2. It seems Borjas was wrong about the Mariel boatlift. And some explanation from Kevin Drum. And does science advance one funeral at a time?
3. Are social science RCTs headed in the wrong direction?
4. Megan’s yearly kitchen gift guide. And Andrew Batson best music of 2015 list.
5. The evolution of Howard Stern.
6. Parental education, not income, predicts childrens’ test scores in Georgia.
7. Christopher Balding on the RMB.
#6: Thus, miracles don’t happen. Motivate and sustain the next generation to advance further. Results could be measured in long term = 20+ years.
But I can still fill my house with books and my child will instantly advance her reading level a few grades, right?
#6: Education and average income are highly correlated. The authors use an F test to show that their betas can’t both be zero. But that doesn’t give me much confidence that I should really trust the effect sizes — I just know they’re not both zero.
Also, the education measure is very rough: 1 if you have *any* college (1 year through doctorate), 0 otherwise. That’s a limitation of the data source, but again it introduces some doubt about how much weight to give this analysis.
Hmm… chart #1 doesn’t go very far out in either dimension.
Disappointing. Not sure what I am going to learn from that.
#1 was a good read on something I know very little about.
I liked it as a contrast to the earlier “Do compensating differentials play a key role in boosting inequality?” In that post Tyler put it this way: “very often when workers switch jobs, they take a pay cut, voluntarily, in return for better amenities”
In #1 we see a quest for amenities, but not quite success. Whether this will be typical of the second machine age (#2MA) is left to the reader.
It’s a big tournament economy with the losers afraid to exit.
Part of me enjoys that the “give it all away for free and then find a corporate parent” strategy has backfired on people who struggled with actually selling things. But these people are being destroyed.
Seems like these Youtube stars are becoming a victim of the “politicization of everything”. Although it was probably always true that performers had to “look authentic”; it was just easier to look authentic without being authentic before the internet existed.
I am not sure what you mean by politicization, but it looks to me more like the modern travails of a content producer. As the article says, it is easy to reach hundreds of thousands, but that level of reach is hard to capitalize.
It’s image-versus-reality. These people are tied to the trappings of fame without having actually achieved any fame. They think they’re stars – their subscriber numbers prove it to them – but in truth they’re just nobodies. They’d enjoy the same kind of fame if they grabbed an acoustic guitar and did some busking downtown every weekend. But no busker says, “I’m kind of famous here in Toledo, I just haven’t had my big break yet.” The fact that they can watch themselves on TV makes them think they’ve achieved something bigger than they have.
In short, there are many shades of narcissism in there.
A friend has had a certain amount of success at getting free stuff for his hobby in exchange for text and photos posted online. He knew better than to even think of quitting the day job.
When I told him he was a content producer, he said, “Like a baby produces content for a diaper?”
#2 see also:
http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/21/why-a-new-study-of-the-mariel-boatlift-has-not-changed-our-views-on-the-benefits-of-immigration/
“We apply the synthetic control method to re-examine the wage and employment effect of the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. We focus exclusively on workers with no high school degree. They are the group competing more closely in the labor market with the newly arrived. We compare Miami’s labor market outcomes with those in a control group of cities chosen using the synthetic control method so as to match Miami’s wages and other labor market features in the period 1972 to 1979. Using most samples and different outcomes we find no departure between Miami and its control between 1979 and 1983.”
Has nobody in the history of the economics profession remembered what was happening in Miami to boost wages locally in the years immediately following the Mariel Boatlift of 1980? Has no economist ever watched “Miami Vice,” “Scarface,” or the new Netflix series “Narcos?” Ceteris was very much not paribus in Miami in the early 1980s due to the most famous Cocaine Boom in history.
This video clip from “Narcos” directly addresses the crucial issue of whether ceteris was paribus in Miami pre and post 1980:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-ignorance-of-economists-refugees-cocaine-and-miami-in-1980/
“A recent survey by the Miami Herald showed that most “marielitos” are now members of the middle class whose income is above the local average, though many of them still speak little English.”
http://havanajournal.com/politics/entry/the_mariel_boatlift_twenty_five_years_later/
Don’t you know that Steve Sailer doesn’t need facts? That’s just not what he’s about.
#4 RE: Megan’s gift guide. Maybe I’m crazy but it gets me thinking that Megan, Tyler, Alex and this guy above, Steve S., might make for an interesting dinner party. Besides interesting ideas and conversation, Tyler knows quite a bit about exotic foods and Megan probably can show us how to prepare some interesting dishes.
But whom else do we invite?
Maybe it’d make an interesting fundraiser like when Warren Buffett auctions off lunch?
A conversation with Tyler between Tyler Cowen and Steve Sailer would be very interesting.
So there is a simple solution to make sure those Syrian refugees are absorbed properly – an Afghan heroin boom!
It is like a win-win really.
According to “MrEd’s” link unemployment for Blacks in Miami rose from 5.6% in 1980 to 9.6% in 1981. I hope people aren’t arguing a 4 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate without a recession isn’t a big deal.
Then there’s this from the personal blog of the writer in the link:
“However, the impacts of the inflow on earlier immigrants is estimated as much larger because it increased the number of immigrant workers in the US not by some 10%, but 125%. The added competitive pressure is calculated to have cut earlier immigrants’ pay by 6.7%. For earlier immigrants with less than a high school education, the figure is 8.1%; and for those with a high school education but no college, it is 12.6%.” http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/09/03/the-domestic-economic-impacts-of-immigration/
So the benefits of mass migration are:
1. Higher Black unemployment.
2. Lower immigrant wages.
And that’s ignoring the cultural impact as is typical among economists.
There were 3 big African American riots in Miami in the 1980s following the Mariel boatlift, typically starting with a dispute with American blacks and Hispanic cops (see Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” for a fictionalization).
The history of Miami in the 1980s isn’t really all that obscure, but it never seems to come up in these economics papers.
Despite not giving even one shit about Howard Stern, i read #5. I still dont give a shit about Howard Stern.
5. Someday, somebody should do a paper on the effects of second wives on public figures
Some of us say that Howard hasn’t been the same since he left WNBC.
Much like Letterman when he did Late Night, he was best when he was REALLY unhappy. Well… I like it a lot anyway. Grumpy, mean… it was AWESOME.
Anger is often misdirected inspiration.
When #3 came up here I was one of a “huge number of commenters said something along the lines of: “I’d much rather have a couple of really good studies than a whole bunch of small and underpowered ones.”
I wanted then to share a link on the possible overproduction of studies, but I’m not sure I found it then. Here is one.
“Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90%. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% (!) for the humanities. It’s 27% for natural sciences and 32% for social sciences … For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90% but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!”
I think there was another article in early December on the exploding rate of publication, but I can’t find that now.
Hegel hardly ever cited anything to justify his stuff. Neither did Goethe. Marx only cited when he needed a little back up, which was rarely the case.
Perhaps a lot of the uncited studies help to show where NOT to go.
That might highlight the difference in utility between papers in medicine (12% uncited) and humanities (82%).
“This relationship is further analyzed by differentiating … race, household type, and educational attainment level … multiple regressions found … household type and educational attainment level were statistically significant.” Sometimes you just have to laugh.
#1: Not surprising. You can get paid in money, or you can get paid in fame. MLB players make millions per year, with a minimum of $500k. AAA players make $2,150/month. Most small touring bands live in a van and on couches. A first-year regional jet airline pilot makes $30k.
And yet if you gave 22 year old me the chance to play minor league ball for a year, I’d rip your arm off grabbing the pen to sign, and never regret it.
The chance to spend a couple years in your early twenties doing something you love while still maintaining most of the benefits of the first world is one of the greatest things about the west. In first-world Asia, you are tracked from age ten on. One step off the track and you’ll never get back on again. Outside the first world, necessity prevents any exploration.
Line 1 — internet fame — reminds me of a comment made by a coworker I have may. many years ago. He did some stained glass work as a hobby. I asked if if ever tryed to sell it or anything like that. The response was never — changing it to a money related activity would ruin it as a hobby. So while there are many aspects of the impact on the internet fame these people will need to make a decision about it being a hobby they do on the side largely for personal satisfaction or if they want tto try making it a business activity that pays for itself. The two might be incompatible and, as the story clearly points out, it’s even harder in the connected world due to the relationships/connections formed between people who never actually meet. Even worse, the relationship is largely defined by that other person much like the meaning of art being defined more by the viewers than the artist once the work is complete.
#2: Here’s the conclusion of a survey of immigrant labor market studies written by the writer in “MrEd’s” link who sides with Card over Borjas, and wants open borders. http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/09/03/the-domestic-economic-impacts-of-immigration/
“The evidence base does not support us with certainties, only best bets. In this case, a variety of studies deploying different methods in different contexts, and some general knowledge about how economies work, coalesce into a fairly consistent picture…Possibly, skilled immigration boosts productivity and wages for many others, but at this point that is mostly a matter of conjecture…
…Among low-income workers, the ones who stand to lose the most are those who most closely resemble new arrivals, in being immigrants themselves, being low-skill, being less assimilated, and perhaps in being undocumented [DP: so as America becomes more vibrantly diversely prole the negative impacts of mass migration will get bigger]. Thus the common statement that natives have little to fear does not represent the whole story…
…A roughly 100% increase in the immigrant stock is estimated to have raised wages slightly for natives while reducing them about 10% among less-educated earlier immigrants…”
1. So even skilled migration is questionable.
2. Mass migration makes older immigrants poorer (more welfare usage, paging Bryan Caplan).
3. Mass migration makes the receiving country more resemble the sending countries, which means the negative impacts get bigger over time as Brazilification sets in.
In other words. Mass migration is the importation of serfs, who are obviously the key to the 21st Century for any civilization.