Results for “Dissertation” 83 found
Which are the greatest dissertations?
Robert Saunders writes to me:
Thanks for posting the Joseph Stiglitz dissertation. It’s always great to see the dissertations of Nobel winners.
For a future post, I thought a good topic might be “best dissertations ever” across fields. Obviously, you’ll know most about economics (assume Nash and Arrow are contenders here?), but I wonder about physics, biology, chemistry, history, etc. Not sure what an English dissertation looks like except in writing (a novel? collection of short stories?), but them, too. Would make for an interesting comments section.
And thanks for the never ending stream of great posts across the years,
In economics Michael Spence on job market signaling comes to mind, as does Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. (Paul Samuelson’s renowned dissertation was mostly a wrong turn for mathematical economics, even though it got the ball rolling.) In English there is Harold Bloom’s doctoral dissertation on Shelley and surely much more. Elsewhere, Marie Curie did something on “radio-active substances” and Jane Goodall covered the chimpanzee. There is Claude Shannon on information, Max Weber on the Protestant Ethic, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. How about Gauss and Turing? Might de Broglie come in first overall?
I’ll say no to Marx’s “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” But how about some of those Russian mathematicians in the mid to late 20th century? They came up with their key contributions quite early in life and I suspect some of those were in their doctoral dissertations.
Libya Dissertation Fact of the Day
From a 2007 PhD Dissertation awarded by the LSE:
This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by the three main actors in global society: governments, civil society and the business sector….
The thesis explains and adopts three philosophical foundations in support of the argument. The first is liberal individualism; the thesis argues that there are strong motivations for free individuals to seek fair terms of cooperation within the necessary constraints of being members of a global society. Drawing on the works of David Hume, John Rawls and Ned McClennen, it elaborates significant self-interested and moral motives that prompt individuals to seek cooperation on fair terms if they expect others to do so. Secondly, it supports a theory of global justice, rejecting the limits of Rawls’s view of international justice based on what he calls ‘peoples’ rather than persons. Thirdly, the thesis adopts and applies David Held’s eight cosmopolitan principles to support the concept and specific structures of ‘Collective Management’.
The author? Saif "we will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet" Gaddafi (son of Muammar).
More background and discussion with David Held, one of his dissertation advisers, here.
Hat tip to Boing Boing.
Weird anecdotes about philosophers connected to Oxford
Here is one:
McTaggart wore his eccentricities with pride. He rode a tricycle. He walked “with a curious shuffle, back to the wall, as if expecting a sudden kick from behind,” a fact that may or may not be explained by his having been bullied at boarding school. He saluted every cat he met. His dissertation for a fellowship at Trinity, later published as Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic; had elicited from that older Apostle, Henry Sidgwick, the remark; “I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense.” Apparently, it was.
That is from Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford 1900-1960. Another recent book dealing with both philosophy and war at Oxford is M.W. Rowe’s very thorough J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer. Here is that book’s best weird philosopher anecdote:
Robert Paul Wolff noted Quine’s frequent lack of small talk, and his tactics for brushing off unwanted questioners, but his deeper doubts were crystallized by an incident some years later:
“Quine obviously had a sensual side to his nature to complement his intellect, as his attractive second wife and his love of food and jazz attested. But I always thought there was some element of humanity missing from his makeup that gave him a rather cold aura. Quine had just returned from a trip to Germany — this was not fifteen years after the war remember — and he was describing a tour he had taken of SS torture chambers. He exhibited an eerie fascination with the technical efficiency of the facility that struck me as devoid of any real human appreciation of its demonic purpose.”
But at Oxford, Quine was perfectly charming, and his erudition and accomplishments — besides logic and jazz, he was an expert on maps, widely travelled, and said to speak eight languages — ensured considerable social success…
As for the broader book, I had not known the extent to which Austin was a significant and highly successful intelligence officer. It is a very good book if you are interested in hundreds of pages on this topic.
Monday assorted links
1. Big changes in energy and climate policy over the last five years, a list.
2. My 2014 post on immigration, and cosmopolitanism at the margin. And my 2005 post “Tyler Cowen pretends he is a Democrat.”
3. Dustin Sebell reviews the BAP dissertation (persist and you can get to the actual review).
4. WaPo runs a front page story about the first freed American hostage, so I am linking to it.
Sunday assorted links
*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*
That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP. It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory. It has been selling very well.
It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation. The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.
I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold. Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”
In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict. You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become! People spend so much time not having sex. Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic. Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting. If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.
Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”
That seems obviously false. There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.” For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future. Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.
In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks. Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit? (Compared to what? Has the author spent too much time at Yale? It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)
We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world. Frazer enters with the Golden Bough. What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon. What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others. I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world. The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.
The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well. And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed. But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way. Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck? I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.
Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?
I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized. The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.
By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.” On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily. Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.
There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.
BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…” For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Is the human brain just a matter of scale? For a while now, I’ve thought that whales might be smarter than we are. And how do sperm whales talk to each other?
2. North Korean missile silo developments.
3. Gavin Leech surveys the “insane” who have blogged a lot and for a long time.
4. Robin Hanson isn’t afraid (with Richard Hanania).
5. “Can we improve how we identify and develop mathematical talent among youth? With generous support from @AgencyFund, we’re excited to launch a new one-year dissertation fellowship for up to four PhD students in economics or economics-adjacent fields on this topic.” From Heidi Williams.
6. A report on Próspera, by Próspera.
7. Group of very smart (but largely non-elite) economists write an open letter to Jeffrey Sachs. #contrast
The economic contributions of Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke is best known for being Fed chairman, but he has a long and distinguished research career of great influence. Here are some of his contributions:
1. In a series of papers, often with Alan Blinder, Bernanke argued that “credit and money” are a better leading indicator than money alone. And more generally he helped us rethink the money-income correlation that was so promoted by Milton Friedman. This work was more correct than not, but since money as a leading indicator has fallen out of favor (partially because of Bernanke’s own later actions!), these contributions are seen as less important than was the case for about fifteen years. See also this piece on the (earlier) import of the federal funds rate as a measure of monetary policy. Ben’s body of work on money and credit was what first brought him renown.
2. Bernanke has a famous 1983 paper on how the breakdown of financial intermediation was a key component of the Great Depression. Earlier, Milton Friedman had stressed the import of the contraction of the money supply, but Bernanke’s work led to a much richer picture of how the collapse happened. Savers were cut off from borrowers, due to bank failures, and the economy could not mobilize its capital very effectively. This article also shows the integration between Bernanke’s work and that of Diamond and Dybvig. This piece has held up very well.
3. Bernanke has related work, with Gertler, Gilchrist and others, on how financial problems can worsen a business cycle. This work of course fed into his later decisions as chairman of the Fed. In yet other work, Bernanke showed how economic downturns can lower the value of collateral, thus squeezing the lending process and exacerbating business cycle downturns.
4. Bernanke’s doctoral dissertation was on the concepts of option value and irreversible investment. Modest increases in business uncertainty can cause big drops in investment, due to the desire to wait, exercise “option value,” and sample more information. This work was published in the QJE in 1983. I have long felt Bernanke does not receive enough credit for this particular idea, which later was fleshed out by Pindyck and Rubinfeld.
5. Bernanke wrote plenty of pieces — this one with Mishkin — on inflation targeting as a new means of conducting monetary policy. Those were the days! Much of the OECD lived under this regime for a few decades.
6. Here is Ben with co-authors: “We first document that essentially all the U.S. recessions of the past thirty years have been preceded by both oil price increases and a tightening of monetary policy…” Uh-oh!
7. Here is 2004 Ben on what to do when an economy hits the zero lower bound. Here is Ben on earlier Japanese monetary policy, and what he called their “self-induced paralysis” at the zero bound. He really was in training for the Fed job all those years. Here is Ben on “The Great Moderation.” Here is 1990 Ben on clearing and settlement during the 1987 crash.
8. Ben has made major contributions to our understanding of how the gold standard and international deflationary pressures induced the Great Depression, transmitted it across borders, and made it much worse. This work has held up very well and is now part of the mainstream account. And more here.
9. Bernanke coined the term “global savings glut.”
Here is all the Swedish information on the researchers and their work. I haven’t read these yet, but they are usually very well done. Here is Ben on scholar.google.com.
In sum, Ben is a broad and impressive thinker and researcher. This prize is obviously deserved. In my admittedly unorthodox opinion, his most important work is historical and on the Great Depression.
Direct Instruction Produces Large Gains in Learning, Kenya Edition
In an important new paper, Can Education be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti and Owen Ozier evaluate Bridge International schools using a large randomized experiment. Twenty five thousand Kenyan students applied for 10,000 scholarships to Bridge International and the scholarships were given out by lottery.
Kenyan pupils who won a lottery for two-year scholarships to attend schools employing a highly-structured and standardized approach to pedagogy and school management learned more than students who applied for, but did not win, scholarships.
After being enrolled at these schools for two years, primary-school pupils gained approximately the equivalent of 0.89 extra years of schooling (0.81 standard deviations), while in pre-primary grades, pupils gained the equivalent of 1.48 additional years of schooling (1.35 standard deviations).
These are very large gains. Put simply, children in the Bridge programs learnt approximately three years worth of material in just two years! Now, I know what you are thinking. We have all seen examples of high-quality, expensive educational interventions that don’t scale–that was the point of my post Heroes are Not Replicable and see also my recent discussion of the Perry Preschool project–but it’s important to understand the backstory of the Bridge study. Bridge Academy uses Direct Instruction and Direct Instruction scales! We know this from hundreds of studies. In 2018 I wrote (no indent):
What if I told you that there is a method of education which significantly raises achievement, has been shown to work for students of a wide range of abilities, races, and socio-economic levels and has been shown to be superior to other methods of instruction in hundreds of tests?….I am reminded of this by the just-published, The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research which, based on an analysis of 328 studies using 413 study designs examining outcomes in reading, math, language, other academic subjects, and affective measures (such as self-esteem), concludes:
…Our results support earlier reviews of the DI effectiveness literature. The estimated effects were consistently positive. Most estimates would be considered medium to large using the criteria generally used in the psychological literature and substantially larger than the criterion of .25 typically used in education research (Tallmadge, 1977). Using the criteria recently suggested by Lipsey et al. (2012), 6 of the 10 baseline estimates and 8 of the 10 adjusted estimates in the reduced models would be considered huge. All but one of the remaining six estimates would be considered large. Only 1 of the 20 estimates, although positive, might be seen as educationally insignificant.
…The strong positive results were similar across the 50 years of data; in articles, dissertations, and gray literature; across different types of research designs, assessments, outcome measures, and methods of calculating effects; across different types of samples and locales, student poverty status, race-ethnicity, at-risk status, and grade; across subjects and programs; after the intervention ceased; with researchers or teachers delivering the intervention; with experimental or usual comparison programs; and when other analytic methods, a broader sample, or other control variables were used.
Indeed, in 2015 I pointed to Bridge International as an important, large, and growing set of schools that use Direct Instruction to create low-cost, high quality private schools in the developing world. The Bridge schools, which have been backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, have been controversial which is one reason the Kenyan results are important.
One source of controversy is that Bridge teachers have less formal education and training than public school teachers. But Brdige teachers need less formal education because they are following a script and are closely monitored. DI isn’t designed for heroes, it’s designed for ordinary mortals motivated by ordinary incentives.
School heads are trained to observe teachers twice daily, recording information on adherence to the detailed teaching plans and interaction with pupils. School heads are given their own detailed scripts for teacher observation, including guidance for preparing for the observation, what teacher behaviors to watch for while observing, and how to provide feedback. School heads are instructed to additionally conduct a 15 minute follow up on the same day to check whether teachers incorporated the feedback and enter their scores through a digital system. The presence of the scripts thus transforms and simplifies the task of classroom observation and provision of feedback to teachers. Bridge also standardizes a range of other processes from school construction to financial management.
Teachers are observed twice daily! The model is thus education as a factory with extensive quality control–which is why teachers don’t like DI–but standardization, scale, and factory production make civilization possible. How many bespoke products do you buy? The idea that education should be bespoke gets things entirely backward because that means that you can’t apply what you learn about what works at scale–Heroes are Not Replicable–and thus you don’t get the benefits of refinement, evolution, and continuous improvement that the factory model provides. I quoted Ian Ayres in 2007:
“The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says.” As a result they have fought it tooth and nail so that “Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market.”
Direct Instruction is evidence-based instruction that is formalized, codified, and implemented at scale. There is a big opportunity in the developing world to apply the lessons of Direct Instruction and accelerate achievement. Many schools in the developed world would also be improved by DI methods.
Addendum 1: The research brief to the paper, from which I have quoted, is a short but very good introduction to the results of the paper and also to Direct Instruction more generally.
Addendum 2: A surprising number of people over the years have thanked me for recommending DI co-founder Siegfried Engelmann’s Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
Greg Caskey, GMU job candidate
Greg Caskey is my student and a Ph.D. Candidate in his 4th year. He focuses on applied microeconomics, economic development, and political economy, particularly regarding the role of China in the developing world. His job market paper, “Chinese Development Lending & the Amplification Effect”, examines the effects of Chinese official lending and foreign aid upon the political institutions of 100+ developing nations. Using a variety of estimators on panel data over the period of 2002-2017, he finds an “amplification effect” with respect to Chinese development flows. While Chinese aid amplifies the existing institutional orientation of both autocratic and democratic recipient nations, this effect exhibits a greater magnitude in autocracies, as sampled autocratic recipients become more autocratic in their institutional orientation, relative to sampled democratic recipients becoming more democratic.
His dissertation is Three Essays on the Role of China in the Developing World, and one chapter considers Chinese policy toward the Uighurs. Greg has several publications and also revise-and-resubmits at good journals, please let me know if you would like my letter of recommendation for him! He is a great teacher too with lots of experience.
A few observations on my latest podcast with Amia Srinivasan
I am reluctant to do this, as I have never offered ex post commentary on a Conversations with Tyler before. It seems unfair to the guest (who may or may not have comparable platforms), and perhaps it is the guest who deserves the last word? Still, I think I can at least try to clear up a few misunderstandings about the episode, as I see a number of important points at stake here. So here goes, with some trepidation:
1. The number, frequency, and extremity of reactions to the episode, both on Twitter and in the MR comments section, I think shows that women simply have a much, much tougher time in the public sphere. There is a much smaller intellectual and emotional space they are allowed to inhabit comfortably and without condemnation or excess judgment. Had the episode been with a man, and had been comprised of the exact same words, it would not have received nearly the same attention or criticism. But people don’t like women who argue back. I realize that is a kind of cliche, but it is largely true.
In this regard, even if you largely disagree with Amia Srinivasan, you should take the strength of the reaction to the episode as a sign she might have a valid point after all.
And to put it bluntly, if said female guest plausibly can be perceived as attractive, the reaction will be all the more disproportionate.
2. Some listeners are teed off about “disabled individuals” vs. “disabled men.” I’ve committed numerous tongue and memory slips in my time, and they are hardly ever pointed out. Now you might be upset that she insisted I said “men” (when I didn’t), but in fact my interior monologue at the time was something like this: “We all know this is mostly about men. But if I just say “men,” she will react to that word and drive the conversation in a different direction. So I will say “individuals.”” Maybe she gets points for insight?
3. If I challenge a guest directly, it is typically a sign of intellectual respect for said guest or person (just ask Bryan Caplan, though perhaps by this point he has suffered too much?). And if the guest comes back at me forcefully, I usually (and consistently) take that as a sign of respect. If I don’t seem frustrated, it is because I am not.
4. If a guest challenges my questions (or indeed anyone’s questions) for having sexist premises, I don’t consider this an illegitimate response. I may or may not agree, but I don’t think it should upset me (or you). I think a lot of people’s questions have for instance highly statist or collectivist premises (and should not). I may or may not be right, but surely that too is a response deserving of consideration, should I decide to raise it.
5. To be fully forthright, if you wish to hear my “negative take” on her responses, I don’t think she was very good at handling empirical evidence in the context of a discussion, and furthermore this is a major shortcoming. I find this to be common amongst philosophers, if I may be allowed to continue my moment of condescension. I also had the feeling she is not challenged sufficiently often with said evidence, and that may partly be the fault of Oxford. This is exactly the point where I feel bad/uncertain offering ex post commentary on the episode, but still leaving off this opinion would not be offering my honest assessment of what happened.
6. I have studied her work carefully, including reading her doctoral dissertation and some undergraduate work, and I then and still now fully believe she will be one of the more important philosophers over the next few decades. As I mentioned before, super-impressive in terms of combining intellect, depth, breadth, determination, and relevance, plus has the all-important “willing to put oneself out there.” And if you don’t trust me as talent-spotter, dare I point out that Oxford University has a not too shabby history choosing and developing philosophical talent? But to return a bit to boasting, I think my relatively strong ability to differentiate emotional response from the talent judgment is in fact one reason to trust my talent judgments.
7. You have to learn to learn from people who bother, annoy, or frustrate you. If you do, they will not in fact bother, annoy, or frustrate you. One central point under consideration is her view that even today in the Western or also Nordic countries, the treatment of women (among other groups) could plausibly be much, much better, and with general emancipatory effects for many other groups as well. You may or may not agree, but is that such a crazy question to ponder and think through? No.
So I thought it was a good episode. I would gladly do another one with her someday, and I hope the feeling is mutual.
What I’ve been reading
1. Russ Banham, The Fight for Fairfax: Private Citizens and Public Policymaking. A well-informed story of the great men and women who built up Fairfax County, Virginia, including Til Hazel, Sid Dewberry, Earle Williams, Jack Herrity, George Johnson, Dwight Schar, and others. WWNN: “We were never NIMBY!” It is striking how much the key builders were not born as elites.
2. Dan Levy, Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard professor Richard Zeckhauser. How many of us will end up getting books such as this in our honor? If you are curious, Zeckhauser’s three maxims for personal life are: “There are some things you just don’t want to know,” “If you focus on people’s shortcomings, you’ll always be disappointed,” and “Practice asynchronous reciprocity.” Zeckhauser, by the way, was on my dissertation committee.
3. Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present. Could this be the best history of Central Asia? The author takes special care to tie the region to the histories of Russia and China, the author seeming to have a specialization in Russian history, and for me that makes the entire enterprise far more intelligible. Useful for Xinjiang history as well, here is one useful review of the book.
4. Paul Greenhalgh, Ceramic: Art and Civilisation. Picture book! Need I say more? And a big one.
Edward J. Watts, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. How has the decline of Rome been discussed and analyzed throughout the ages, including by the Romans themselves?
Loyd Grossman, The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome. Has all the virtues of a picture book, but the price of a regular book. With the common educated public, Bernini is still probably underrated.
Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The billion dollar story of Silicon Valley is the new Stripe Press reprint.
Seth David Radwell, American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secrets to Healing Our Nation. This is not a book written for me, but it is nonetheless good to see someone putting forward Enlightenment ideals as a solution to our problems.
Are young or old lives worth more?
Jeremy Horpedahl and Bryan Caplan debate this topic, with Jeremy pointing out that older, wealthier people can have just as high a willingness to pay to reduce risk, if not higher.
In all things Covid I usually agree with Jeremy, though in this case I side with Bryan’s conclusion (though he doesn’t explain well why he is correct).
For purposes of simplicity, let us consider purely selfish individuals and move to the case where the “p” of death will be equal to one if the “risk” is not avoided. And make capital markets perfect. Then both young and old will then pony up the full value of their prospective human capital to avoid death. The lives with more human capital will be worth more, at least according to economic standards. Young lives usually will be worth more than old lives, though of course highly productive older people might count for more if the higher productivity outweighs the smaller number of years left. You might prefer to save fifty-year-old Thomas Schelling over the life of a forty-year-old who is doing less.
This is so far quite intuitive, again noting these are economic judgments not final moral judgments (which will be more contentious and bring in many additional considerations). Furthermore, you can scale down these numbers, and adjust for risk-aversion, to cover mortality risks much lower than p = 1.
Now consider some older people who have a lot of wealth but very little human capital. These (selfish) individuals still will pay a lot to avoid death or risk of death, but in essence there is an externality. They treat their wealth as “disappearing with their death” when in reality that wealth simply is transferred to others. Therefore they overspend to keep themselves around on planet earth, and they will overpay for risk reduction.
So the lives of high wealth, low human capital individuals, including older individuals, are overweighted by traditional economic metrics, given that “naive” WTP measures do not adjust for the “wealth transfer upon death” externality. That is some but by no means all of the elderly. Their willingness to pay for risk reduction may be as high as the WTP of the young, but in social terms that does not mean their lives are equally valuable.
In sum, check your WTP calculations against human capital intuitions.
The first version of this argument appeared in my dissertation, though it has surfaced a few times since, including in some QJE pieces.
And if you would like some homework for your spare time, try solving for the conditions under which selfish individuals, but living in families, can make intra-family trades to internalize these wealth transfer externalities.
Robert B. Wilson, Nobel Laureate
Here is his home page. He has been at Stanford Business School since 1964, and born in Geneva, Nebraska. Here is his personal website. Here is his Wikipedia page. He has a doctorate in business administration from Harvard, but actually no economics Ph.D. (bravo!) Here is the Nobel designation.
Most of all Wilson is an economic theorist, doing much of his most influential work in or around the 1980s. He is a little hard to google (no, he did not work with Philip Glass), but here are his best-cited papers. To be clear, he won mainly for his work in auction theory and practice, covered by Alex here. But here is some information about the rest of his highly illustrious career.
He and David Kreps wrote a very famous paper about deterrence. Basically an incumbent wishes to develop a reputation for being tough with potential entrants, so as to keep them out of the market. This was one of the most influential papers of the 1980s, and it also helped to revive some of the potential intellectual case for antitrust activism. Here is Wilson’s survey article on strategic approaches to entry deterrence.
Wilson has a famous paper with Kreps, Milgrom, and Roberts. They show how a multi-period prisoner’s dilemma might sustain cooperating rather than “Finking” if there is asymmetric information about types and behavior. This paper increased estimates of the stability of tit-for-tat strategies, if only because with uncertainty you might end up in a highly rewarding loop of ongoing cooperation. This combination of authors is referred to as the “Gang of Four,” given their common interests at the time and some common ties to Stanford.
His 1982 piece with David Kreps on “sequential equilibria” was oh so influential on game theory, here is the abstract:
We propose a new criterion for equilibria of extensive games, in the spirit of Selten’s perfectness criteria. This criterion requires that players’ strategies be sequentially rational: Every decision must be part of an optimal strategy for the remainder of the game. This entails specification of players’ beliefs concerning how the game has evolved for each information set, including information sets off the equilibrium path. The properties of sequential equilibria are developed; in particular, we study the topological structure of the set of sequential equilibria. The connections with Selten’s trembling-hand perfect equilibria are given.
Here is a more readable exposition of the idea. This was part of a major effort to figure out how people actually would play in games, and which kinds of solution concepts economists should put into their models. I don’t think the matter ever was settled, and arguably it has been superseded by behavioral and computational and evolutionary approaches, but Wilson was part of the peak period of applying pure theory to this problem and this might have been the most important theory piece in that whole tradition.
From Wikipedia:
Wilson’s paper “The Theory of the Syndicates,”JSTOR 1909607 which was published in Econometrica in 1968 influenced a whole generation of students from economics, finance, and accounting. The paper poses a fundamental question: Under what conditions does the expected utility representation describe the behavior of a group of individuals who choose lotteries and share risk in a Pareto-optimal way?
Link here, this was a contribution to social choice theory and fed into Oliver Hart’s later work on when shareholder unanimity for a corporation would hold. It also connects to the later Milgrom work, some of it with Wilson, on when people will agree about the value of assets.
Here is Wilson’s book on non-linear pricing: “What do phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and railroad tariffs all have in common? They are all examples of nonlinear pricing. Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased. The Electric Power Research Institute has commissioned Robert Wilson to review the various facets of nonlinear pricing.” Yes, he is a business school guy. Here is his survey article on electric power pricing, a whole separate direction of his research.
Here is his 1989 law review article about Pennzoil vs. Texaco, with Robert H. Mnookin.
Wilson also did a piece with Gul and Sonnenschein, laying out the different implications of various game-theoretic conjectures for the Coase conjecture, namely the claim that a durable goods monopolist will end up having to sell at competitive prices, due to the patience of consumers and their unwillingness to buy at higher prices.
Wilson was the dissertation advisor of Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Laureate, and here the two interview each other, recommended. Excerpt:
Wilson: As an MBA student in 1960, I wrote a class report on how to bid in an auction that got a failing grade because it was not “managerial.”
And here is an Alvin Roth blog post on the prize and the intellectual lineage.
The bottom line? If you are a theorist, Stockholm is telling you to build up some practical applications — at the very least pull something out of your closet and sell it on eBay! A lot of people thought Roberts and maybe Kreps would be in on this Prize, but they are not. The selections themselves are clearly deserving and have been “in play” for many years in the Nobel discussions. But again, we see the committee drawing clear and distinct lines.
Let’s see what they do next year!
An epidemiologist (who is also an economist) responds
Matthew Bonds, who is at Harvard, wrote this response to my original post on epidemiologists. I am offering it in its entirety, click here.
Here is the first paragraph:
Since the novel coronavirus outbreak turned into a global health and economic crisis, one of the few silver linings has been unprecedented collaboration across spheres of science, innovation, and policy that have potential for long-term benefits. My training is in economics (PhD) and ecology (PhD) with a specialty in infectious disease modeling. Over the past decade, I have focused on implementing global health delivery programs where the lack of models and technical solutions are rarely the biggest problem – instead, the challenge often lies with breakdowns in the systems of delivering those solutions. That is not the case with COVID-19. We do not have solutions at our fingertips. We do not know the full scope of the problem, and consequently how to best navigate policy tradeoffs. So, I was dismayed to read, “What does this economist think of epidemiologists?” by Tyler Cowen, which struck me as a reinforcement (maybe even a celebration?) of boundaries that do more harm than good.
Do read the whole thing, and note that Bonds wrote his economics dissertation with Dwight Lee (a former co-author of mine) at the University of Georgia. Here is the home page of Matthew Bonds.