My contentious Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode summary:
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn’t seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.
It is a very different tone than most CWTs, most of all when we get to social media. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There are two pieces of evidence — when I look at them, they don’t seem to support your story out of sample.
HAIDT: Okay, great. Let’s have it.
COWEN: First, across countries, it’s mostly the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries, which are more or less part of the Anglosphere. Most of the world is immune to this, and smartphones for them seem fine. Why isn’t it just that a negative mood came upon the Anglosphere for reasons we mostly don’t understand, and it didn’t come upon most of the rest of the world? If we’re differentiating my hypothesis from yours, doesn’t that favor my view?
HAIDT: Well, once you look into the connections and the timing, I would say no. I think I see what you’re saying now, but I think your view would say, “Just for some reason we don’t know, things changed around 2012.” Whereas I’m going to say, “Okay, things changed around 2012 in all these countries. We see it in the mental illness rates, especially of the girls.” I’m going to say it’s not just some mood thing. It’s like (a), why is it especially the girls? (b) —
COWEN: They’re more mimetic, right?
HAIDT: Yes, that’s true.
COWEN: Girls are more mimetic in general.
HAIDT: That’s right. That’s part of it. You’re right, that’s part of it. They’re just much more open to connection. They’re more influenced. They’re more subject to contagion. That is a big part of it, you’re right. What Zach Rausch and I have found — he’s my lead researcher at the After Babel Substack. I hope people will sign up. It’s free. We’ve been putting out tons of research. Zach has really tracked down what happened internationally, and I can lay it out.
Now I know the answer. I didn’t know it two months ago. The answer is, within countries, as I said, it’s the people who are conservative and religious who are protected, and the others, the kids get washed out to sea. Psychologically, they feel their life has no meaning. They get more depressed. Zach has looked across countries, and what you find in Europe is that, overall, the kids are getting a little worse off psychologically.
But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re much worse.
It doesn’t seem to me like, oh, New Zealand and Iceland were talking to each other, and the kids were sharing memes. It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?
COWEN: Old Americans also seem grumpier to me. Maybe that’s cable TV, but it’s not that they’re on their phones all the time. And you know all these studies. If you try to assess what percentage of the variation in happiness of young people is caused by smartphone usage — Sabine Hossenfelder had a recent video on this — those numbers are very, very, very small. That’s another measurement that seems to discriminate in favor of my theory, exogenous mood shifts, rather than your theory. Why not?
Very interesting throughout, recommended. And do not forget that Jon’s argument is outlined in detail in his new book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
It’s happening, music and video edition
OpenAI released a Music Video with Sora
it's puzzling i dont think ive ever seen anything quite like this before pic.twitter.com/8OzUVuQmFL— nano (@nanulled) April 2, 2024
Thursday assorted links
1. Interview with Michael Elowitz on synthetic biology. Asimov Press again.
2. The brothers who collected Star Trek memorabilia (NYT). A weird story, believe it or not.
3. The importance of foreign workers for national security.
4. What makes home building so expensive? (cost issues, not NIMBY issues)
Wednesday assorted links
Why aren’t Canada and other Anglo nations turning against immigration more?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. I cover several points, here is one of them, based on the economic idea of intertemporal substitution:
In this sense, Canada is ahead of much of the rest of the world in seeing the importance of these factors and turning it into actionable policy. It is willing to give up some of its present cultural identity to achieve a brighter cultural and political future.
This trade-off is much better than it looks at first. For one thing, birth rates for native-born citizens may fall further than they have already. If a country wants to preserve its national culture, it may be better off allowing more migration now, when there is still a critical mass of native-born citizens to ease assimilation.
To put the point more generally: Whatever costs there might be to immigration, successful nations will have to deal with them sooner or later. And the sooner they do, the better off they will be. The choice is not so much between more immigration and less immigration, but rather a lot of immigration now or a lot later. This choice will become all the more pressing as the need to fund national retirement programs requires more tax-paying citizens.
And on real estate prices:
One of the most common criticisms of immigrants is that they push up real estate prices. Yet there is a home-grown explanation: Stringent regulations on building make it difficult for the supply of housing to respond when demand increases.
In fact, there is a way immigration can help address this problem. First, immigrants may themselves induce their adopted country to free up its real estate markets. So immigration might increase real estate costs in the short run, but help reduce them in the longer run. Second, immigrants can help lower-tier cities move to the fore. The suburbs of Toronto, for example, have seen much of their growth driven by Asian in-migration, and longer term that will give Canadians more residential (and commercial) options.
These points aside, note that higher real estate prices, to the extent they result from immigrant demands, largely translate into capital gains for homeowners — most of whom are native-born. To be sure, the higher home prices may be bad for many younger Canadians, who may be locked out of housing markets, but eventually many of them will inherit high-valued homes from their parents.
Rrecommended.
Emergent Ventures, 33rd cohort
Alex Bartik and Arpit Gupta, Chicago and NYU, to work on zoning codes, machine learning, and LLMs.
Sasha Przyblski, 16, Ontario, building more durable batteries.
Egzona Marina, Kosovo and MIT, to promote science and neuroscience education in Kovoso.
Aldrich Heinz Alvarez, Manila, travel grant to San Francisco and Singapore, wearables that harness multi-modal AI.
Molly Cantillon, Stanford, for a hacker house at Stanford.
Ayush Tambde, Dublin (Mumbai), physics and wormholes, and to finance a trip to San Francisco.
Candela Francisco, 17, Buenos Aires, to become the world’s greatest woman chess player.
Aabhas Senapati, Harvey Mudd, from Ahmedabad, general career support, and for work on ecosystems.
Erick Li, Mexicali, to visit a social science conference at Harvard.
Lorcan Geraghty, Country Wicklow, Dublin, EirSpace, aerospace for Ireland.
Regan Arntz-Gray, Brooklyn, writing on feminism.
Steven Gong, Waterloo, to make videos on topics related to physics and math.
Dominic Sobhani, Midwest, Columbia University and now Tokyo, Progress Studies-related meet-ups and also personal travel.
Tomas Markey, 17, Ballineen, Cork area, Direct Air Capture Engineering.
Alexander Koch, Germany, Bay Area, robotics and robot learning.
Dylan Iskandar, Stanford, computer science, music, general career support.
Vesuvius Project, Bay Area.
Mark Koyama and Desiree Desierto, for British economic and political history, including in the 17th century.
Grant Getzelman, Bay area, computational wetware.
Naina Kumar, McLean, Virginia, 16, surgery + AR.
Ukraine:
Yanchuk Dmytro, Kyiv, repairing electric station short circuits.
And here is Nabeel’s AI-driven directory of previous EV winners.
The law and economics of permitting
Here is an important new paper by Zachary D. Liscow:
Given the benefits to economic growth and the need to transition to green energy, getting infrastructure built is an urgent issue. I describe what to consider in designing a system of permitting infrastructure. I then review the evidence: in the US, permitting is slow, infrastructure is expensive, and environmental outcomes are not particularly good. I propose a framework for reform with two dimensions: the power of the executive branch to decide and its capacity to plan. After considering reform possibilities, I propose that reforming both dimensions could lead to a possible “green bargain” that benefits efficiency, the environment, and democracy.
Via Heidi Williams.
Incentives matter
Why are so many random government agents claiming to be suffering from Havana Syndrome?
The devil is in the details…
The HAVANA Act, which passed in 2021, gives an untaxed lump-sum payment of one years' salary to government employees with a "neurological injury."
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) April 1, 2024
(To be clear, I do take the Havana Syndrome allegations seriously, but the broader equilibrium is worth pondering too.)
Tuesday assorted links
1. New Zealand’s building boom.
2. Thread on new research on why people hate inflation, by Stefanie Stantcheva.
3. NFTs as part of the art world doing better than many people think.
4. ‘I’m 28. And I’m Scheduled to Die in May.’
5. List of biotech-themed questions.
6. “Headline results: we estimate raising Dogger Bank would cost £97.5bn, but would bring present value benefits of £622bn. Under the government’s standard method of cost-benefit analysis, this project would get a go-ahead, with a cost-benefit ratio of 6.2.” Link here.
7. Ezra Klein and Ethan Mollick, self-recommending (NYT).
Cuba Libre
Martin Gurri has a very good, deep-dive on the current situation in Cuba.
The wreckage of the Cuban economy really can’t be exaggerated. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is begging the United Nations for food aid. Nearly half a million persons have fled the island in despair during the last two years—that’s 4% of the population, the equivalent of more than 12 million Americans. Yet the failure cascade is moving faster than the capacity to emigrate. People feel trapped and hopeless. The volcano is growling. Despite the words we use, national economies never actually implode—but the regimes that exploit and mismanage them often do.
At the same time, the Cuban public has found its voice. That is the second radical transformation of Cuban society. Despite the blackouts and the poor connectivity, large numbers of Cubans are venting online. I have no idea how this happens, but the web in Cuba has turned into an immense chorus of anger and disgust.
Most moving are the expressions of little-known individuals trapped in the catastrophe of a failed utopia, trying to make sense of the nightmare of everyday life. Those unable to flee Cuba today escape to the web. They post on Facebook and X, they exchange links and opinions on WhatsApp, they complain of the dark and the heat and the mosquitos at night, they mock the regime, they pray to God for consolation. “How lucky we Cubans are that we can go to the web!” reads a Facebook post. “That’s the end of the state monopoly over information!” During a blackout, one poster asks, “Where can we protest?” Another answers: “Right here.”
…Amid a volley of emojis, one wag claimed on Facebook that the words of the communist anthem, the “Internationale,” had been written about Cubans: “Arise, wretched of the earth, stand up you slaves without bread …”
Once the jokes and the defiance stop, we are confronted with the awful spectacle of human existence in a state of pure desperation. “Of course I’m unwell with blackouts of 15 hours one day and eight hours the next. I feel dissociated, I’m not well. I think I’m entering into insanity,” a woman wrote. A poster warned: “This can’t continue indefinitely.”
I’ve always said that a simple theory of when communist regimes collapse is when the true believers die and the people at the top are no longer willing or able to kill for ideals. Raul Castro is now 92. It won’t be long.
Gurri has much more on corruption within the regime and how the regime mafiosos are moving foreign currency, which could be used to buy necessary food and supplies, out of the country as quickly as possible.
New Econ Journal Watch edition
Volume 21, Issue 1, March 2024
In this issue:
Executive diversity and firm performance: Beginning in 2015, McKinsey & Company has released a series of highly impactful studies claiming a positive relationship between executive racial/ethnic diversity and firm performance. Jeremiah Green and John Hand explain why the McKinsey findings cannot be verified, and they do a replication of sorts using the S&P 500, and find, instead, no relationship between executive racial/ethnic diversity and performance. (Note: The McKinsey authors were not invited to reply for concurrent publication because this piece was finalized at too late a date. They are invited to reply in a future issue.)
Temperature~economic growth: Having tested temperature-growth claims previously in this journal (here, here, and here), David Barker now reports on his investigation into a much-cited 2015 Nature article by Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang, and Edward Miguel. Once again, Barker contends that the claims in the commented-on article are untenable. (Note: Professors Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel were not invited to reply for concurrent publication because this piece was finalized at too late a date. They are invited to reply in a future issue.)
The limbo bar of 5% allows too much to wiggle under it: Tom Engsted takes another look at the replication crises and argues that we need to lower the limbo bar—that is, raise the difficulty of claiming ‘statistical significance.’
Revisiting Hypothesis Testing with the Sharpe Ratio: Michael O’Connor contends that comparing Sharpe ratios of different investment options is not as simple as has been presented in the academic finance literature. He cautions that no method of analysis can improve the power of the test of statistical significance because the power is an innate property of the statistic; he uses simulations and other analyses to show that “when the power is low then the very best estimators perform no better than random number generators,” and advises: “Investors should be wary of claims by portfolio managers that their Sharpe ratio exceeds the ratio of other managers.”
What caused the Ukraine famine of the early 1930s? In the previous issue, Mark Tauger discussed the work of Natalya Naumenko, and Naumenko replied. Here, Tauger rejoins.
Ergodicity economics: Previously, Matthew Ford and John Kay commented on ergodicity economics, and a reply was provided by Oliver Hulme, Arne Vanhoyweghen, Colm Connaughton, Ole Peters, Simon Steinkamp, Alexander Adamou, Dominik Baumann, Vincent Ginis, Bert Verbruggen, James Price, and Benjamin Skjold. Here, Ford and Kay rejoin, contending “our criticism of ergodicity economics remains unanswered.”
Classical Liberalism in Russia: Provided here is an intellectual and political history of classical liberalism in Russia. The author is Paul Robinson, who has published the books Russian Conservatism and Russian Liberalism. In the story, notable figures include Semyon Desnitsky, Alexander Kunitsyn, Konstantin Kavelin, Boris Chicherin, and Boris Brutzkus. (An 1857 essay by Chicherin appears in the previous issue of this journal.)
Classical Liberal Think Tanks in Greece, 1974–2024: Constantinos Saravakos, Georgios Archontas, and Chris Loukas provide a guide to the course of liberal thought and movements in Greece. After some foregrounding, they pick up the story in 1974 and focus especially on the entry, exit, character, activity, and influence of liberal think tanks in Greece. The authors are affiliated with one of them, the Center for Liberal Studies (KEFiM).
Trygve Hoff’s Appeal to Ragnar Frisch: The liberal economist Trygve Hoff appealed to Ragnar Frisch, a fellow Norwegian and future Nobel Prize winner, to relent in his economic interventionism. Their four letters from 1941 are translated and presented by Hannes Gissurarson.
Christianity Changes the Conditions of Government: Three brief chapters of The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) capture some the book’s important ideas about the composition of ancient polytheism, and how the universal benevolence of Christianity’s monotheistic gospel would in time spell a new world. “[T]o obey Cæsar is no longer the same thing as to obey God.” The book, originally in French, was first published in 1864.
EJW thanks its referees and others who contribute to its mission.
The polity that is German
None dare call it eugenics:
Dachshunds, the German dog breed known for their distinctive long bodies and short legs, face an uncertain future if proposed changes to an animal protection law are approved, Germany’s kennel club said.
A draft of the bill, from the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was published in February and aims to combat “torture breeding,” or breeding to produce animals with characteristics that will cause them to suffer, and to regulate the online trade of animals.
However, the draft contains requirements that could end the breeding of certain dogs, such as the dachshund, according to a statement from the V.D.H., Germany’s kennel club.
The bill lists various disease characteristics, like anomalies of the skeletal system, that would be outlawed. That could be interpreted as a ban on breeding animals with any significant size deviation from the “original wolf type,” the V.D.H. said…
The restrictions could be applied to the leg length of dachshunds. The breeding of beagles, Jack Russell terriers and miniature schnauzers could also be affected, as well as of dogs with short noses, like the English bulldog, French bulldog and pug.
Here is the full NYT article.
Monday assorted links
1. How much would you pay never to saw off a finger? (NYT)
2. Scott Sumner movie reviews.
3. Peter Eotvos, RIP (NYT).
4. Haidt responds to critics. And is schizophrenia a useful identifying variable?
5. Vaccine mandates were counterproductive for health care workers.
6. New guidelines on email deliverability.
7. Highly speculative take on Russia and the Havana Syndrome. I have long believed that Havana Syndrome is real, though I cannot vouch for this particular account.
Build Back Key Bridge Better
The collapse of the Key Bridge is a national disaster but also an opportunity for societal advancement. We must rebuild but in doing so we must also address the historical discrimination faced by workers in Baltimore and beyond. Ensuring the participation of Baltimore’s workforce in the reconstruction project is essential. It’s Baltimore’s bridge and in rebuilding we must actively engage and employ a diverse pool of local talent, reflecting the city’s rich cultural tapestry. We can Build Back Better by providing meaningful, well-paying jobs to those who have been historically marginalized, fostering economic growth and equity within the community.
Furthermore, offering accessible, quality day care for workers will directly contribute to an equitable working environment, enabling parents and guardians to participate fully in the reconstruction effort without the burden of child care concerns. We must reject the idea that equity and productivity are at odds. A more inclusive workforce is a more productive workforce.
American workers are the most productive in the world thus to Build American we must Buy American. Reconstruction of the Key Bridge is not just a matter of national pride but also an essential strategy for growing our economy. By prioritizing American materials and labor, we invest in our communities, support local industries, and ensure that the economic benefits of the reconstruction project are felt widely, especially in areas hardest hit by economic challenges.
We can build back better. We must build back better. By engaging Baltimore workers in Baltimore’s bridge we can rectify long-standing discrimination. By providing accessible child care, and adhering to “Buy American” rules we can build America as we build America’s bridge. Building back better is not simply about building physical infrastructure. It’s about building a bridge to the future. A bridge of progress, equality, and unity, symbolizing our collective commitment to a future where every individual has the opportunity to thrive.
Addendum: April 1, 2024.
*Accelerating India’s Development*
The author is Karthik Muralidharan, and the subtitle is A State-Led Roapmap for Effective Governance. If you imagine a 600 pp. “state capacity libertarian” take on Indian development this is what you get, admittedly with the libertarian side of the equation downplayed a bit. Excerpt:
A common misconception is that the inefficiencies of the Indian state stem from its large size — that there are too many workers doing too few things. In practice, the opposite is true, and the Indian state is highly understaffed. As Figure 3.1 shows, India has only 16 public employees per 1000 people. For comparison, China has over three times as many (57) and Norway has nearly ten times as many (159). Even the US, often viewed as a leading example of a market-driven economy with limited government, has 77 public employees per 1000 people — nearly five times as many as India!
Recommended, here is the link on Amazon India. An American edition is needed. Here is a review of the book from The Economist.