all a farce

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? (by us, overeducated, underexperienced, putzy beings confused as hell, like a child wandering into a theater, except that this theater is, in actuality, the harshest job market in 30 years, and instead of children, we’re ostensibly adults, albeit ones who have been institutionalized for the entire duration of our existence to this point)

(Title reappropriated from the reappropriation by Lenin)

This is a post about careers, life, liberty, law, and lobsters, flushing out some ideas I’ve held in my mind-vice for far too long. The logic goes that the best way to rigorously define an idea is to force yourself to put it into concrete form. The second best way is to blog it. I’ve chosen a hybrid form.

I would honestly and sincerely love any constructive feedback, in particular empirical criticism, proposed analytical strengthening, or related thinking and work on this subject that I should consider.

-Dave

A proposed analytical framework for career evaluation criteria (or, consider the lobster)

I shall argue that there are three criteria that we should use in evaluating potential career paths (or, minimally, as a framework for nixing options). I shall attempt to do so with a minor sense of humor, wit, and aplomb. And if I fail, I assure you it is not for want of caffeine.

Three criteria for evaluating a career:

1. Day-to-day enjoyment

How much do I enjoy the day-to-day work? Really! When I’m sitting, doing this job, do I hate life? Am I plotting my elaborate vengeance against God/Loki/Fate/Bill for this? Or do I kinda like it? Do I find myself wanting to go back to it after lunch, or work through lunch because it’s got me all riled up in a good way?

2. Impact

What impact, how impactful, and how important is that impact relative to others? And here I’m referring to *my marginal contribution*, not some nebulous output, like what my organization does, either chiefly or secondarily. I’m talking about the fact that my being at work this month and working hard yields what difference in the world. Put another way, both Philip Morris and the Gates Foundation have accountants (I’m guessing the pay grades are somewhat different; though, on second thought, maybe not).

3. Compensation

What standard of living do I want? What’s the minimum that would keep me satisfied, if I’m trading off for the other criteria? Does this career put me on a path to make enough when I’m forty that I’m also happy then with my compensation? (KIDS, UGH.) What things outside my work do I find joyful, and would my compensation allow for that? (Musicians shouldn’t be professionals; that’s not just on practical grounds. It’s an argument for another day, but an important one.)

Let’s get complicated!

Now, here’s the tough part: how you rank these really is up to you. There’s no straight-and-narrow answer, and be extremely wary of anyone who suggests otherwise. There’s a great deal of money in convincing people their own rank-order of these isn’t right [1][2]. That’s because, ultimately, this decision process is almost entirely governed by two rather tenuous factors: (1) ethical/moral questions which have no objectively “best” answers, and (2) empirical assessments of causation (aka, the-way-the-world-works) that are, at best, tenuous generalizations based on low-quality data and, at worst, dart throws.

The ethical questions are, honestly, quite tough. Read from the Greeks up through Hume all the way on through Rawls — being sure not to skip Bentham and Mill — and you’ll begin to see how the questions might well be legitimately construed as intellectual sinkholes when confronting a practical question like whose cube to reside for 9 hours tomorrow [3]. So I’ve gotten to the point of endorsing the Google approach: don’t be evil [4]. That’s pretty much the only criterion here that I really apply to other people in judgement: if they’re doing evil, know they’re doing evil, but are okay with that, the judgement-eyes come out. Otherwise, let people be. We’re all neurotic apes whose brains developed under conditions where contemplating the effect of one’s actions on more than a 50-being cohort was never an issue, so give folks a break. Unless they’re being evil. Then JUDGEMENT-EYES.

The empirical questions are, in theory, more tractable, but practically similar in difficulty. My paltry academic background is as a student of political economy: how the disparate logics of government, markets, and organizational complexity (overlapping both) can produce social value, and which structures serve to best produce the heterogeneous goods sought by people working frantically to achieve some sense of vague contentment. And the truth, in my humble opinion, is that the space for uncertainty in an empirical assessment of the impact of a given gig (from task on up to role and institution) is #$*#ing big. Really. Just *@#-all huge.

Think of the elements comprising the social safety net, generally provided by some combination of public sector bureaucracies (requiring such a scale to implement such programs for such large populations) and private philanthropic organizations. If you take some end (let’s say, domestic hunger reduction), there’s a behemoth causal logic to how that good (food) is provided. Food stamps are provided by a public sector actor, but the beneficiaries purchase goods sold by private market actors.

Hrm: so do I work for the USDA? Do I work in OMB? Or do I rise in a massive-growth food supplier that exploits economies of scale to lower food prices? What’s, honestly, my marginal impact from within if it’s profit-maximizing and there’s pretty much one way to do that? What if there are two ways? Argh.

And in this complex interaction, we also find that the question arises of quality versus quality. Was our goal keeping people satiated and safe of the sensation of hunger? Cheetos and soda do a great job of that, and at a great price! Unfortunately, as it turns out, our implicit operationalization of “hunger reduction” might had more to it. What about the decade-old Walmart argument? (Walmart brings in cheaper goods, and is a great boon for low-income communities, except that the boon need be discounted by whatever offsetting impact it has on employment. This — despite what either bureaucrats, lobbyists, academics, or advocates will state — is really, really hard to know.)

And once you start thinking with serious intellectual honesty about the production of social value, you start to realize that (1) unitary command and its concomitant big marginal impact for a given individual’s efforts is extraordinarily rare, and (2) where there *does* exist such big individual marginal impact, it’s largely governed by much bigger structural constraints that are, again, stochastic (or probabilistic). As an example, likely the biggest impact on SNAP (food stamps) would be a significant upping of funding and laxing of eligibility criteria. And if you watch enough West Wing, sure, you can see situations at a big negotiating table where Josh could make that happen. But what external political factors set up who was at the negotiating table? (Should we, then, like many eschew the programmatic/policy work for political ops, if that’s the larger governing factor? How much of election outcomes are genuinely about the efforts of the partisans versus bigger things, like, say, jobs? Should I then work at the Fed and try to push for… BAH.) Also, what had to be given up, and who does that affect? What’s the offset?

So: another intellectual sinkhole, albeit a more tractable one.

So, wait, uh, then, what *is* to be done?

Now that we’ve done our good job as undergraduate thinkers by deconstructing each proposition by negative argument [insert Foucault allusion/joke/knock], let’s get back to the positive side. We started with a proposed framework for evaluative criteria: enjoyment, impact, and compensation. Even admitting the complexity of the choice, we can at least use this framework to *eliminate* some career paths. For example: I believe quite firmly (and the NYT has, most recently, been disseminating the Good Word to the masses) that law school is a trap.

It’s a system of profound market failure that exploits the fact that most kids leaving undergrad don’t have *any* analytical framework beyond the broadly-held social heuristics and cognitive tactics that have gotten them through to this point. The problem is that all the little tricks and approaches to problems that working one’s way up in the institutional hierarchy of school imposes upon you — through positive/negative behavioral reinforcement — aren’t particularly helpful in the work-world, much less in the bizarre, certainly unique task of choosing a career. The problem does not bear the contours [5] of any practical problem or decision that people have had to make up to this point, least of all because it’s about broader life questions that are all but held constant by the institutional track we’re guided down.

Let’s get back to the specific case of law school since it’s just oh-so-much-fun. I recommend reading the above linked articles to get a better sense of the stylized empirics, but the synopsis goes like this: if you get into a top 10 school, want to do Big Law where you’re overworked but highly-compensated, or willing to do public-service work with low-compensation, *and* you intrinsically enjoy the work that lawyers practically do [6], then maybe go to law school. Otherwise, do something else. Really. The starting salary distribution of bimodal — one peak around $115k (Big Law) and one peak around $60k (everyone else). The lower peak is, once discounted by the debt repayment, a quite crappy return on your investment. Most people from upper middle class backgrounds who take for granted said lifestyle will be disappointed by the lifestyle afforded by a JD.  Combine that with the fact that attorneys consistently rank among the lowest in terms of self-reported job satisfaction, and the fact that most of law is not profoundly impactful (and that which is on the margin is often not compensated well at all), and you have the makings of a low score from our framework.

Just to be pedagogically sound (or pedantic), let’s review. A JD is, pretty much, a bifurcated good: Good A, the top-tier school (or best at not-top-tier school), or Good B, a not-top-tier degree [7]. Good A scores poorly on enjoyment, but well on *either* compensation or impact, though rarely both. Good B scores poorly on all 3 counts. So, to be incredibly, profoundly, almost stupidly simplistic: a top-tier JD scores 1/3, and a low-tier scores 0/3. This bodes poorly.

So what does this say? What it says to me first is that the old social heuristic that a law degree is a good straight-shot to the upper middle class is neither empirically accurate [8] nor a good choice if you go beyond the implicit values there (i.e., upper middle class compensation and status are the key metrics) and apply a broader judgement that includes values like impact and enjoyment.

And that’s a big message I’d like to convey: social heuristics are lagging, not leading, indicators. Don’t do what your parents would have you do; their data’s probably old. This, however, is the substance of a future argument.

I want to emphasize that I don’t blame people who go to law school at all: everyone’s faced the same terrible job market out of undergrad, and social heuristics have traditionally been very useful because good data was, traditionally, so expensive to acquire. What’s more, law schools are a cottage industry created by the confluence of a few distinct failures: federal guarantee of all student loans and the aid package structuring, federal law allowing student debt to remain even after bankruptcy, and the high-margin revenue model of such schools (which can be ethically justified in oh so many ways [9] by the academic administrators who seek to cross-subsidize the oh-so-unfortunate humanities departments, inter alia, doing so much uncompensated good for Knowledge).

But it doesn’t obviate a proposition I quite earnestly believe: if people thought more seriously about what they wanted out of a career as a part of life, the vast majority of people currently pursuing that path would not do so. This in turn would mean demand for law degrees (i.e., the willingness of people to attend such schools at such a price) would fall, and maybe — just maybe — this 

Thus endeth the pedantic sermon from the Mount (or, to use a more appropriate geographical metaphor, the Valley) of No-Debt.

Okay, great; nice rant; but you still didn’t answer my question, schmuck

Fair enough. I’ll be honest. I’m not going to answer your question. I may have (*just* may have) misled you intentionally with the title, implying that I could resolve your existential angst in short order with but one blog post. I can’t do that. What I *can* do, is suggest a way to approach the problem that, I think, is relatively efficient, intellectually honest, and as rigorous as a poorly-defined problem can accommodate.

1. Set your goals

Figure out what values matter to you, figure out a way to honestly assess jobs/careers in light of these values, and then go.

2. Collect data

The world is much more transparent than it was even 5 years ago; “operationalizing” these broad values into tangible data (taking an idea and making it into something measurable) that you can collect and compare is easier than it has ever been, and only getting easier by the year/day/hour. The Bureau of Labor Statistics rules. So I say: go with Gauss, my son.

3. Critically assess everything

People are paid to influence actions; the job choice is, actually, arguably the biggest case of this phenomenon [10]. When you hear an argument, think about why it’s being made, and who/what end your buying it would serve. A nice rule of thumb (OH NO, A HEURISTIC) I’ve found is if a statement someone is making goes against their own interest in a situation, give it a bit more weight [11]. Or, more concisely, always be asking: “Cui bono?”

4. Don’t stress

Do you have food? Shelter? Maybe health insurance or just access to a free clinic? Then stop worrying. You’re still in the highest echelon of wealth in the world and, in fact, in human history. In the hierarchy of human needs, yours are almost certainly met. So relax, take your time, and think before jumping. There’s really no rush.

Potential future related posts:

- The supply-demand dynamics of the career market (or, why being selfish ain’t so bad, as long as you’re also being honest with yourself, and not evil)

- Social heuristics are lagging, not leading, indicators

- Law services: structural supply transformation, commodification, and, oh crap, I’m underwater on my loans

- Developing an efficient search algorithm for careers (what makes for a good early-career job, and why is that choice different from the career choice)

- Don’t network, just geek out

- Let them wear Prada: living off capitalism’s leftovers

Endnotes:

[1] Take the HR reps at an Ivy League career fair: do you really think every kid who goes Analyst at [Input: I-Bank/Consulting Firm] really believes in the impact of their role or the day-to-day enjoyment *isn’t* a meaningful evaluative metric when he or she steps into the (pristine) banquet hall? Hardly. But there’s a lot of money in being able to recruit kids who have shown themselves willing and able to be worked to the bones on things of trivial ultimate consequence/enjoyment (read: winning the Ivy League admissions tournament out of high school). Why? If one of your core value propositions is the ability to get a client question answered out of a Thursday evening meeting by the Monday market opening, you require people who will not simply up and refuse when you call them away from their niece’s first birthday to crunch Nebraskan municipal bond data that’s, at best, tangentially relevant to what the client will ultimately decide. (But always overdeliver: especially when you can do it on the back of someone else’s labors. This, my friends, is a foundational MBA approach.) But if this is a product your firm offers, then you require that scalable labor; heavily-indebted Ivy League graduates without any tangible skillset beyond general intelligence, meticulous attention to detail, and sleep-deprivation endurance represent the commodity tier of the symbolic analyst labor market. James Kwak has a nice piece on the Ivy League graduate’s mentality if you’re further interested in entertaining this rant.

[2] Similarly, do not underestimate the *non-monetary* incentive for people to try and re-work your life choices. People, particularly those well into their careers with no hope of movement, are possessed of an intrinsic psychological drive to affirm their own choices. This manifests itself in the questioning of others’ without much consideration for divergent values, or hierarchical ranking of values like the above. The next time a tenured professor tells you you should really consider the academic route, ask her what the tenure-track placement rates for her advisees were this past year. (Actually, don’t ask that just then. Ask someone who doesn’t have the ability to scuttle your future with a bad letter of rec.)

[3] Consider, for example, that there is no formal, rigorous philosophical proof affirming the notion of the counterfactual. If you set the bar that high, it turns out most of normative social science is in fact underspecified and invalid. Bummer. I guess kids who get the question on opportunity costs wrong on their Econ 1 final are actually the raw material of moral philosophers; or zen masters; or maybe just alcoholics, hard to parse out the causal chain here since there’s bound to be heterogeneity.

[4] Editorial note: love the sort of engineering mentality implicit here; specify your function only to the level of practical utility.

[5] Worse yet is when it looks to one like a problem that one has confronted before. But one is wrong. Oh, lord, how wrong.

[6] This is *not* the work of law school itself. Perhaps my favorite joke on this matter is that there are two types of lawyers: those who loved law school but hate practicing law, and those who hated law school and hate practicing law.

[7] Note a big advantage for applicants is that you more or less know where you’ll end up before committing to the cost. That said, we’re assuming applicants aren’t already emotionally committed having fought the annoying battle of the LSAT, recommendation, and admissions game. I’d like to hope people would see these sunk costs as such, but, hey, I’d be pissed too and might make an irrational choice after so much work and annoyance.

[8] Seriously. Look at the salary data for recent grads, *not* historical earnings.

[9] This is not to say these are good, rigorous, or intellectually honest justifications, but hey, that’s not their job.

[10] I’m tempted to get straight-up political here, and go all Weber, with some ideology and Protestant ethic and yadayada — but I’ll hold back.

[11] I swear to God, if someone makes criticizes me for borrowing from law in this regard, and concomitantly being a hypocrite, I will lose my #%@&: I did not pay $120,000 to learn the statement-against-interest exception, nor is it anything more than sheer common sense, a.k.a., the business school literature.

Giving thanks in the eye of the shit storm

(My friend Brian asked me to post this, an e-mail I sent to friends today. I’ve tried to take this day each year and provide some context for why the thought-act of gratefulness is not only important, but why the nihilism and jadedness pervasive in our society needs to stop for a moment, at the very least once a year. -DG)
—-
My dear friends,

Most of us were born in the 1980’s; most of us were either born — or found ourselves shortly thereafter — in the United States. On the whole, we occupy the most prosperous segment of the most prosperous country at the most prosperous time in global history. I do not mean to diminish the hardships we face, simply to contextualize that, of all the forces outside our control which determine our lives, we enjoy by far the least catastrophic.

And it’s worth noting two stylized facts here: first, that while we are privileged enough to be far from the prospect of catastrophe, we aren’t that far; second, that none of this we owe to our own cleverness, hard work, or perseverance — we are the beneficiaries of blind luck, of historical accident and our antecedents’ missteps.

And given our privileged position, we forget that freedom from imminent destruction is the greatest gift: and a relatively recent blessing, at that.

1914 to 1918 — three generations ago: our grandparents’ parents. The first “great war” left 10 million dead; 10 million maimed; 10 million lightly injured.

1937 to 1945 — two generations ago: our grandparents. By the end of the catastrophe, 40 million in Europe were dead by violence or starvation, with about 10 million in Asia. All told, this would be like wiping out South Africa (or Spain, or South Korea) today. Fewer than half of those killed in the war were soldiers. 1 in 8 Soviet citizens were killed — 23 million people (that would be Australia today). 1 in 6 Poles. 70% of the European Jewish population.

The Great Leap Forward (our parents’ generation): 30 million. The First Congo War (our generation): 4 million. Sudan (ongoing): 1-2 million.

The point is the people who experienced this had no agency, choice, or control in the matter. There is no justifying rationale — ethical, moral, or even purely explanatory. They were casualties of collective nightmares brought on by random chance.

Then there is the luck of material circumstance.

If you make $26,000 this year, you’re in the top 10% of global wealth today. If you make $35,000, you’re in the top 5%; $50,000, the top 1%. And this is not because we are intrinsically smarter, or harder-working, or somehow more deserving than the other 90% of the world.

We were handed education, and English, and access to the US labor market — things people are (today, right now) risking their lives in the desert border areas, or in container shipping crates, to get (and not for themselves, but for their kids).

So I ask that you give thanks: day, night, and yet again.

Our hardships and our challenges are real. We will have trouble finding fulfilling jobs; we’ll wonder what we’re doing day-to-day and why; we will have to fix the unsustainable things in our lives and our country; we will bicker and misunderstand and even think (at times) that we hate each other.

But these, truly, are luxuries.

I love you all, and appreciate the heck out of having you in my life. And I wish you the happiest and most fantastic of Thanksgiving holidays.

And I ask one more thing: that you watch this.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccj2BH25c0I

Your friend,
Dave


(Many of the historical figures here are taken from the work of Brad Delong, available at: http://delong.typepad.com )

Economics in its right place.

[Warning: This post is one, among many I’ve drafted in past years, attempting to delineate my views on the economics field and its proper aims. Reading this post may be damaging to your research ambitions and/or baseline serotonin levels.]

The economics discipline is marketed as teaching its pupils how to see the assumptions underlying a statement or argument – given some conclusion, the well-taught student should be able to locate, in short order: (1) the empirical claims that are implicitly relied upon, and (2) the value judgments and weighing-of-goals that are applied in the case of a prescriptive/normative conclusion. Economics shares the struggle with epistemological issues encountered by all social scientists – the fundamental unknowability of the social world; the phenomenology of observation; the feedback mechanism from our construction of the social world into the operating dynamics of said social world. But it attempts to parse out the causal chains in those things which we can measure – if imperfectly, then hopefully consistently.

In this way, economics is an engineering subdiscipline: one dedicated to understanding the mechanics of simulations and models of reality, rather than some fundamental, and fundamentally consistent, reality itself. And there is great use in this aim. As decisionmakers and agents of society are forced to act with imperfect and incomplete models of the social world in mind, deepening our understanding of how these models work is important work.

The economist, therefore, contributes most to the field by one of three pursuits of labor: (A) narrowing the gap between known-reality and reality by the improvement of measures (the expansion of the scope of the category “the measurable world”, which is the object of social scientists); (B) maintaining the internal consistency (logical rigor) of our understanding of (i) causal relationships (models), and (ii) possible internal dynamics (this being the chief aim of Theory/mathematical economics)*; and, (C) improving our models by composing new ones – better fit to the data in A, or more specified in their elimination of possible coexisting logics per B.

This – to my mind, and perhaps to that of Thom Yorke – is economics in its right place.

* On the latter count, let me rant for a moment: I find myself increasingly arguing with those enamored of Theory. The reasons are simple:  first, they take a mathematical modeling of agents (firms, individuals, economies) to be empirically descriptive prima facie, when in fact they are simply studies in feasibility; a formal model only proves that given certain conditions, some outcomes are logically (mathematically) consistent – which is to say, possible – and others are logically inconsistent – which is to say, impossible; second, being failed mathematicians/physicists, they feel a certain superiority over us mere technocrats who limit our scope and are constantly aware of the costs of attempting to expand beyond our domain of the measurable-world; another way of putting this is that they are happier being wrong, and concomitantly damaging to the world, but published; in physics and mathematics, such idiocy is tolerated because the human cost of High Theory on the everyman is low; in economics, it should not be, and the moral philosophers among us have failed in our lack of righteous indignation; to paraphrase a masterful script, Boondock Saints, it is not the evil of bad men we are to fear most, but rather the indifference of good men.

The truth can’t be messaged.

Ezra Klein on why the deficit freeze means we (wonks) lost the battle over the price of health insurance reform:

[Y]ou can’t look at this as anything less than a tremendous defeat for the Obama administration. It’s not the policy itself. The freeze locks in a post-stimulus, and potentially post-jobs-bill, level of spending. It’s not terribly onerous. But it’s also the administration’s white flag on the argument that the deficit must be understood as a health-care reform problem rather than a taxes and spending problem. This was their most audacious effort to change the way Americans think, and it didn’t work. For all the effort Democrats put into building a health-care bill that cuts the deficit, a full 60 percent of Americans think (pdf) the legislation increases the deficit. Only 15 percent think it’s a deficit reducer.

Agreed.

But the failure is not for lack of trying. It’s for the fact that it’s much easier to message “Democrats are doing this, this costs money, increases the deficit, and the CBO is being gamed” than to message “this costs money now, but saves money later (and some of those savings are not scoreable by CBO’s normal methods); the short-term deficit is a non-issue (in the context of current monetary conditions/prevailing Treasury rates), and the medium- and long-term deficits—reasonable people think—are helped by this, or are at least better than the trajectory of doing nothing; and, yes, some components are scheduled in certain years to get certain scoring from the CBO, but it’s a minor issue relative to the total projected savings, and the savings all reasonable people think will accrue in the out years.”

What we have here is the failure of (our best guess at) truth to be legible.

[Please also note my great self-control in not making a “massage”/”message” & “truth” pun.]

California has ceased to make sense.

Acting Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency Thursday in five California counties, including San Francisco, where the week’s storms battered away the shoreline so badly officials had to close the Great Highway. The declaration clears the way for state assistance in hard-hit areas.

Okay, wait— what? Hold on a second: acting Governor Jerry Brown?

Brown is filling in for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is in Washington, D.C. No lieutenant governor has been confirmed since John Garamendi was elected to Congress in November.

Honest to god — I thought this was clever political satire, or a profoundly subtle (but droll) commentary on the sad state of the gubernatorial race.

But apparently California politics is so profoundly bizarre that we have the Governor of 30 years ago calling a state of emergency in place of the action hero who is busy in Washington confusing our twin Senators for one another; and, this is all because we don’t have a Lt Gov, still unconfirmed because, if he gets confirmed, no budget deal can be made; BUT, if the Dems hold it up too long then he won’t go along with a budget deal regardless…

I’d continue, but, I swear to god, I’m starting to confuse myself.

Addendum: it is now completely legitimate to refer to Jerry Brown as any member of the Christmas Carol trinity.

“Ghost of Governors-Past, -Present, and -Future”

Questions worth investigating: budget scoring and bill-authoring pressure

Paul Krugman has me thinking about the efficiency and equity of the proposed excise tax on insurance. But his call to vary the “Cadillac plan” tax-deductible ceiling by region and age got me pondering a more abstract question: are complex tax structures (even when more efficient and equitable) more politically challenging in the Upton Sinclairesque* factory floor we call the legislative process?

And so I present another episode of the Dave-patented, internet-approved serial QUESTIONS WORTH INVESTIGATING, with the requisite stylistic nod to John Hodgman.

How does the institutionalization of budget scoring impact the content of bills?

This leads to more intriguing component questions:

1. Does a CBO-like institution incentivize particular fiscal structures over others (on both the revenue and cost sides)?
2. Is there greater incentive to make these budgetary structures simpler (thereby easier to score) or to make them more complex (obscuring potential costs)?
3. Does budget-scoring disincentivize efficient tax structures simply due to the uncertainty and political costs of scoring complex bills (e.g., actuarial calculations that are costly to produce) or is it the contrary/no effect?
4. Is there a big distinction between national [CBO] scores and state-level fiscal notes?
5. What is the variation across states? What institutional or methodological differences foster this?
6. How has the CBO shaped fiscal structures of bills over time?

Question #3 seems to me both the most salient from a policymaking perspective, as well as the most interesting (and yes, the question is a tad leading, but only for scope purposes).

My Peets-fueled impressionistic answer would be that it is more likely for efficient-but-complex structures to suffer strong disincentives at the state-level, for two reasons:

• State-level fiscal analysts have fewer and less-advanced forecasting resources available to them.
• Fiscal cost is more politically dangerous at the state-level during deficits because, well, they can’t just fire up the printing presses. So the devil you know (easily forecasted costs) may be more easily passed than the devil you don’t — admittedly this is the core assumption, and it could push the ball either way.

* Yes, I’m calling the Senate unsanitary; the House, however, easily wins in terms of pungency.