Results for “wisdom garett jones”
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The wisdom of Garett Jones

by  Tyler Cowen in

Of course this Bloomberg column was inspired by Garett’s work, not to mention Paleo-Caplanianism!  Here is one excerpt, with the focus being on the annoying tendency to label various policies “anti-democratic”:

The danger is that “stuff I agree with” will increasingly be labeled as “democratic,” while anything someone opposes will be called “anti-democratic.” Democracy thus comes to be seen as a way to enact a series of personal preferences rather than a (mostly) beneficial impersonal mechanism for making collective decisions…

It is also harmful to call the Dobbs decision anti-democratic when what you’re really arguing for is greater involvement by the federal government in abortion policy — a defensible view. No one says the Swiss government is “anti-democratic” because it puts so many decisions (for better or worse) into the hands of the cantons. And pointing out that many US state governments are not as democratic as you might prefer does not overturn this logic.

It would be more honest, and more accurate, simply to note that court put the decision into the hands of (imperfectly) democratic state governments, and that you disagree with the decisions of those governments.

By conflating “what’s right” with “what’s democratic,” you may end up fooling yourself about the popularity of your own views. If you attribute the failure of your views to prevail to “non-democratic” or “anti-democratic” forces, you might conclude the world simply needs more majoritarianism, more referenda, more voting.

Those may or may not be correct conclusions. But they should be judged empirically, rather than following from people’s idiosyncratic terminology about what they mean by “democracy” — and, by extension, “anti-democratic.”

I am worried about some of the increasing polarization on this issue.  If you are on “the Left,” and you think various social and policy trends are so immoral, how is it exactly that you avoid becoming yourself “anti-democratic”?  Even though at the same time you are cursing everything you don’t like as “anti-democratic” too?

The wisdom of Garett Jones

by  Tyler Cowen in

On wage subsidies:

True, would likely boost employment rates. But note: if it works, it means current low employment rates are largely supply-side & voluntary.

Here is the link, and here is Garett’s follow-up tweet.  Here are previous installments in the series.

I would note that it is oh so hard for people to keep consistent views on labor markets (e.g., minimum wage vs. wage effects of immigration, or how about minimum wage vs. nominal wage stickiness?).  Those moods and emotions keep on getting in the way…

Words of wisdom from Vitalik Buterin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Both reasoning from behavioral-economic first principles, and my personal experience, people are at their most evil out of fear, not greed. Growth means there is less fear going around.

That is from Vitalik Buterin, reviewing Stubborn Attachments on Twitter.  And this:

I have a different take on “growth is good for harmony” (52-53). Arrow’s theorem doesn’t become more or less true if a conflict is between, say (+5, +1) vs (+1, +5) or (+2, -2) vs (-2, +2). Rather, the reason why the latter is more disharmonious is loss aversion.

And:

Redistributing money to the rich (p88) is risky because the rich are not necessarily aligned with general population. Caring for old people (p91) is valuable not just for the sake of present individuals, but also as a commitment to future old people who are present-day workers.

Here is my earlier Conversation with Vitalik Buterin.  And here is Garett Jones’s tweet storm on the book.

The wisdom of Lee Ohanian

by  Tyler Cowen in

The area has become “the largest region for medical device manufacturing” in the world, says Faulconer, who explains that because of increasingly complex binational supply chains, “sometimes [one product] will cross the border two to three times.” UCLA’s Ohanian pegs the figure far higher: In some cases, he suggests, a product can cross the U.S.-Mexico border an astonishing 14 times before it goes to market. One study suggests that the average good exported from Mexico to the U.S. contains 40-percent American-made components. In the San Diego-Tijuana region, Solar Turbines, Kyocera International and Taylor Guitars are just a few of the companies that have facilities on both sides of the border.

Here is the full article, via the wisdom of Garett Jones.

*Hive Mind*, by Garett Jones

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am very excited to report that next week will see the publication of Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, by my colleague Garrett Jones, with Stanford University Press.  This will go down as one of the social science books of the year.

Here is Garett’s opening paragraph:

This isn’t a book about how to raise IQ: it’s a book about the benefits of raising IQ. And a higher IQ helps in ways you might not have realized: on average, people who do better on standardized tests are more patient, are more cooperative, and have better memories. But while dozens of studies by psychologists and economists have established these links, few researchers have connected the dots to ask what this means for entire nations. And since average test scores vary across nations—whether we’re talking about math tests, literacy tests, or IQ tests—an overall rise in national test scores likely means a rise in the number of more patient, more cooperative, and better-informed citizens. This in turn means that higher national test scores will probably matter in ways too big to ignore. And if education researchers and public health officials can find reliable ways to raise national test scores, productivity and prosperity will rise where poverty and disease now flourish.

Here is chapter one, here are Garett’s chapter summaries.  Here is Garett’s home page.  On Twitter, here you will find The Wisdom of Garett Jones.

Patience and educational achievement

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educational outcomes. The results are impressive, albeit unsettling. In Italy, differing degrees of patience account for two-thirds of the achievement variation across the country’s regions. In the US, differing degrees of patience account for one-third of the variation in educational outcomes across states, a smaller amount but still notable.

Before I go any further, you might be wondering which are the most patient states. They are (in alphabetical order) Maine, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming. The least patient state? California. In Italy, patience is highest in the northern region bordering Austria, which has a relatively Germanic culture and history. Patience is the lowest by far in Sicily. In both Italy and the US, patience is generally greater in the North than in the South.

These results do not necessarily mean that lower patience results in lower grades. It could be that doing well in school makes you more patient, because you learn that working hard has its own rewards, and that may lengthen your time horizon. Or there may be some underlying factor, say conscientiousness, that is key to both patience and academic achievement.

Still, it is hard to avoid the overall impression that there is a tight connection between certain “bourgeois virtues” and academic achievement. If you are a parent, you might want to be rooting for your child to be more patient rather than less, no matter how complex all the interrelationships among the various personal and cultural attributes may turn out to be.

The researchers estimated patience by an ingenious method. There is already a widely accepted global preference survey that measures patience across nations. They then used Facebook data on interests, clicks and likes to see which interests were most popular in the more patient nations. Then they examined that data to see how popular those interests were in the various regions of those countries.

Here is the underyling research by Eric A. Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, Pietro Sancassani, and Ludger Woessmann.  I do consider whether “patience” is exactly the right word for what is going on here.  Hat tip also to The Wisdom of Garett Jones.

The economic impact of AI

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is part of my argument:

I am a believer in the power of current AI trends. But a look at the way economies work argues for more moderate (but still substantial) estimates of AI’s impact. The most likely scenario is that economic growth will rise by a noticeable but not shocking amount.

Economic historians typically cite Britain’s England’s Industrial Revolution as the single most significant development ever in boosting living standards. Through the late 18th and 19th centuries, it took people from a near-subsistence existence to modern industrial society.

Yet economic growth rates during the Industrial Revolution were hardly astonishing. From 1760 to 1780, often considered a “take-off” period, annual British growth was about 0.6%. The strongest period was 1831 to 1873, when annual growth averaged about 2.4% — a very good performance, but “revolutionary” only if sustained over longer periods of time.

The important feature of the Industrial Revolution, of course, is that growth did continue for decades, and thus living standards did not regress. But it was not possible to move quickly to an advanced industrial economy. For each step along the way, a lot of surrounding infrastructure and social practices had to be put into place. A profitable steel factory may require a nearby railroad, for instance, and an effective railroad in turn requires agreement on compatible gauges and equipment, and all these numerous decisions take a long time to sort out. There are always bottlenecks, and there is no simple way to fast forward through the entire process.

One way to estimate the impact of AI on economic growth is to look at all the human intelligence brought into the global economy by the social and economic development of Korea, China, India and other regions. There are many more potential innovators and researchers in the world, and the market for innovation is correspondingly larger. Yet all that new human intelligence does not seem to have materially boosted growth rates in the US, which on average were higher in the 1960s than in more recent times. All that additional talent is valuable — but getting stuff done is just very difficult.

I owe that latter point to The Wisdom of Garett Jones, though I could not find the Twitter link.  And then:

My best guess, and I do stress that word guess, is that advanced artificial intelligence will boost the annual US growth rate by one-quarter to one-half of a percentage point. That is nothing to sneeze at: Consider that US per capita income is currently approaching $80,000. If it grows at 2% a year, in 50 years that figure will be almost $215,000. Alternatively, if the economy grows at 2.5% a year, it will be almost $275,000 — a substantial difference, and with compound returns that gap widens with time.

In the shorter run, that difference in growth rates could mean the difference between an easy path forward vs. a looming fiscal crisis and big tax increases. It could mean a world where most cancers are cured in 30 years, rather than 70 or 80. It’s possible to recognize the importance of those developments for human well-being, while still understanding that most of GDP is a huge lump of goods and services, most of whose production cannot be revolutionized quickly, no matter how much intelligence (artificial or otherwise) is available.

Finally:

None of those estimates should be taken to suggest that AI development will be anything less than hugely impressive over the next few decades. But as one set of constraints is relaxed — in this case access to intelligence — the remaining constraints will matter all the more. Regulatory delays will be more frustrating, for instance, as they will be holding back a greater amount of cognitive horsepower than in times past. Or as AI improves at finding new and better medical hypotheses to test, the lags and delays in systems for clinical trials will become all the more painful. In fact they may worsen as the system is flooded with conjectures.

I should note also that there is nothing else on the horizon likely to boost growth more than AI will.

*Regime Change*

by  Tyler Cowen

That is the new Patrick J. Deneen book, with the subtitle Toward a Postliberal Future.  I would say that reading and trying to review this book most of all raises the question of what a review is for.  As you might expect from Deneen, the book is well-written and comes across as highly intelligent.  The question is what one should make of the actual claims and content.

The opening chapter tells us what a failure America is, but not much in the way of concrete evidence is cited (what again would an American passport auction for?). Deneen writes “A growing chorus of voices reflects on the likelihood and even desirability of civil war…”, but that I think means he simply faced some publication lags with the book.  America still seems to be gaining on most of the world.

By the end of the next chapter, we are told “Unfortunately, the current ruling class is uniquely ill equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history…”

C’mon, people…C’mon, Patrick!  I don’t even have to invoke Godwin’s Law to refute that one.  I can think of a few historical elites who were slightly worse than those who go to Harvard and Yale.

The quick segment on Mill on slavery (p.82) is both wrong and deeply unfair.

Burke is closer to Mill than Deneen might wish to think, especially if one studies Burke on Ireland.

The chapter “The Wisdom of the People” is rather under-argued in a post-Bryan Caplan, post-Garett Jones intellectual era.  You don’t have to agree with Caplan or Jones to recognize they offer orders of magnitude more evidence than Deneen does.  One of the bigger lessons here is that you can no longer write such a book without seriously engaging with social science.

All this talk about creating a “mixed constitution,” but what exactly does he want to see happen?  Is “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” really what we need?  (Might some rather mundane changes in policy get us further?)  What exactly are we supposed to do to increase the status, influence, and reputation of the populace, as Deneen repeatedly suggests?  Where is the evidence any of that is going to work, whatever “work” might mean in this context?  This book will not tell you.

National service, tariffs, and immigration restrictions are all endorsed, but with no consideration of the rather extensive empirical literatures on these topics, mostly not supporting Deneen’s hastily presented conclusions.

Is liberalism really (p.229) “premised on the complete liberation of the individual from any limiting claims of an objective good…”?  Mill certainly didn’t think so, nor did most other classical liberals.

I would start by distinguishing the social consequences of birth control — which isn’t going to be reversed and shouldn’t be — with the social consequences of classical liberal ideas.  Is Deneen in fact willing to endorse birth control?  Inquiring minds wish to know.

If Western liberalism is “exhausted,” is he short the market?

Overall, I leave this book with the impression that it is no accident classical liberal ideals have endured as much as they have.

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