Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Florida drivers speed up after a close NFL home team loss.  No such comparable effect for the NBA.

2. “We’re rebuilding MRU’s learner and teacher platforms, and we build with AI agents from the ground up — coding, testing, content, and operations. We’re looking for someone early in their career to build alongside our team and own real work, using AI as their primary tool.”

3. Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo (NYT).

4. Generating human eggs from stem cells?

5. AI to predict human chess moves?

6. Are philosophers absurd?

7. Anthropic on the reconstruction of Fable 5.  And Alex Stamos comments.

Civilian supersonic flights are being legalized in the U.S.

by  Tyler Cowen

For too long, outdated rules based on old technology held back American aerospace innovation. Now, we are updating those rules for the first time since the 1970s. Today @USDOT announced a new proposal to enable civil supersonic flight by replacing speed limits with noise limits, ushering in a new era of safer, quieter, and faster air travel for all Americans.

That is from Michael Kratsios.  Here is how the 1973 ban first came about.  More details will be forthcoming, here is one concern from Eli.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Elizabeth Buchanan, So You Want to Own Greenland?  A useful and dispassionate overview of the relevant history and issues.  The author is from Australia.  I had not known that Norway unilaterally claimed parts of eastern Greenland in the early 1930s, though gave it back to Denmark following a Hague adjudication and ruling.

2. Andrea Wulf, The Traveler: One Man’s Epic Quest for Discover Our Shared Humanity.  This book meets her usual high standards.  In this case the traveler is George Foster, who sailed with Cook to the South Seas and had relatively sympathetic attitudes toward the indigenous peoples there.

3. James Hawes, The Shortest History of Ireland.  From a useful series, even if some of the claims are wrong and the judgments intemperate.  Such books force you to think through your own views and interpretations, they serve as refreshers for the basic history, and they do give you conceptual frameworks of a sort.  You are more likely to remember the core histories when you read books like this, but caution typically is in order as well.

4. Simon Warrack, Monumental: Great Buildings of the World Through the Hands and Eyes of a Stonemason.  An engaging book about the beauties of stonemasonry, with case studies of Venice, Angkor Wat, Lalibela, Zimbabwe and other locales.

5. Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light.  Yup.  “Earth is long since dead.  On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as gods of the Hindu pantheon.”  First published in 1967.

Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media

by  Tyler Cowen in

We live in a digital age, where billions of people engage in dialogue within topic-bound communities and threads. In an archival analysis of over 2 billion Reddit comments and an experiment, we show that this dialogue becomes more negative over time. Further analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity. Our studies show how basic human motives interact with the structure of social media platforms, posing an acute challenge for sustaining healthy online dialogue.

Here is the article by Hongkai Mao, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  For some of you commenters, how does it feel to be a puppet in the unfolding of this game?

Prediction markets paragraphs to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen

The oracle is an elaborate Web 3.0 contraption that combines cryptocurrency, voting and game theory in its goal to produce fair judgments. It’s billed by its creators, a company based in Manhattan called Risk Labs, as a “decentralized truth machine.”

But for all its brainiac complexity, the oracle has proved exploitable. Dozens of livid bettors claim the system has been gamed, the handiwork of a budding tech entrepreneur named Lancelot Chardonnet (his name at birth, he says). A look at the Donk debate, which unfolded over nine rancorous days, illustrates how he did it, and the messy, fractious challenge of divining something as nuanced as truth.

When the Bucharest video was first broadcast on April 11, nobody heard “Donk,” and this bet seemed destined to be won by those who bet “no.” Then someone noticed that the caster, who through sheer phonetic coincidence is known as Dinko, had botched “don’t.”

Dinko might have known about the Donk bet, so it’s at least possible that he said the fateful syllable on purpose. It’s even possible he placed money on the outcome. He might have made what linguistics fans would call a voiceless velar stop slip.

Here is more from the NYT.

Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end.  From Jackson:

Links

From the episode summary:

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be

Excerpt:

Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.

…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?

Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.

There is much more of interest, self-recommending!

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).

2. Is space the most underrated policy area?

3. On the USAID and deaths debate.  Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate.  Here is commentary from GPT Pro.  In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.

4. Using LLMs in economic history.

5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.

6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.

AI cheating on math econ at Brown

by  Tyler Cowen in

The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.

Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.

Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The US Racial Wealth Gap

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Writing in the QJE, Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, & Schularick argue that today’s black-white wealth gap can be explained by differences in initial conditions from over a hundred and fifty years ago, i.e. slavery. But there is an important, and glaring objection: in the age of immigration (1850–1924) millions of whites immigrated to the United States with essentially no wealth and yet they caught up to the “heritage” whites quite quickly and indeed today are richer than heritage whites.

Brian Marein collects and carefully analyzes the data:

Persistent racial wealth inequality in the United States is often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of historical wealth disparities. However, inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. This paper accounts for this compositional change in the white population by documenting wealth dynamics among European immigrants and their descendants. Cash-on-arrival data show that immigrants began with substantial wealth deficits relative to the native-born. Yet by the late twentieth century, these deficits had closed, as indicated by comparisons between the descendants of later-arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans and those of longer-established Northwestern Europeans. This pattern implies rapid intraracial wealth convergence, in contrast to the slower convergence observed across racial groups. A stylized model shows that these differences can be largely accounted for by income. These findings demonstrate that large wealth disparities do not mechanically persist when groups have access to comparable economic opportunities.

If initial conditions don’t explain the wealth gap then the most likely explanation is an income and/or savings gaps. I am reminded of an earlier politically incorrect paper of the year by Nathaniel Hilger and see also my review of his book The Parent Trap.

Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs.  Another pill can be printed almost for free.

That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services.  They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination.  After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.

Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you.  Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.

In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well.  It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.

“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.

Typewriters and fertility

by  Tyler Cowen in

Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.

That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid.  Via Kris Gulati.