Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. There is no great stagnation: the horizontal shower.

2. What if Star Trek had social networks?

3. The culture that is Iceland.

4. New economics blog from Phillips Exeter Academy.

5. TGS for musical instruments?

6. Profile of Scott Stern’s work on the economics of science.

7. Kristof has quite a reasonable review of Murray; by the way if you think dysfunctional social mores all boil down to economics, how are those Albertan tribes with the oil revenues doing?  Ex football players in bankruptcy?  etc.  Here is more Krugman on Murray, now totally on the mark.  Matt nails it too.

Comments

CH

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"Ex football players in bankruptcy?"

glad to see you're coming around on this tyler. and in such clear language for a change! shouldn't be long now before you're rethinking your open borders mood affiliation.

Craig

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If you think the people of Iceland have it bad, consider the Samaritans--yes, like in the New Testament. They're still out there...barely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan

With fewer than 800 adherents, and basically just four families, all of their marriages have to be approved by a geneticist.

Willitts

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Star Trek: The Great Stagnation

FYI

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Tyler, why do you think Krugman got it right? I mean, if anything he is very confused about what is wrong and what is not. In the post you linked he seems to imply that things are actually not that bad... which contradicts his initial position of things being really bad because of declining incomes for poor men.

Kristof did have a good column right until the end. If we think the cause of our current problem is moral decline, how can liberal social policies that are basically the opposite of what we had before (when the situation was better) can help? I understand the point about changes in the economy that impact the working class but I think liberals policies he mentions will only make things worse. If women knew that they would have the government taking care of her kids, would they have more or less kids?

Tyler Cowen

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True all around, Krugman does contradict himself but this time he got it right. And I do think Kristof undervalues the importance of rising female wages, instead looking to stagnant males wages when that is of secondary importance, albeit a factor.

T. Shaw

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Stopped clock right twice each 24 hours.

Krugman doesn't meet that standard.

Slocum

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One place where Krugman is still not playing completely straight was in citing teenage birth rates but ignoring overall out-of-wedlock birth rates. The former have declined substantially, but the latter continued to climb:

http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/sites/default/files/75_Fig01.jpg

Matt

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Tyler,

Krugman is arguing that divergent cultural lives haven't led to a divergence in the actual quality of life ("social ills") for the lower/middle class (whites? he doesn't disaggregate the crime stats, although I don't know if one meaningfully could).

I haven't read the Murray book, but doesn't he point to bad life outcomes, in terms of incomes etc., that accompany the marriage and religiousity trends? If not, it's probably not a very good book, and is just voicing aesthetic complaints about one group's cultural habits. If Murray does tally important metrics showing that cultural divergence leads to bad life outcomes, then Krugman pointing to two upward trends (only one disaggregated by race) is a weak and misleading argument that doesn't consider all the relevant factors when assessing the "social ills" the lower/middle class is facing.

So which is it? Is the book silly and unimportant, or is Krugman missing the point? You seem to have claimed that neitehr is the case in recent posts.

mark

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Idk. I would not say Krugman is now on the mark. it seems like he is trying to distract his readers from Murray's point, which is not that declining marriage rates have caused the ills Krugman chooses to talk about, but rather that they have in part caused ills Krugman chooses - in that post - not to talk about, but in other instances talks about a lot, namely household income inequality.

CBBB

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I think Murray's point is in itself distracting

CBBB

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Krugman got it right there's no question. I frankly don't understand this obsession with marriage - it all seems like a big side show. I don't see moral decline as a problem at all and can't understand what the concern is.

Hasdrubal

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Single women can raise children as efficiently and effectively as married couples? That's a surprise, case everything I've heard says that being a single parent is hell and has negative impacts on both the children and the parent.

CBBB

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But is it really that big of a problem? I honestly doubt that the big reason wages are stagnating and unemployment is high is due to these sorts of issues. I know my comment about what I consider to be poor was unpopular but I think that focusing on the VERY bottom of the barrel in society is a big distraction from the fact that things are not going fantastically well for people in the middle either and they aren't having all kinds of children out of wedlock and so on.

Look when Krugman talks about lack of economic opportunities leading to people not getting married or forming households he's talking about people like me and so it rings true from my perspective.

Brian Donohue

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Maybe you should complain.

Jason Malloy

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Murray shows why the social changes are meaningful: the social dimensions in decline (and far more precipitously among the lower class)-- religiosity, social engagement, stable relationships-- are also the strongest correlates of subjective well-being. (Stevenson and Wolfers have already shown increasing happiness inequality by education levels that mirror the same trends).

Conservatives understand that the lower classes help themselves more under the simplicity of paternalism than under the chaos of laissez faire, but their message is largely impotent under the prevailing zeitgeist. That's why Murray is better at describing the trends than at offering much realistic advice on how to change them.

On the other hand, a confident philosophical libertarian is more able to accept/embrace the tradeoff of lower happiness for increased autonomy (at both the societal and individual level).

Scoop

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Krugman on Murray: Teenage pregnancy is a much stronger argument than crime. Crime is falling for very obvious reasons. Improving technology and police tactics are greatly increasing the chances of catching and convicting criminals (look at closure rates by crime over the past two decades) and the longer prison sentences passed in the 1980s are keeping criminals off the streets (though liberals are now beginning a real movement push to deny this truth and endanger us all by reducing criminal sentences). Dissolving lower class families may push crime rates up, but you can hardly expect it to beat out the far more direct effect of higher conviction percentages and longer sentences per conviction. Perhaps crime would have fallen far more without the destruction of lower class family structure. I don't see any such obvious explanation for teenage pregnancy dropping.

Matt (and others arguing increasing female earnings): Then why isn't it decreasing marriage rates among the upper classes, where women earn far more and the marginal happiness increase brought about by bringing in a man's earnings are much less? If you're making less than, what?, $80,000, extra income brings substantially more happiness, but above that point, it brings none. Thus, it would seem, marriage rates among rich women would be down far more. But the rich women are marrying like it's 1956. If someone has created a convincing explanation for this, I haven't read it.

CH

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Then why isn’t it decreasing marriage rates among the upper classes, where women earn far more and the marginal happiness increase brought about by bringing in a man’s earnings are much less?

1. because status/dominance, not money, is the primary male attractiveness trait that women love. at upper class incomes, a man's occupation usually carries so much high status that careerist women in his milieu don't care as much about income discrepancies. thus, for instance, you see successful pairings of say, lawyerchicks with lower paid professors. in the lower classes, most jobs have little inherent status beyond what they pay, so income plays a much bigger role.

2. upper class women have inherited, on average, genetic dispositions to greater foresight, risk management, low impulsivity and future time orientation. thus, making long-term outlook beneficial life choices comes more naturally to them than it does to low class women, who must be prodded harder to do the right thing.

all of this, btw, is intimately tied to issues arising from the migration of tens of millions of peasants from south of the border. a fact i love rubbing in libertardians' mood affiliated faces.

Dave

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Adding on this, high status women only benefit from having high status children. If junior ends up as a Starbucks barista he's an embarrassment that shows she is a bad mother. Having a father is good for raising high status children.

FYI

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Your last point is completely false. Go and compare the rate of out of wedlock births among whites, blacks and latinos.

ad*m

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"because status/dominance, not money, is the primary male attractiveness trait that women love"
->
but only since suffrage, feminism etc. Before, women definitely loved the salvation from starvation that betas could provide.

Scoop

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#2 invalidates Matt's argument that this is "no big deal." I'm not saying this makes it false, but I was looking for an explanation that paints this as a not-particularly-disturbing trend. I'm sure the "no big deal" folks have devised an argument.

CBBB

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80K is pretty close to the poverty line

Laserlight

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CBBB, didn't you say "60k" yesterday?

dead serious

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Inflation rates move quicker than previously thought apparently.

Andrew'

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I figured out why the middle class is shrinking. Obama thinks the rich make $200k and CBBB thinks poverty is $80k.

CBBB

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I assessed that and felt the original figure was too low

Brian Donohue

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This explains a lot.

DPG

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Roissy's theory of female hypergamy and male economic stagnation should gain status as a result of the debates over Coming Apart.

CH

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Tell me about it. Four years later, and polite society is finally coming around to the ugly truth of the matter.

CBBB

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Well that's all pretty hysteric to say the least

CH

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try invigorating. meant to get under the skin as much as illuminate the mind.

asdf

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The scale is hysteric. Civilization won't collapse. But the logic is sound and the effects are real.

CBBB

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Are they real? For all the talk about this I don't see too much of the effects.

CH

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you know, it's not like we don't have historical precedent for this sort of sociosexual and cultural dystopia leading to civilizational collapse.
anyhow, amusing gusto of Le Chateau aside, the fact that female hypergamy -- or other very unPC taboo subjects such as those concerning group population differences in civilizationally advantageous traits -- wasn't even on the smartypants pundit radar until, oh, right about now, should tell us how vigorously the elites in control of our discourse need to be pummeled over the head with the facts on the ground. It's gonna be funny when, on the night before the long day of the rope, our leading light intellectuals confront the past 60 years of their cherished beliefs and realize it was all a pack of lies and wrongheadedness.

Alex

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He has some good points and bad points but vastly overreaches. Doesn't help that he's a repugnant human being.

Claudia

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And Roissy's insistence that "game" is the solution for society's ills is just wacky. I will grant him and Murray that socioeconomic dynamics between men and women have changed in some ways...but we have to look forward and make the new arrangements work. We're still social creatures who need some form of support and community.

Ricardo

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Roissy is Nietzsche adaopted for people who read FHM magazine.

msgkings

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Outstanding comment.

Rich Berger

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7. I am surprised that you thought Krugman's diversionary tactics - hey look at crime and teenage pregnancies! were on the mark and Mr. Church's quote from Jane Austen was part of his nailing it.

I am annoyed that the Kindle prices are so close to those for the physical book, but I may have to break down and buy Murray's book. I am curious to know whether Frum's "quote" is accurate - the one that all the lefties seemed to have latched onto.

Chuck Rudd

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Rich, which quote? I have the Kindle version right here.

Rich Berger

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Here is the quote - I gather that the fragment in quotes is supposed to be from Murray. I would be curious to know if it occurs in the book, exactly or in paraphrase, and if so, in what context.

'Murray is especially eager to chastise the top 5% because he is convinced that this class "tends to be liberal—right? There's no getting around it Every way of answering this question produces a yes."'

Chuck Rudd

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The fuller passage:

"But the lacuna that is likely to be at the top of your mind is politics. The new upper class tends to be liberal, right?

There's no way of getting around it. Every way of answering that question produced a yes. In chapter 3, I give politics a longer discussion, because it relates to the isolation of the new upper class. But that reality need not obscure another one: Most of the description of the elite culture in this chapter cuts across ideological lines. The details can be different. As a group, elite liberals are more exercised about being green than are elite conservatives. The dinner party given by a conservative hostess of the new upper class is more likely to feature red meat as the entree than a dinner party given by a liberal one....But these differences are swamped by the ways in which people occupying the elite positions in America have adopted similar norms and mores. The essence of the culture of the new upper class is remarkably consistent across the political spectrum."

But to go back to Murray's working definition of "new upper class", he says: "when I use the term *upper middle class*, I am not referring to all of them, but to a small subset: the people who run the nation's economic, political, and cultural institutions."

Rich Berger

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Thanks. Two observations - I have to buy the book to read Chapter 3 for a longer discussion of the political dimension. Number 2, he does say the top 5% tends to be liberal, but the culture of the top 5% cuts across the political spectrum. So Frum read the sentence he quoted and ignored the rest of what Murray wrote, which undercuts his argument. Quoting Frum going off the track:

"Say "top 5%" to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. It includes the retired general now enriching his pension with directorships and consultancies. It includes for that matter the call screener at the Rush Limbaugh program." Seems like Mr. Frum doesn't read very carefully.

Furthermore, Frum has an axe to grind, claiming that Murray said he was fired from AEI for "laziness". Murray instead indicated not that Frum was lazy but that his output was meager for what he was getting paid. Does this prove that he is wrong? No, but it makes me very careful in taking his writing at face value.

Ricardo

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I don't see how this undercuts Frum's point at all. Murray appears to want to make the point that the "upper class" are "the people who run the nation's economic, political, and cultural institutions" and that these people tend to be liberal and tend to adhere to the David Brooks stereotypes of well-off liberals.

Frum attacks this by pointing to research showing that the top 5% are not especially liberal and, in fact, are more likely to share Charles Murray's economic policy preferences. We could also look at the issue from a different angle: what about members of Congress, their staffers, and lobbyists? In other words, the people who actually make policy for the country as opposed to people like Charles Murray's friends who merely write about policy for think tanks. As I Google prominent members of Congress or prominent political players, I just don't see any evidence these people tend to come from especially elite backgrounds. Most of them went to non-elite universities and especially non-elite law schools and then worked in non-elite jobs before breaking into politics. Some like Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd or Mitt Romney come from political families but many if not most power brokers appear to come from rather middle class backgrounds.

Ricardo

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Put a bit differently, Murray has a case if and only if he can show that his "upper class" (I will call them the Stuff White People Like crowd or SWPL for short) have disproportionate influence in policy-making.

I will concede SWPLs have disproportionate influence in academia, non-profits, left-leaning think-tanks and the media. However, I see little evidence they have influence in the armed forces, Fortune 500 corporations, law enforcement, labor unions, or among professional politicians and lobbyists. I even doubt they have much influence in bureaucracy at the federal, state or local level.

Does Murray provide any evidence I am wrong on this? If so, I'll be interested to read the evidence. If not, though, I suspect he is just trafficking in the sort of conservative resentment against liberal coastal elites that has energized the conservative base from Barry Goldwater's campaign or William F. Buckley's readers to Newt Gingrich's current campaign. This kind of thing is necessary if one wants to simultaneously insist the U.S. is on the decline and to deny that conservative elites have any responsibility for this decline.

Jack Fraser

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4. As a boarding school man myself (of long ago), I'm offended a senior at Exeter thought his musings on macroeconomics warranted attention.

Crenellations

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Yes. But, if it were an Andover student I'd click through.

Jack Fraser

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Why, I'd give him an internship!

TheCrankyProfessor

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I wonder what the persistence rates of people who are just sure they're going to major in economics is like? I haven't ever found it very helpful to know what my freshman advisees said they intended to do before they get here....

T. Shaw

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3. Is there an econimcs academic, anywhere, that is monitoring Iceland and its progress compared to the PIIGS eurozone carnival?

CBBB

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Try the Economics department of the University of Iceland

rluser

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5) it's not so new anymore, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdJTIwFokqA

Chuck Rudd

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Krugman is erects a strawman by focusing only on teenage pregnancy rates. That's not the issue. The issue is unmarried birth rates, and it has increased among non-Hispanic white women (and all racial cohorts):

http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/share-of-births-to-unmarried-mothers-by-race-1990-2010/

Greg Ransom

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Mix apples with oranges with bananas and don't look at demographic trends across time -- and Krugman is not an idiot. Otherwise, umm ....

ques

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I can't find my way into the general discussion of Murray's book/thesis at all. It seems really arbitrary to want to talk about social conditions, morals, culture, and the divergent paths of certain classes in US society, but then to choose to limit that to a discussion of "white America." So Murray only looks at white upper class people and white lower/working class people? Why not look at American society broadly? Other sociologists seem to have no problem doing this and initiating debates. I would think more people would be perplexed by the basic focus of his book, given that he clearly wants to talk about American society in general.

CBBB

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Murray attempted to look at American Society more broadly and it produced a racist polemic called The Bell Curve

Chuck Rudd

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yeah, 2 chapters out of 22 were about race.

Chuck Rudd

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Murray doesn't look at blacks because there are other confounding variables. Whatever conclusions he might develop when looking at society as a whole would be torn down by the left - as they were when The Bell Curve came out - as not taking x, y, and z factor into account.

Just looking at whites takes away a lot of the white noise, but it has still not satisfied those on the right or the left. Readers on the right feel that Murray didn't account for immigration or increased diversity and multiculturalism - that a lot of social decay and loosened bonds among white people is attributable to "others" getting in the way of those associations.

ques

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I guess I just think there's a mismatch between focusing solely on whites, but also wanting to make a statement about American society in general. The fact that he wrote a previous work that also included other races -- whether or not that work was good or bad -- doesn't really change the fact that this new book is pretty fundamentally, on a conceptual level, an odd duck.

ques

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And it's just weird that many reviewers maybe mention at the outset the issue of a focus solely on whites, but then they go ahead and seriously address the work, as if it's framed logically. I'm not being political here. Both left-of-center and right-of-center reviewers have seemed to grant Murray his odd premise in their assessments of his book.

Chuck Rudd

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Personally, I see his book as a conversation-starter, not as the end-all, be-all of the subject.

It seems to me that Charles Murray merely injected another variable into the mix - one that was already well understood by sociologists and, oddly enough, by the same people who are suffering the problem. Philosophers have long been saying that something not-great will come out of turning away from God, authority, the family, community, and order. Surely that, mixed with economic factors, is part of this picture.

But Frum and Krugman don't even want to entertain those variables.

CBBB

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Well I consider myself a Philosopher of sorts and I wouldn't say turning away from those things is all that bad

Ricardo

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Chuck, one of the standard tomes on subject you raise (among many others) is Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind." It's tough to see what Charles Murray could contribute after a conservative effort like that with its citations of Plato, Freud, Weber, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Locke; Bloom has the philosophical and humanities perspective in this field on the conservative side pretty much covered.

It's also not clear that a decline in religious belief is at issue here. Surveys tend to show that religious attendance among Christians increases with education but also that religious belief or the subjective importance of religion in one's life tends to decrease with education. See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's survey, for instance.

Finally, Frum is a religious Jew and a conservative so I don't know why you would claim he is somehow unwilling to entertain the questions that you raise now and that Bloom raised 25 years ago.

Steven Kopits

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The "Freedom & Belonging" take on this would be that society continues to become more conservative. Teenage pregnancy reflects neither liberal (libertarian) nor socially conservative values. Libertarians (liberals) tend to feel strongly about personal responsibility. Social conservatives would consider out-of-wedlock births as anti-social. So neither philosophy, I think, has much sympathy for unwed mothers.

Egalitarians, on the other hand, are quite comfortable with that kind of choice because i) everyone's equal, ii) discipline is a drag, iii) accountability is unnacceptable, and iv) it's someone else's fault.

If we allow that the egalitarians are no longer on the median voter boundary, then social pressures should take liberal (libertarian) or socially conservative forms. This would argue that Murray is wrong because he is impatient. The conservative trends already manifest among the elite will tend to filter down over time.

Attorney at Flaw

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That's a very powerful argument, especially if you don't know what "egalitarian" means.

drunicus

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I don't think anyone, no matter what their political persuasion, can seriously argue that single parents kids have worse outcomes. They simply do, it's simply a fact, and there's no denying it.
And one can't deny, either, that phenomenally stupid and short sighted leftist policies encouraged illegitimacy, denigrated the role of males, and left many poorer females very, very dependent on an indifferent, dehumanizing social welfare system.
No matter what kind of silly Keynesian "stimulus" you throw at an entrenched underclass, they'll obviously remain an entrenched underclass.

Jason Malloy

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Matt (and others arguing increasing female earnings): Then why isn’t it decreasing marriage rates among the upper classes, where women earn far more and the marginal happiness increase brought about by bringing in a man’s earnings are much less?

Exactly. The larger sorting patterns need to be viewed through the lens of latent behavioral variation. Social pressures were already biased towards high investment reproduction. People were shamed for having premarital sex or children outside of marriage. Female economic dependency was just one more practical limit on these behaviors. However, once prosperity and secularism unraveled the cultural expectations, only internal behavioral motivators were left, and the motivations previously dampened and suppressed through practical and social limits could now express themselves.

The internal motivators tend to form a psychological and behavioral package: some people are oriented towards higher investment reproduction and this entails higher cognitive ability, long term goals about education and career, later first intercourse, fewer and more stable relationships, reproduction within secure pairbond, and mate selection biased towards reliability and parenting qualities. Other people are oriented towards lower investment reproduction and this entails lower cognitive ability, few long term goals, early first intercourse, more sex partners and less stable relationships, reproduction outside of pairbond, and mate selection biased towards "sexy" qualities (looks, charm, creativity, athleticism). (Many of these traits are functionally related (e.g. lower IQ mostly is a major cause of higher time preference), but they are also compounded through assortative mating).

Jon

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I find the link to the story on Iceland to be offensive. The story is wrong, and having lived in Iceland my whole life I know that. The genealogy website simply exists because a company, DeCode genetics, made it available. The company has used it to develop genetic tests and medicine for hereditary disease.

jc

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"how are those Albertan tribes with the oil revenues doing?"

Not sure what you mean by this. Most of them are doing better then the ones I visit without oil revenue.

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