Month: November 2019
What I’ve been reading and browsing
1. Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. I read this one straight through, it does more to bring the Aztecs (a misnomer, by the way, as it is technically the name of the military alliance…a bit like referring to “NATO people”) to life than any other book I know.
2. Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics. I don’t need this, but I suspect useful for many.
3. Thomas O. McGarity, Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity. A very useful of the last four decades of transformation in the electricity industry.
4. Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947. An informative and engaging account of what the title promises (you can learn more about Heine and Alkan and Moholy-Nagy). Nonetheless the author never really addresses the question of why that period was quite so remarkable for Jewish achievement, relative to the rest of world history.
5. Edmund Morris, Edison. Lots of impressive research, but this book didn’t have the emphasis on innovation and institutions that I was looking for.
There is also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
Saturday assorted links
Don’t put the state capital too far away sorry Albany but Austin is fine
In this paper I exploit a novel and rich data-set with biographical information of US state legislators to investigate their sorting based on remoteness and attractiveness of the state capital. The main finding of the chapter is that in more remote US state capitals the legislators are on average less educated and experienced. The results are robust to using different measures of remoteness, based on the spatial distribution of the population, and controlling for other characteristics of the legislatures. To identify the causal effect of capitals’ remoteness, I use instrumental variables relying on proximity of capitals to the state centroids. Finally, I also find that legislators’ education affects public good provision and corruption.
That is the abstract of the job market paper of Giuseppe Rossitti from the London School of Economics.
Facial recognition isn’t just about China and airports
The child labor activist, who works for Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, had launched a pilot program 15 months prior to match a police database containing photos of all of India’s missing children with another one comprising shots of all the minors living in the country’s child care institutions.
He had just found out the results. “We were able to match 10,561 missing children with those living in institutions,” he told CNN. “They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families.” Most of them were victims of trafficking, forced to work in the fields, in garment factories or in brothels, according to Ribhu.
This momentous undertaking was made possible by facial recognition technology provided by New Delhi’s police. “There are over 300,000 missing children in India and over 100,000 living in institutions,” he explained. “We couldn’t possibly have matched them all manually.”
Locating thousands of missing children is just one of the challenges faced by India’s overstretched police force in a nation of 1.37 billion people.
In spite of these practical benefits, I still do not favor facial recognition systems at the macro level. India seems to be planning a big one:
…India’s government now has a much more ambitious plan. It wants to construct one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems. The project envisions a future in which police from across the country’s 29 states and seven union territories would have access to a single, centralized database.
Here is the full article with much more detail about the plans.
Intelligence predicts educational achievement pretty well
This 5-year prospective longitudinal study of 70,000+ English children examined the association between psychometric intelligence at age 11 years and educational achievement in national examinations in 25 academic subjects at age 16. The correlation between a latent intelligence trait (Spearman’s g from CAT2E) and a latent trait of educational achievement (GCSE scores) was 0.81. General intelligence contributed to success on all 25 subjects. Variance accounted for ranged from 58.6% in Mathematics and 48% in English to 18.1% in Art and Design. Girls showed no advantage in g, but performed significantly better on all subjects except Physics. This was not due to their better verbal ability. At age 16, obtaining five or more GCSEs at grades A⁎–C is an important criterion. 61% of girls and 50% of boys achieved this. For those at the mean level of g at age 11, 58% achieved this; a standard deviation increase or decrease in g altered the values to 91% and 16%, respectively.
That is from a new paper by Deary, Strand, Smith, and Fernandez, via Noah Carl.
Of course it has other uses too
Shachihata, a company that sells personal seals, has developed a stamp that allows victims to mark their attackers with invisible ink, which can be detected under ultraviolet light. A trial run of 500 anti-groping stamps, priced at ¥2,500 ($23), sold out within 30 minutes.
Here is more from The Economist, via Hugo.
Friday assorted links
1. The excellent Ben Westhoff on Joe Rogan.
2. A Canadian pro experiences the world and management system of Russian hockey.
3. The Cato study on wealth inequality. And why did the UK Labour government abandon the wealth tax idea in the 1970s?
4. Kocherlakota argued in Econometrica that optimal wealth taxes should be zero on average.
5. David McCabe at NYT: “The debate can take on a heated and personal tone. At a conference this spring, the soft-spoken legal academic Tim Wu responded to doubts raised by Tyler Cowen, an economist, about whether America has dangerous levels of corporate concentration by saying it was like arguing with someone who believes the earth is flat.”
6. “An inmate claimed his life sentence ended when he died and was revived.”
7. Megan McArdle on the historical importance of the Church.
Model this dopamine fast
“We’re addicted to dopamine,” said James Sinka, who of the three fellows is the most exuberant about their new practice. “And because we’re getting so much of it all the time, we end up just wanting more and more, so activities that used to be pleasurable now aren’t. Frequent stimulation of dopamine gets the brain’s baseline higher.”
There is a growing dopamine-avoidance community in town and the concept has quickly captivated the media.
Dr. Cameron Sepah is a start-up investor, professor at UCSF Medical School and dopamine faster. He uses the fasting as a technique in clinical practice with his clients, especially, he said, tech workers and venture capitalists.
The name — dopamine fasting — is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a stimulation fast. But the name works well enough, Dr. Sepah said.
The purpose is so that subsequent pleasures are all the more potent and meaningful.
“Any kind of fasting exists on a spectrum,” Mr. Sinka said as he slowly moved through sun salutations, careful not to get his heart racing too much, already worried he was talking too much that morning.
Here is more from Nellie Bowles at the NYT.
Did the medieval church make us WEIRD?
A growing body of research suggests that populations around the globe vary substantially along several important psychological dimensions and that populations characterized as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual. People from these societies tend to be more individualistic, independent, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty. Although these patterns are now well documented, few efforts have sought to explain them. Here, we propose that the Western Church (i.e., the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) transformed European kinship structures during the Middle Ages and that this transformation was a key factor behind a shift towards a WEIRDer psychology.
That is a new piece in Science by Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrani-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joe Henrich, try this link too. This one works for sure. Here is Harvard magazine coverage of the piece. Here is a relevant Twitter thread.
The two Jonathan co-authors are new colleagues of mine at GMU economics, so I am especially excited this work is seeing the light of day in such a good venue.
“OK Boomer”
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, how can I excerpt this one?:
On the negative side, I worry that those who deploy “OK Boomer” are putting themselves down and signaling their own impotence. I am not arguing for “[Expletive Deleted] Boomer,” even though it would have a vitality and rebellious spirit very much reminiscent of the 1960s or 1970s (which of course were quintessential boomer eras). But when I read or hear “OK Boomer,” I start to think there might be something special about baby boomers after all. We boomers may not be different in kind from other generations, but we do seem to inspire rhetorical creativity in our critics.
The closest earlier analog to “OK Boomer” is probably “OK, Chief,” a slightly sardonic response to a bossy or persistent request. So the phrase “OK Boomer” is itself an implicit and indeed somewhat passive admission as to who is really in charge. Members of Gen Z are subtly demonstrating that the clichés about them may have a grain of truth.
As I said I am a baby boomer, born in 1962, and I do a lot of public speaking about such topics as the absence of free lunches in this world. Yet I have never heard anyone say “OK Boomer” back to me. Instead I see the phrase on social media — another sign of the essentially passive nature of the response. (And wearing an “OK Boomer” hoodie or buying other such merchandise doesn’t seem like a major sign of rebellion, either.)
If there is any native medium for the “OK Boomer” meme, in fact, it is short TikTok videos, one of the more evanescent forms of social media. That the site seems plagued by Chinese censorship is just another state of affairs that boomers find more offensive than does Generation Z.
There is also this:
I am greatly pleased that the post-boomer generations are by all appearances less racist and sexist than their predecessors. Still, prejudices are part of human nature. There is always a danger that they will re-emerge, redirected at other targets — defined by their age, their political views, their wealth, the size of their carbon footprint, or some other salient variable. Prejudice doesn’t become acceptable simply because it is not directed at someone’s race, ethnicity or gender.
There is indeed much more at the link. A better cause for young people would be to fight against the growing age segregation in American society.
Thursday assorted links
Can an Artificial Intelligence Write A Good Blog Post?
A blog post by an artificial intelligence that has just been taught to write about an artificial intelligence is still far from being a good blog post by any human being.
There are many reasons why a blog post by an artificial intelligence is unlikely to be a good blog post by any human being.
First, the post is still a huge piece of written material, so it will be a big task for the AI to read it all. This is similar to reading a huge, long book, which is a huge task for you as an author.
Second, it is likely that the AI will use its knowledge about writing to create a very bad, misleading, or otherwise nonsensical blog post. In this case, the AI will be writing a blog post about its own stupidity.
Third, even if the blog post is not written by a computer but rather by a human author, the human author will not understand it and will not be able to correct it. This is because the blog post will include very basic, incorrect, or outdated knowledge about writing,
What should I ask Tim Harford?
For a Conversation with Tyler. Your assistance is much appreciated.
Consistency about elasticities, revisited
From Ross Rheingans-Yoo, the content is all his, I will not do a double indent:
- If marginal wealth is taxed an additional 0.5%/yr at the high end, then fewer people will amass and invest that much wealth—some will instead disperse it among a wider number of family members, donate it to charitable or political causes, or spend it on expensive consumption. (Saez and Zucman, in their potential-revenue analyses, assume that this effect is quite small, and that the wealthy will mostly accept lower returns on wealth.)
- Similarly, if the marginal opportunities to invest became worse by 0.5%/yr, fewer people would chose to invest, by the same token. Additionally,the effects should be the same size, as it’s the same decision-makers facing the same incentives!
- But if pushing on the price (read: rate of return) has little effect on the quantity of investment, then pushing on the quantity of investment should have a large effect on the price! (Unless we’re at some magic kink in the supply curve for unspecified reasons…)
- So a small amount of additional capital competing for investment opportunities should quickly reduce the competitive rate of return.
What’s the practical upshot? Well, if the authors’ assumptions about revenues are right, then Piketty’s r>gr>g “wealth spiral” can’t proceed unchecked, since capital simply can’t accumulate without competition quickly reducing the average rate of return back below gg.
Effort: The Unrecognized Contributor to US Income Inequality
That is a new paper by J. Rodrigo Fuentes and Edward E. Leamer:
This paper provides theory and evidence that worker effort has played an important role in the increase in income inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2016. The theory suggests that a worker needs to exert effort enough to pay the rental value of the physical and human capital, thus high effort and high pay for jobs operating expensive capital. With that as a foundation, we use data from the ACS surveys in 1980 and 2016 to estimate Mincer equations for six different education levels that explain wage incomes as a function of weekly hours worked and other worker features. One finding is a decline in annual income for high school graduates for all hours worked per week. We argue that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs forces down wages of those with high school degrees who have precious few high-effort opportunities outside of manufacturing. Another finding is that incomes rose only for those with advanced degrees and with weekly hours in excess of 40. We attribute this to the natural talent needed to make a computer deliver exceptional value and to the relative ease with which long hours can be chosen when working over the Internet.
I like that last sentence in particular.