarcity in the former country. Similar ideas are often suggested as possible reasons for why high wages might have encouraged rapid adoption of certain technologies in continental Europe over the past several decades, and as a potential reason for why environmental regulations can spur more rapid innovation. I present a general framework for the analysis of these questions. I define technology as strongly labor saving if the aggregate production function of the economy exhibits decreasing differences in the appropriate index of technology, theta, and labor. Conversely, technology is strongly labor complementary if the production function exhibits increasing differences in theta and labor. The main result of the paper shows that labor scarcity will encourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving. In contrast, labor scarcity will discourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor complementary. I provide examples of environments in which technology can be strongly labor saving and also show that such a result is not possible in certain canonical macroeconomic models. These results clarify the conditions under which labor scarcity and high wages encourage technological advances and the reason why such results were obtained or conjectured in certain settings, but do not always apply in many models used in the growth literature.
Entrepreneurship Exemplars Conference
| Dick Langlois |
The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the UConn business school is sponsoring an “exemplars” conference in conjunction with the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. The idea of the conference is to help young scholars by providing “exemplars” of good scholarship. Editors from the top management and entrepreneurship journals are here (including frequent O&M participant Joe Mahoney) to comment on these exemplar papers and provide advice.
The conference started last night with a keynote by Venkat Venkataraman and continues through Saturday. You can actually participate in the conference online: register here. I am about to wander over (physically, not electronically) to hear Jay Barney’s keynote at 10:50 EDT.
The Book (Value) of Revelations
| Dick Langlois |
Here’s the abstract of the day:
Irrational Exuberance in the U.S. Housing Market: Were Evangelicals Left Behind?
Christopher W. Crowe
Summary: The recent housing bust has reignited interest in psychological theories of speculative excess (Shiller, 2007). I investigate this issue by identifying a segment of the U.S. population — evangelical protestants — that may be less prone to speculative motives, and uncover a significant negative relationship between their population share and house price volatility. Evangelicals’ focus on Biblical prophecy could account for this difference, since it may enable them to interpret otherwise negative events as containing positive news, dampening the response of house prices to shocks. I provide evidence for this channel using a popular internet measure of “prophetic activity” and a 9/11 event study. I also analyze survey data covering religious beliefs and asset holding, and find that ‘end times’ beliefs are associated with a one-third decline in net worth, consistent with these beliefs providing a form of psychic insurance (Scheve and Stasavage, 2006a and 2006b) that reduces asset demand.
Interestingly, the author is with the International Monetary Fund. When I googled to find where I had seen this abstract, the search returned several links pointing out that many Evangelicals consider the IMF (and the World Bank) to be the work of the Devil. (Not a few economists feel this way as well, of course, but wouldn’t put it in quite the same terms.) If you believe the end times are imminent, why would you bother to hold assets at all?
Ferguson on Financial History and the Crash
| Dick Langlois |
I too loved the Ferguson piece in the New York Times. More sound bites: “In the months ahead,” he predicts, “the world will reverberate to the sound of stable doors being shut long after the horses have bolted, and history suggests that many of the new measures will do more harm than good. The classic example is the legislation passed during the British South-Sea Bubble to restrict the formation of joint-stock companies. The so-called Bubble Act of 1720 remained a needless handicap on the British economy for more than a century.”
Skepticism and Greed
| Dick Langlois |
One of my University colleagues, who works in instructional technology, sent a few of us a post from a mailing list-blog at Stanford called Tomorrow’s Professor. The site has a lot of interesting stuff on teaching and the academy, which O&M readers may find interesting. But this particular post, reprinted from a blog at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, prompted me to send in a response. Here is what I said. (Take a look at the original post, but I think you can get the idea from my comment.)
I certainly endorse what I take to be the central idea of post 944 — that students of business and economics would benefit from a liberal education.
Having said that, however, let me also note that I think the post gets things exactly — and perhaps dangerously — backwards in many ways. It is a constant trope in the popular press that the idea of “free markets” is some kind of dogma among economists (and perhaps society more broadly). In fact, economists believe that markets exist only within institutional structures, and economics — even so-called free-market economics — is actually about getting the institutions right, not about letting people do whatever they want.
In my view, moreover, economists are the real skeptics in the academy. Despite his (marketing) claim to being a “rogue” economist, Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame is actually a better model of what most economists do than is Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan. Unlike most other academics, economists are rewarded for taking skeptical and iconoclastic positions, at least when they can back those positions up with hard data and clear analysis.
By contrast, few people outside of economics departments or business schools have any understanding whatever about how and when — or even whether — individual action can lead to beneficial unintended consequences. Economics is actually counter-intuitive in many ways. Humans evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and as a result our intuitions about how a large open society operates are often wrong or backwards.
For all these reasons, it seems to me odd to suggest that economists (and students of economics) are dogmatic and would be made more skeptical and thoughtful about the economy by studying other liberal fields. In my experience, it’s rather the opposite. (Which is not to say, of course, that students won’t benefit in many ways from studying other fields.)
The post itself is a case in point. It starts out in the right direction with a marvelous story from Keynes about the nature of the money supply. But then it goes on to talk about “greed” as the central issue, ending with a quote from Roosevelt that “heedless self-interest” is bad economics. In fact, however, it is pointing to “greed” that is unexamined dogma. Why exactly has the level of greed changed over time? Is that really an explanation of anything? In stark contrast, many professional economists (including such serious scholars of the crisis as John Taylor and Karl Case) would point out that the most fundamental cause of the crisis was the expansive monetary policy of the Fed, which pumped money into the system and caused an asset bubble. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors endowed us with intuitions about greedy individuals; but they didn’t leave us intuitions about how a fiat money system works in a huge economy of non-face-to-face exchange. That we have to learn in an economics course.
There Isn’t Much Spam In It
| Dick Langlois |
A new working paper from the Association of Wine Economists is called “Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?” Here’s the abstract.
Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.
Perhaps the group should broaden its name to the Association of Wine and Hors d’Oeuvre Economists.
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