Raising Children to Be (In-)Tolerant: Influence of Church, Education, and Society on Adolescents' Stance towards Queer People in Germany

There recently was a highly emotional debate in Germany regarding what to teach children about sexual plurality; different actors accuse each other of wrongful indoctrination. This paper presents a computational model based on the results of the SINUS youth study 2016 indicating that the dynamics of adolescents finding their own stance towards sexual plurality are resilient towards external pressure by clerical or government activities. Instead, civil society plays a strong role in the process of children developing their own opinions. This underlines that values in society can be reproduced between generations

Equal chances, unequal outcomes? : Network-based evolutionary learning and the industrial dynamics of superstar firms

With the advent of platform economies and the increasing availability of online price comparisons, many empirical markets now select on relative rather than absolute performance. This feature might give rise to the ‘winner takes all/most’ phenomenon, where tiny initial productivity differences amount to large differences in market shares. We study the effect of heterogeneous initial productivities arising from locally segregated markets on aggregate outcomes, e.g., regarding revenue distributions. Several of those firm-level characteristics follow distributional regularities or ‘scaling laws’ (Brock in Ind Corp Change 8(3):409–446, 1999). Among the most prominent are Zipf’s law describing the largest firms‘ extremely concentrated size distribution and the robustly fat-tailed nature of firm size growth rates, indicating a high frequency of extreme growth events. Dosi et al. (Ind Corp Change 26(2):187–210, 2017b) recently proposed a model of evolutionary learning that can simultaneously explain many of these regularities. We propose a parsimonious extension to their model to examine the effect for deviations in market structure from global competition, implicitly assumed in Dosi et al. (2017b). This extension makes it possible to disentangle the effects of two modes of competition: the global competition for sales and the localised competition for market power, giving rise to industry-specific entry productivity. We find that the empirically well-established combination of ‘superstar firms’ and Zipf tail is consistent only with a knife-edge scenario in the neighbourhood of most intensive local competition. Our model also contests the conventional wisdom derived from a general equilibrium setting that maximum competition leads to minimum concentration of revenue (Silvestre in J Econ Lit 31(1):105–141, 1993). We find that most intensive local competition leads to the highest concentration, whilst the lowest concentration appears for a mild degree of (local) oligopoly. Paradoxically, a level playing field in initial conditions might induce extreme concentration in market outcomes

Redistribution, Social Segregation and Voting Information

This paper examines the puzzle of why economic inequality has not resulted in political countermeasures to mitigate it, and proposes that the reason is due to misperceptions of economic inequality caused by segregation in social networks. We model taxation and voting behavior with an exponential income distribution and a Random Geometric Graph-type model to represent homophily, which leads to people perceiving their own income rank and income to be close to the middle. We find that people base their beliefs about mean income on a weighted sum of the true mean and their local perception in the network, and that higher homophily causes lower implemented tax rates, which explains why redistribution preferences appear decoupled from actual inequality. We suggest two measures to counteract this: educating people about the actual income distribution and promoting diversity to reduce homophily

Pluralist economics in an era of polycrisis

Interacting crises at economic, societal, ecological, and geopolitical levels reveal the fragility of connected global systems and give momentum to pluralist economic thinking as a suitable approach to address the complexity and uncertainty of today’s economy. This special issue (SI) explores how young economists, educated in this era, study economic phenomena through pluralist lenses. Due to the structure of interdependent crises and inherent uncertainty, pluralism of values, theory and methods may benefit the academic and policy debate on solutions for today’s political, social, and scientific challenges. Applied to the crisis context, this SI shows a range of research methods and interdisciplinary approaches, reflecting a shift in economic thinking that embraces the complexity, limited predictability, and fragility of socioeconomic systems. The SI aims to promote a dialogue across schools of economic thought to enhance our understanding and contribute to robust and inclusive policy

Perception and privilege

Inequality perceptions differ along racial and gendered lines. To explain these disparities, we propose an agent-based model of localised perceptions of the gender and racial wage gap in networks. We show that the combination of homophilic graph formation and estimation based on locally limited knowledge can replicate both the underestimation of the gender or racial wage gap that empirical studies find and the well-documented fact that the underprivileged perceive the wage gap to be higher on average and with less bias. Similarly, we demonstrate that the underprivileged perceive overall inequality to be higher on average. In contrast to this qualitative replication, we also show that the effect of homophilic graph formation is quantitatively too strong to account for the empirically observed effect sizes within a recent Israeli sample on perceived gender wage gaps. As a parsimonious extension, we let agents estimate using a composite signal based on local and global information. Our calibration suggests that women place much more weight on the (correct) global signal than men, in line with psychological evidence that people adversely affected by group-based inequities pay more attention to global information about the issue. Our findings suggest that (educational) interventions about the global state of gender equality are much more likely to succeed than information treatments about overall inequality and that these interventions should target the privileged

Soziale Vergleiche und wahrgenommene Ungleichheit

Die öffentliche Wahrnehmung von ökonomischer Ungleichheit ist oft stark verzerrt. Solche Fehlwahrnehmungen haben weitreichende Folgen für verschiedenste ökonomische Fragen und beeinflussen das subjektive Wohlbefinden, Umverteilungspräferenzen sowie Wahl- und Konsumverhalten. Wir schlagen ein Netzwerkmodell vor, das die wesentlichen stilisierten Fakten in Bezug auf solche Fehlwahrnehmungen replizieren kann. Analytisch und mittels Computersimulationen können wir zeigen, dass sie sich ergeben, wenn die einzelnen Akteur*innen von ihrem wahrgenommenen sozialen Netzwerk auf die Gesamtgesellschaft extrapolieren. Ein solcher Effekt ergibt sich immer dann, wenn das soziale Netzwerk Homophilie im Einkommen aufweist, das Netzwerk also nach Einkommen segregiert ist. Es müssen insbesondere keine kognitiven Verzerrungen angenommen werden, sondern verzerrte individuelle Stichproben bei korrekter Wahrnehmung sind hinreichend. In dieser Zusammenfassung unseres Ansatzes stellen wir weiterhin auch die Implikationen dieses Mechanismus für andere Zusammenhänge wie Konsumkaskaden, genderbezogene Ungleichheit und das Wahlverhalten dar

Play Away! Why Cheating is Morally Okay

A lack of faithfulness in romantic relationships is often called a lack of morality. But things become less clear when taking a closer look using Hohfeldian incidents: while it is only supererogatory not to have sex with someone else than one's partner, not prohibiting them from doing so is a moral obligation to protect their liberty to act freely. There is no significant difference between having sex and other activities like playing football or between genuine friendships and good romantic relationships. Thus, the latter should, like the former, focus on the joy and positive feelings both parties can get - with each other or a third one

Raising Children to Be (In-)Tolerant. Influence of Church, Education, and Society on Adolescents' Stance towards Queer People in Germany

There recently was a highly emotional debate in Germany regarding what to teach children about sexual plurality; different actors accuse each other of wrongful indoctrination. This paper presents a computational model based on the results of the SINUS youth study 2016 indicating that the dynamics of adolescents finding their own stance towards sexual plurality are resilient towards external pressure by clerical or government activities. Instead, civil society plays a strong role in the process of children developing their own opinions. This underlines that values in society can be reproduced between generations

Perception and privilege

Inequality perceptions differ along racial and gendered lines. To explain these disparities, we propose an agent-based model of localised perceptions of the gender and racial wage gap in networks. We show that the combination of homophilic graph formation and estimation based on locally limited knowledge can replicate both the underestimation of the gender or racial wage gap that empirical studies find and the well-documented fact that the underprivileged perceive the wage gap to be higher on average and with less bias. Similarly, we demonstrate that the underprivileged perceive overall inequality to be higher on average. In contrast to this qualitative replication, we also show that the effect of homophilic graph formation is quantitatively too strong to account for the empirically observed effect sizes within a recent Israeli sample on perceived gender wage gaps. As a parsimonious extension, we let agents estimate using a composite signal based on local and global information. Our calibration suggests that women place much more weight on the (correct) global signal than men, in line with psychological evidence that people adversely affected by group-based inequities pay more attention to global information about the issue. Our findings suggest that (educational) interventions about the global state of gender equality are much more likely to succeed than information treatments about overall inequality and that these interventions should target the privileged