Tuesday assorted links
1. Skepticism about the beauty premium?
2. “On a cellular level, younger generations seem to be aging faster than their forebears.” (speculative)
4. William Stanley Jevons and eclipses (NYT). And an Amtrak train ride across the country is less carbon-efficient than flying (NYT).
5. The ascent of high school wrestlers.
6. A short video on how the Great Pyramids may have been built.
7. Was more spent on eclipse tourism than on the Taylor Swift tour?
Philipp Strack wins the J.B. Clark award
Congratulations! Here is the AEA announcement and summary of his work.
What to Watch
3 Body Problem (Netflix): Great! A captivating mix of big ideas, a compelling mystery, and spectacular set-pieces like the Cultural Revolution, strange worlds, the ship cutting and more. Of course, there are some weaknesses. 3 Body Problem falters in its portrayal of genius, rendering the British scientists as too normal, overlooking the obsessiveness, ambition, and unconventionality often found in real-world geniuses. Ironically, in its effort to diversify gender and race, the series inadvertently narrows the spectrum of personality and neurodiversity. Only Ye Wenjie, traumatized by the cultural revolution, obsessed by physics and revenge, and with a messianic personality hits the right notes. Regardless, I am eager for Season 2.
Shogun (Hulu): Great meeting of cultures. Compelling plot, based on the excellent Clavell novel. I didn’t know that some of the warlords of the time (1600) had converted to Christianity. (Later banned and repressed as in Silence). Shogun avoids two traps, the Japanese have agency and so does the European. Much of it is in Japanese with subtitles.
Monsieur Spade: It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:
Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?
Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.
Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?
Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.
Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.
What I’ve been reading
1. Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. An amazing book, full of life and energy on every page, and yes there are 605 of them. Imagine if Camille Paglia had stuck with it and produced case studies. The main problem is simply that most people don’t know or care about Burton and Taylor any more?
2. David Caron, Michael Healy, 1873-1941, An Túr Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer. An excellent book, can it be said that Michael Healy is Ireland’s fourth greatest stained glass artist? Clarke, Geddes, and Hone would be the top three? It is good to see him getting this attention, but what will happen when so many Irish churches are decommissioned or abandoned or simply never seen? What does that equilibrium look like? All the more reason to invest in this book. What an underrated European tradition.
3. Paul Seabright, the subtitle says it all, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. I’ve just started to crack this one open, Paul’s books are always very smart.
4. Sahar Akhtar, Immigration & Discrimination: (un)welcoming others. Can the idea of wrongful discrimination be applied to immigration decisions? Maybe you believe this is a pure and simple matter of national autonomy, but what if the potential immigrants are from a former and wronged colony? From an island nation perishing due to climate change? Or they were previously pushed off territory that is now part of the host nation? And yet open borders as an idea also does not work — how should one fit all these pieces together?
5. Austin Bush, The Food of Southern Thailand. The best book I know of on southern Thailand flat out. This one has recipes of course, but also photos, maps, anecdotes, and plenty of history. The food is explained in conceptual terms. Recommended, for all those with an interest.
6. Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. Mostly ends at 1800, this will become one of the standard, must-read histories of Islam and its multiple homes. The section on India, which is what I have been reading, is strongly conceptual and novel compared to other survey books such as Hourani. At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.
The culture that is U.S.A.
-Barbenheimer
-Eras Tour
-Swift-Kelce
-huge football ratings
-Sphere
-Ohtani/Wemby
-a fun Oscars
-women’s basketball
-heel Rock/Wrestlemania Avengers EndgamePretty nice run for sports/pop culture. https://t.co/xdH3yH7hic
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) April 8, 2024
Monday assorted links
1. NYT symposium on smart phones and childhood. And when do young female suicide rates start rising? Tweet here. And “Gen Alpha (my kid’s generation) has already optimized out of it and have figured out how to do the social play they need to in the new medium.”
3. Bridgewater x Metaculus forecasting contest.
4. Louise Perry on Andrea Dworkin.
5. Chechenya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow.
6. Is Pakistan seeking normalization with India?
7. Eclipse songs. And from India.
Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming
It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group harmony and interdependence. In contrast, wheat farming, which requires less labor and coordination is associated with more individualistic cultures that value independence and personal autonomy. Implicit in Turner’s Frontier hypothesis, for example, is the idea that not only could a young man say ‘take this job and shove it’ and go west but once there they could establish a small, viable wheat farm (or other dry crop).
There is plenty of evidence for these theories. Rice cultures around the world do tend to exhibit similar cultural characteristics, including less focus on self, more relational or holistic thinking and greater in-group favoritism than wheat cultures. Similar differences exist between the rice and dry crop areas of China. The differences exist but is the explanation rice and wheat farming or are there are other genetic, historical or random factors at play?
A new paper by Talhelm and Dong in Nature Communications uses the craziness of China’s Cultural Revolution to provide causal evidence in favor of the rice and wheat farming theory of culture. After World War II ended, the communist government in China turned soldiers into farmers arbitrarily assigning them to newly created farms around the country–including two farms in Northern Ningxia province that were nearly identical in temperature, rainfall and acreage but one of the firms lay slightly above the river and one slightly below the river making the latter more suitable for rice farming and the former for wheat. During the Cultural Revolution, youth were shipped off to the farms “with very little preparation or forethought”. Thus, the two farms ended up in similar environments with similar people but different modes of production.
Talhelm and Dong measure thought style with a variety of simple experiments which have been shown in earlier work to be associated with collectivist and individualist thinking. When asked to draw circles representing themselves and friends or family, for example, people tend to self-inflate their own circle but they self-inflate more in individualist cultures.
The authors find that consistent with the differences across East and West and across rice and wheat areas in China, the people on the rice farm in Ningxia are more collectivistic in their thinking than the people on the wheat farm.
The differences are all in the same direction but somewhat moderated suggesting that the effects can be created quite quickly (a few generations) but become stronger the longer and more embedded they are in the wider culture.
I am reminded of an another great paper, this one by Leibbrandt, Gneezy, and List (LGL) that I wrote about in Learning to Compete and Cooperate. LGL look at two types of fishing villages in Brazil. The villages are close to one another but some of them are on the lake and some of them are on the sea coast. Lake fishing is individualistic but sea fishing requires a collective effort. LGL find that the lake fishermen are much more willing to engage in competition–perhaps having seen that individual effort pays off–than the sea fishermen for whom individual effort is much less efficacious. Unlike Talhelm and Dong, LGL don’t have random assignment, although I see no reason why the lake and sea fishermen should otherwise be different, but they do find that women, who neither lake nor sea fish, do not show the same differences. Thus, the differences seem to be tied quite closely to production learning rather than to broader culture.
How long does it take to imprint these styles of thinking? How long does it last? Is imprinting during child or young adulthood more effective than later imprinting? Can one find the same sorts of differences between athletes of different sports–e.g. rowing versus running? It’s telling, for example, that the only famous rowers I can think are the Winklevoss twins. Are attempts to inculcate these types of thinking successful on a more than surface level. I have difficulty believing that “you didn’t build that,” changes say relational versus holistic thinking but would styles of thinking change during a war?
350+ coauthors study reproducibility in economics
Jon Hartley is one I know, here is the abstract:
This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators’ experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes.
Here is the full paper, here are some Twitter images. I have added the emphasis on the last sentence.
Can you guess who wrote this passage?
We often hear today that Wokeism and Political Correctness are gradually receding. Contrary to this opinion, I think that this phenomenon is gradually being “normalized,” widely accepted even by those who intimately doubt it, and practiced by the majority of academic and state institutions. This is why it deserves more than ever our criticism — together with its opposite, the obscenity of new populism and religious fundamentalism. In Cancel Culture at its worst, your public life can be destroyed for reasons that are not even clear in advance. This is what makes Cancel Culture so threatening: something very particular that you did (or are) can be unexpectedly elevated into the universal status of an unforgivable mistake, so that every particular case is never just a neutral case of universality but gives its own spin to a fuzzy universality.
No, it is not Bari Weiss, not Naveen or even Community Notes. Please try to guess first, but if you must you can peek here.
Economists do it with models?
Collaborations in economics across genders increased (12.5% increase of women coauthors per 100 men-authored papers) after #MeToo .
But senior researchers reduced their new collaborations with junior women by 33% per 100 senior-authored papers. https://t.co/zIxDF2Hukx pic.twitter.com/2YplnMTFoy
— Florian Ederer (@florianederer) April 7, 2024
Sunday assorted links
1. Can the Left be happy? (Ross D. in the NYT)
2. Explosive growth from AI automation? (This paper is economically literature, and uses some simple models)
3. James C. Scott, “Academic Diary of an Iconoclast” (academic gate).
4. Some more serious evidence that rising population density predicts lower fertility uh-oh.
6. Soumaya Keynes FT column on government debt, with a focus on Jamaica. She is flat out one of the best columnists period, time for more people to say that!
7. Oliver Kim on Albert Hirschman on development, including “development decisions” as the truly scarce factor.
When does provenance justify a consumption experience?
Konstantin emails me a question:
Hey Tyler! You said you tried coffee just once, at a coffee ceremony in an Ethiopian village, as coffee probably originates in Ethiopia.
What else would you try (or do) only due to its provenance?
What else have you tried or done only due to its provenance?
I used to always try the local foodstuffs, no matter what the expected quality, for instance that terrible fermented dish in Iceland. I guess I have stopped doing this? (“I’ll just have the beef rendang, please!” No monkey brains either. I do however make a point of trying new dishes I think I will enjoy.) In the case of coffee, I felt it would be rude to refuse. Plus after all these years I was curious what coffee tasted like.
More generally, I am a fan of consumption experiences tied to what Konstantin calls provenance. If you are in Japan at the right time of year, it makes sense to walk up Mount Fuji. The fact that the mountain has a special status in Japanese lore makes the experience more valuable, even if you don’t believe in Japanese lore per se. It is one way of “connecting” yourself to Japan, and seeing how that connection feels.
When I was younger, I took a cable car in San Francisco, even though I didn’t find the experience an intrinsically valuable one. Frankly, it bored me, but I also don’t regret doing it. Think of the underlying model as “trying to approach a native culture from as many different angles as possible.” You also should try the angles they put forward as focal. Even though those angles may not in fact be the most relevant or focal ones. How important are cable cars for understanding San Francisco? I am not sure, but if they are irrelevant that too is an angle you might try on for size. And then take off. When you are done, you can always walk over to the local bookstore.
A simple model of AI and social media
One MR reader, Luca Piron, writes to me:
I found myself puzzled by a thought you expressed during your interview with Professor Haidt. In particular, from my understanding you suggested that in the near future AI will be able to sum up the content a user may want to see into a digest, so that they can spend less time using their devices.
I think that is a misunderstanding of how the typical user experiences social media. While there surely are some brilliant people such as the young scientists you described during the episode who use social media only to connect with peers and find valuable information, I would argue that most users, alas including myself, turn to social media when seeking mindless distraction, when bored or maybe too tired to read of watch a film. Therefore, having a digest will prove unsatisfactory. What a typical user wants is the stream of content to continue.
I think these are some of the least understood points of 2024. Let us start with the substitution effect. The “digest” feature of AI will soon let you turn your feeds into summaries and pointers to the important parts. In other words, you will be able to consume those feeds more quickly. In some cases the quality of the feed experience may go up, in other cases it may go down (presumably over time quality of the digest will improve).
We all know that if tech allows you to cook more quickly (e.g., microwave ovens), you will spend less time cooking. That is true even if you are “addicted” to cooking, if you cook because of social pressures, if cooking puts you into a daze, or whatever. The substitution effect still applies, noting that in some cases the new tech may make the cooked food better, in other cases worse. In similar fashion, you will spend less time with your feed, following the advent of AI feed digests.
Somehow people do not want to acknowledge the price theory aspect of the problem, as they are content to repeat the motives of young people in spending time with their feeds. (You will note there is the possibility of a broader portfolio effect — AI might liberate you from many tasks, and you could end up spending more time with your feed. I’ll just say don’t bet against the substitution effect, it almost always dominates! And yes for addictive goods too. In fact those demand curves usually don’t look any different.) No one has to be a young genius scientist for the substitution effect to hold.
Note that a majority of U.S. teens report they spend about the right amount of time on social media apps (8% say “too little time”) and they are going to respond to technological changes with pretty normal kinds of behavior.
I think what has in fact happened is that commentators have read dozens of MSM articles about “algorithms,” and mostly are not following very recent tech developments, including in the consumer AI field. Perhaps that is why they have difficult processing what is a simple, straightforward argument, based on a first-order effect.
Another general way of putting the point, not as simple as a demand curve but still pretty straightforward, is that if tech creates a social problem, other forms of tech will be innovated and mobilized to help address that problem. Again, that is not a framing you get very often from MSM.
The AI example is also a forcing one when it comes to motives for spending time with social media feeds. Many critics wish to have it both ways. They want to say “the feed is no fun, teenagers stick with the feed because of social pressures to be in touch with others, but they ideally would rather do something else.” But when a new technology allows them to secede from feed obsession to some degree, (some of) those same critics say: “They can’t/won’t secede — they are addicted!” The word “dopamine” is then likely to follow, though rarely the word “fun.”
It is better to just start by admitting that the feed is fun, and informative, for many teenagers and adults too. Of course not everything fun is good for you, but the “social pressure” verbal gambit is a slight of hand to make social media sound like an obvious bad across all margins, and a network that needs to be taken down, rather than something we ought to help people manage better, at the margin. If it really were mainly a social pressure problem, it would be relatively easy to solve.
For many teens, both motives operate, namely scrolling the feed is fun, and there are social pressures to stay informed. The advent of the AI digest will allow those same individuals to cut back on the social pressure obligations, but keep the fun scrolling. Again, a substitution effect will operate, and furthermore it will nudge individuals away from the harmful social pressures and closer to the fun.
As Katherine Boyle pointed out on Twitter, a lot of this debate is being conducted in terms of 2016 technology. But in fact we are in 2024, not far from the summer of 2024, and soon to enter 2025. Beware of regulatory proposals, and social welfare analyses, that do not acknowledge that fact.
In the meantime, please do heed the substitution effect.
Saturday assorted links
1. Zvi annotates the CWT with Jon Haidt.
2. How is bird flu spreading in cows?
3. Not sure I believe in these kinds of correlations, but here are some results suggesting that automation leads to less religion.
4. Claims about GPTs. Complicated but interesting.
5. Ezra Klein and Nilay Patel on AI and the future of media and the internet (NYT).
Zimbabwe launches new gold-backed currency
Zimbabwe has introduced a new gold-backed currency called ZiG – the name stands for “Zimbabwe Gold”.
It is the latest attempt to stabilise an economy that has lurched from crisis to crisis for the past 25 years.
Unveiling the new notes, central bank governor John Mushayavanhu said the ZiG would be structured, and set at a market-determined exchange rate.
The ZiG replaces a Zimbabwean dollar, the RTGS, that had lost three-quarters of its value so far this year.
Annual inflation in March reached 55% – a seven-month high.
Zimbabweans have 21 days to exchange old, inflation-hit notes for the new currency.
However, the US dollar, which accounts for 85% of transactions, will remain legal tender and most people are likely to continue to prefer this…
He committed to ensuring that the amount of local currency in circulation was backed by equivalent value in precious minerals – mainly gold – or foreign exchange, in order to prevent the currency losing value like its predecessors.
Here is the full story, file under “less than fully credible.” That said, I do think that many of the important monetary innovations of the future are likely to come in Africa.