“This is a story some economists like to tell . . .”

I was thinking more about the this story, where a series of economists took an story based on someone’s childhood memories and elaborated upon it in different ways until it eventually appeared in a major journal in the field. A few years after that, enough people got irritated that the journal ran a correction:

There is an error in “Self-Control at Work” (Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan 2015), published in the October 2015 edition of this journal (vol. 123, no. 6). In section VI, on page 1274, the paper includes the following incorrect quote from a paper by Steven N. S. Cheung:

The second view—that joint production necessitates the need for monitoring (Alchian and Demsetz 1972)—is summarized in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

While the incorrect quote also appears in other earlier sources, it does not appear in Cheung’s original article. [For example, the incorrect version of the quote also appears in Jensen et al. (1998).]

The accurate quotation from Cheung (1983, 8) is as follows:

My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them. The point here is that even if every puller were perfectly “honest,” it would still be too costly to measure the effort each has contributed to the movement of the boat, but to choose a different measurement agreeable to all would be so difficult that the arbitration of an agent is essential.

The inaccurate quote was included simply as a way to illustrate the idea that joint production might necessitate the need for monitoring. . . . However, the quote is in no way central to the core point of the paper, or even for the discussion in section VI of the paper. . . . Consequently, this incorrect quote can be omitted from the paper without any impact on the substance of the paper.

To start with, the story was changed in many important ways! To call this an “incorrect quote” is an extreme understatement of what happened here. Second, that last bit about removal having no impact on the substance—it makes me wonder why it was included in the article at all. Surely it must have some impact, no?

After reading through the comments to the above-linked post and thinking more about this, I think I’ve come up with an answer.

How was the story changed?

The revised story has several elaborations, most of which seem like the result of unthinking ignorance:

– Changing from an unspecified river to the Yangtze: That’s the #1 river that Americans think of, when they hear about a river in China. According to the original teller of the story, it was a “journey from Liuzhou to Guiping,” which according to the map is not near the Yangtze. Kind of like how that buffoonish business-school professor took a story about the Alps and moved it to Switzerland.

– Changing from the 20th century to the 19th: The scenario sounds old-fashioned, so the storyteller unthinkingly moves it back in time.

– Introducing the word “coolie”: Adding this slur contributes to placing the story in the more distant past. We wouldn’t refer to a modern worker as a coolie, partly because it’s rude but also because it’s an old-fashioned word to use, even descriptively.

– Adding the physical description, “burly”: This is the kind of detail that can make a story seem more real; also, “burly” is another old-fashioned word, again placing the story back in the mists of time.

– Changing from riverboat pullers to oarsmen: A boat being rowed is more familiar than a boat being pulled, so if you’re telling from memory a story that you’ve never fully visualized, you might unthinkingly make that change.

But three of the elaborations are particularly striking because they don’t just elaborate the story, they also make it more compatible with the usual ideology of academic economists:

– Changing from “the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them” to “the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging”: In this new version, the workers actually own the boat. As independent agents—owners of capital, in fact!—these workers are now unambiguously hiring the whipper out of their own free will, not acting out of some desperate economic necessity.

– Adding the “titled English woman”: At first this elaboration might seem the most puzzling, as it transforms a Chinese refugee into an upper-class foreigner, introducing an entirely new element to the story. From the economists’ perspective, though, it’s perfect, as this upper-class twit is a perfect foil to the down-to-earth economists who understand the real world (as here and here, for example).

– Adding the bit where the woman “complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen”: This bit helps to make the woman unsympathetic (she “complains”; it is her host who gets to “explain”) and also reinforces the idea of the economists as taboo-busters who can marshal the cold facts to support apparent “cruelty.”

Whether or not the story is “central to the core point of the paper,” it does seem central to a certain way that economists often present themselves, and I do think some reflection on their part is in order.

What should the correction notice have said?

As discussed earlier, I was unsatisfied by the original correction notice (“this incorrect quote can be omitted from the paper without any impact on the substance of the paper”), both because “incorrect quote” doesn’t begin to describe the many ways that the story from Cheung (1983, 8) was changed, and second because . . . what does it mean that they included this story that had no impact on the substance? That’s not usually done in academic articles, is it? Even a story is merely illustrative, the fact that it presumably actually happened is relevant, no? To put it another way, if the best story you can use to illustrate a point is a made-up story, that in itself should be telling you something.

Actually, the quote is not inaccurate at all! It’s a direct quote from one of the practice exam questions in Jensen et al. (1998). The inaccuracy was in the attribution to Cheung and, indirectly, in repeating a highly-distorted version of a story without noting the distortion.

In any case, I think the inclusion of this ridiculous story in the published article is informative. Not directly informative on the economic theory described in the paper, but indirectly informative, in that this fake-o story about the “titled English woman” has spread widely among economists—indeed, so widely that the authors write, “the incorrect quote [sic] also appears in other earlier sources,” and so widely that they didn’t even think to check it, they just blindly attributed it to Cheung (1983, 8). A story so well known it didn’t need to be checked.

Now that’s interesting to me—that this elaborate story, originally based on someone’s childhood memory and then transposed to a different part of China, in a different century, with an entirely different cast of characters, became common currency in some academic circles.

It’s interesting what people will believe without questioning, if it fits with their model of the world. In this case, hard-nosed economists, self-employed laborers, boat rowing on the Yangtze, and, as a foil, a soft-hearted upper-class reformer who doesn’t understand the real world.

So here’s what I think the correction notice should have said:

In our paper, we attributed to Cheung (1983, 8) a story that actually appeared in Jensen et al. (1998). The Chung (1983) story is:

My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.

Further background is supplied by Chung (2018):

In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen!

Here is the story as printed in Jensen et al. (1998), which is a collection of practice exam questions:

On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging. (Source: Steven Chung [sic].) Explain why such an organizational arrangement would arise voluntarily.

This differs from Cheung’s original version in several minor ways (moving the location from Guangxi to the Yangtze river, changing the time from the twentieth to the nineteenth century, changing from boat pulling to rowing, and adding the colorful phrase “burly coolie”) and in a few major ways (stating that the laborers were owners of the boat, which was not in the original story, changing the female character from a Chinese refugee to a “titled English woman,” having the woman “complain,” and adding a new character whose job is to explain the situation to her.

This is a story some economists like to tell. Our retelling of this story that so neatly fits our theoretical model, without reflection on the story’s fictional nature, perhaps reflects an excess of faith on our part, and suggests we should be careful when trying to apply this model to the real world.

That would do it. Or, if such a correction would be too long, here’s something shorter, to the point, and without defensiveness:

In our paper, we attributed to Cheung (1983, 8) a story that actually appeared in Jensen et al. (1998), which is a collection of practice exam questions. The story as related by Jensen et al. and copied by us is a much distorted version of Cheung (1983), which according to Cheung (2018) derives from a memory of a story told to him as a child.

They could leave it to the readers to decide whether this error affected the substance of the paper.