Is there Hope for Evidence-Based Policy?

Vital City magazine and the Niskanen Center’s Hypertext have a special issue on the prospects for “evidence-based policymaking.” The issue takes as its starting point, Megan Stevenson’s Cause, effect, and the structure of the social world, a survey of RCTs in criminology which concludes that the vast majority of interventions “have little to no lasting effect.” The issue features responses from John Arnold, Jonathan Rauch, Anna Harvey, Aaron Chalfin, Jennifer Doleac, myself, and others. It’s an excellent issue.

My contribution focuses on the difference between changing preferences versus constraints. Here’s one bit:

Some other programs that Stevenson mentions elsewhere are also not predominantly constraint- or incentive-changing. Take, for example, the many papers estimating the effect of imprisonment on the post-release behavior of criminal defendants via the random selection of less and more lenient judges. At first, it may seem absurd to say that imprisonment is not about incentives. Isn’t deterrence the ne plus ultra of incentives? Yes, but the economic theory of deterrence, so-called general deterrence, is rooted in the anticipation of consequences — the odds before the crime. By the sentencing stage, we’re merely observing where the roulette wheel stopped. Criminals factor in the likelihood of capture as just another cost of doing business. Thus, the economic theory of deterrence predicts high rates of recidivism, as the calculus that justified the initial crime remains unchanged after punishment. To be sure, imprisonment might change behavior for all kinds of reasons. Maybe inmates learn that they underestimated the unpleasantness of prison, but perhaps they improve their criminal skills while in prison or join a gang, or perhaps the stain of a criminal record reduces the prospect of legitimate employment. Thus, the study of imprisonment’s effects on criminal defendants is intriguing, but it’s not testing deterrence or incapacitation, on which we have built a body of work with clear predictions.

Indeed, on Stevenson’s list only hot-spot policing is a clear example of changing constraints. It is perhaps not coincidental that hot-spot policing is one of the few interventions that Stevenson acknowledges “leads to a small but statistically significant decrease in reported crime in the areas with increased policing.” While I do not begrudge Stevenson her interpretation, other people shade the total evidence differently. Here, for example, is the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, in my experience a rather tough-minded and empirically rigorous organization not easily swayed by compelling narratives:

As the National Research Council review of police effectiveness noted, “studies that focused police resources on crime hot spots provided the strongest collective evidence of police effectiveness that is now available.” A Campbell systematic review by Braga et al. comes to a similar conclusion; although not every hot spots study has shown statistically significant findings, the vast majority of such studies have (20 of 25 tests from 19 experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations reported noteworthy crime or disorder reductions), suggesting that when police focus in on crime hot spots, they can have a significant beneficial impact on crime in these areas. As Braga concluded, “extant evaluation research seems to provide fairly robust evidence that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy.”

Indeed, I argue that most of the programs that Stevenson shows failed, tried to change preferences while those that succeeded tend to focus on changing constraints. There are lessons for future policy and funding. Read the whole thing.

What should I ask Brian Winter?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is his bio:

Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chefProficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian

So what should I ask him?

My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  You can tell he knows what an interview is!  At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?

ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.

He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.

That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.

The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.

My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.

My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”

My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.

Excellent throughout.  And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

Strong AI and the O-Ring model

Let’s say the Sumerians were gifted strong AI, simply as an exogenous shock to a historical model.  Could they put it to much use?  Electricity would be one immediate problem, but not the only problem.

Or give strong AI to a caveman.

Thomas Edison had electricity, but how much could he do with strong AI?  Lord Asquith?  Adlai Stevenson?

Where exactly are we in this historical sequence?

Opening Borders

Open borders hasn’t been getting a lot of good press recently but next week Bulgaria and Romania will join the Schengen Area for air and sea travel (road travel will likely follow). No more passports or visa necessary! The Schengen Area is a remarkable achievement for a part of the world once riven by violence and rivalry. Recall:

Created in 1995 with 10 countries, the Schengen Area has since grown to cover more than 1.5 million square miles, allowing almost 420 million people to move freely between 27 countries, currently. It’s important not to confuse the Schengen Area with the European Union—the former is a travel zone where citizens can cross country borders without a passport or visa, whereas the latter is an economic and political union of countries. The Schengen Area currently includes Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

According to the Council of the European Union, “Each day around 3.5 million people cross internal borders for work or study or to visit families and friends, and almost 1.7 million people reside in one Schengen country while working in another.” Being a part of the zone saves citizens time and hassle from passport checks. It also helps travelers from 59 countries outside the EU, including the United States, as they can travel without visas for up to 90 days within the Schengen Area for tourism and business.

Unfortunately, the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) means that US citizens will require a visa to travel to Europe next year–this is a step in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, the entry of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Area is something to celebrate.

It would be great to see a Schengen Area for say the United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K and New Zealand (the US plus the CANZUK countries).

*Nuclear War: A Scenario*

By Annie Jacobsen, a very good book.  What would happen if a nuclear weapon actually were launched at the United States?  On the ground?  In the chain of command?  Organizationally and otherwise?  A good book, sadly still of relevance.  Full of drama throughout, and tactically astute.  Excerpt:

Ted Postol is blunt.  “Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says.  “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.”  This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability.  And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”

Notably troublesome is how Tundra sees clouds.

It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here.

Disparities in psychological traits and incomes

There are pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender gaps in income in the U.S. We investigate whether these correspond with differences in competitiveness, risk tolerance, and confidence relative to performance in a large, stratified sample of the U.S. prime-age population. We find substantial differences in all three traits across Black, Hispanic, and White males and females. These traits predict individual income. Competitiveness and risk tolerance help explain the White gender income gap. Competitiveness also affects the Black-White income gap between men. Confidence about one’s performance helps explain a substantial and significant portion of all five race-gender income gaps with White men.

That is from a new paper by Aurélie Dariel, John Ham, Nikos Nikiforakis, and Jan Stoop.  The number of data points is 2,463.  Here is one sentence from the paper:

The sizes of the effects are substantial: individuals above the median in terms of competitiveness and risk tolerance,
for instance, have incomes that are 21.2% and 15.7% higher than those below the median, respectively, when jointly estimated. Confidence in relative performance is also associated with income: individuals in the upper and lower third of the distribution (the upper third being overconfident and the lower third being underconfident) have incomes that are 23.5% and 16.7% lower than the middle third, who are better at evaluating their relative performance.

And this:

We find that controlling for confidence substantially and significantly reduces the unexplained income gaps between White men and all of our other five REG groups; the effects range from 7.2% of the differential (White women versus White men) to 18.7% (Hispanic men versus White men). Only controlling for competitiveness significantly reduces the unexplained income gap between White women and White men by 5.9%, but increases the unexplained income gap between Black men and White men by 5.1%. Only controlling for risk tolerance, on the other hand, does not significantly affect any of the income gaps, with the exception of a (marginally) significant reduction of 4.1% in the gap between White women and White men. Jointly controlling for the three traits significantly reduces the unexplained income gap between Black women and White men (by 15.2%), Hispanic women and White men (by 11.5%), and White women and White men (by 15.0%). However, these traits do not explain the gap between Black men and White men, as the overconfidence and competitiveness effects go in opposite directions.

All worthy of a ponder.  I did find this result of particular interest:

On average, Blacks and Hispanics are 9.7% more competitive than Whites.

You will note this is based on self-reports.  While self-reports often are more reliable than outsiders might think, are they so reliable for making comparisons across different groups in this manner?  And the variable “confidence in relative performance” — might that be a proxy for other, unobserved but also quite real factors?

Via a loyal MR reader, and I commend the researchers for their courage, even if I am not convinced by everything they have done.

San Francisco dining

Dwarkesh brought me to the very good Sizzling Pot King, 139 8th St, San Francisco, genuine Hunan food and yes I have been to Changsha.  Don’t walk there though, take an Uber or better yet a Waymo.  Dwarkesh was kind enough to call me one for the trip back to the hotel.  When I asked for jazz music, I was shocked to hear a very high quality Bill Evans trio cut, not some popular slop.

The Guam restaurant on Mission — Prubechu — is quite interesting and serves largely the indigenous Chamorro food.  It is rare that I have the chance to try an altogether new cuisine, in any case I would eat there again.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Autistic 27-year-old Canadian now allowed to end her life.  It’s time to end the Canadian suicide regime as it currently exists: “…the province [Alberta] operates a system where there is no appeal process and no means of reviewing a person’s MAID approval.”

2. Highlights from SF CWT listener meet-up event.

3. “More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt.

4. Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park.

5. Economics round-up from Zvi.

6. Finding excessive sentencers in the judicial system.

7. On the Bach cello suites.

What I’ve been reading

Christopher Phillips, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East.  A good, “simple enough” introduction to the wars going on in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.  If you are worried you will hate, you can just skip the Palestine chapter.

Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.  About five percent of American women end up having five children or more — what do you learn by talking to them?  (“Which one should I give back?”)  The author herself has eight children.

Beth Linker, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.  For a long time I’ve been thinking there should be a good book on this topic, and now there is one.  Both fun and interesting.

Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy argues for proportional representation and accompanying reforms.  Putting aside whether this ever can happen, I am never quite sure how this is supposed to work when nuclear weapons use is such a live issue.

Ethan Mollick is the best and most thorough Twitter commentator on LLMs, he now has a forthcoming book Co-Intelligence.

Andrew Leigh, an Australian MP and also economist, has published The Shortest History of Economics, recommended by Claudia Goldin.

An RCT for income-sharing agreements

Is this the first one?

We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing of downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific terms can increase demand for higher education insurance to potentially address risk for students with varying outcomes.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Sidhya BalakrishnanEric BettingerMichael S. KofoedDubravka RitterDouglas A. WebberEge Aksu Jonathan S. Hartley.

Netherlands fact of the day

The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions…

The country has nearly 24,000 acres — almost twice the size of Manhattan — of crops growing in greenhouses. These greenhouses, with less fertilizer and water, can grow in a single acre what would take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to achieve. Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow about a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons.

Here is the full article, via S.  The article is interesting throughout.  However here is a more recent piece on the Dutch nitrogen revolt.