Month: January 2020
Wednesday assorted links
1. Megan McArdle on Elizabeth Warren, recommended.
2. Damien Ma Iowa China podcast.
3. “The church wants to attract more young families. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship somewhere else. A memo recommends that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.” Link here. Cottage Grove, Minnesota.
4. “And the island’s puffin population has almost trebled in 15 years.”
Marginal Revolution University video for Anna Schwartz
It is excellent, one of my favorite MRU videos to date:
Here is some text from the release email:
The second episode of Women In Economics is out today! Join Harvard’s Claudia Goldin, UC Berkeley’s Christina Romer, and more on an insightful, engaging look at Anna Jacobson Schwartz’s life and achievements.
Did you know that Anna graduated from high school at 15?
Or that her dissertation couldn’t be published because of paper rationing during World War II? Yet despite this setback, she went on to coauthor one of the most important books about monetary policy and the Great Depression. Because of her work, she was hailed as one of the leading monetary economists of the 20th century by the end of her career!
We’re so excited to share Schwartz’s incredible story—click here to watch the video!
We’re also excited to announce our next video in our Women in Econ series, about Janet Yellen, will be released on March 8th. It will feature Yellen in her own words, along with Ben Bernanke and Christina Romer. Stay tuned!
Recommended.
Tomb Economics
The Mughals of Northern India are famous for their tombs, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, Jahangir’s Tomb in Lahore and, of course, the Taj Mahal. Why so many tombs? Culture surely has something to do with it, although conservative Muslims tend to frown on tombs and ancestor worship as interference with the communication between man and God. Incentives are another reason.
Under the Mansabdari system which governed the nobility, the Mughal Emperor didn’t give perpetual grants of land. On death, all land that had been granted to the noble reverted back to the Emperor, effectively a 100% estate tax. In other words, land titling for the Mughal nobility was not hereditary. Since land could not be handed down to the next generation, there was very little incentive for the Mughal nobility to build palaces or the kind of ancestral homes that are common in Europe. The one exception to the rule, however, was for tombs. Tombs would not revert back to the Emperor. Hence the many Mughal tombs
Here is some lovely jali (stone lattice) work in Barber’s tomb in the Humayan tomb complex.
The Aga Khan Development Network has done some great restoration work on Isa Khan’s tomb, again in the Humayun’s tomb complex. Here’s the ceiling and another piece of jali work.
Assessing State Capacity Libertarianism
Ryan Murphy and Colin O’Reilly suddenly have a 33 pp. (yes substantive) paper on my January 1 blog post on State Capacity Libertarianism (on speed, perhaps they have learned from a master). Here is the abstract:
Cowen (2020) argues for a redirection of effort towards “State Capacity Libertarianism,” which keeps the core of policy proposals from libertarianism intact while emphasizing a select set of policies aimed at furthering economic growth. These policies center on the ability of the state to accomplish that which it sets out to accomplish, i.e. state capacity. This paper interprets Cowen’s proposal in terms of an interaction between economic freedom and state capacity. Using four measures of state capacity, it finds that state capacity and economic freedom are neither additive nor complementary. Rather, they are substitutes for one another. These results are uncomfortable for conventional libertarianism, for the advocates of state capacity, and for State Capacity Libertarianism itself. One measure of state capacity we use is a novel measure using data from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which may be useful for researchers in other contexts.
I am very pleased (and flattered) they undertook this investigation. In terms of response on the particulars, I would say that State Capacity Libertarianism is about living standard levels, not marginal growth rates holding per capita income constant (as they do), which tends to drain off the benefits of state capacity. You can run into similar misspecification problems by regressing against growth rates for the particular American states, whereas again the levels ought to be central to the analysis. I readily admit the levels are not easy to handle econometrically, mostly because (outside of some oil principalities) “all good things go together,” and the correct causal model is not well understood.
In any case, the debate will go on.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Alfred Marshall reading group on Reddit.
3. Daniel Drezner on the China deal (among other things, a response to my China trade war column).
4. Arpit Gupta thread on the economics of caste.
5. What can social scientists learn from surveillance camera footage? Should they be allowed to?
Facts from The Browser
Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before
The average American church sermon lasts for 37 minutes — but only 14 minutes in Catholic churches
Japan now has over 70,000 people who are more than 100 years old
The average human-body temperature is 97.5 degrees, not 98.6 degrees
The average new American home now has more bathrooms than occupants
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How economics has changed
Panel A illustrates a virtually linear rise in the fraction of papers, in both the NBER and top-five series, which make explicit reference to identification. This fraction has risen from around 4 percent to 50 percent of papers.
And:
Currently, over 40 percent of NBER papers and about 35 percent of top-five papers make reference to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), lab experiments, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, event studies, or bunching…The term Big Data suddenly sky-rockets after 2012, with a more recent uptick in the top five.
Note that about one-quarter of NBER working papers in applied micro make references to difference-in differences. And:
The importance of figures relative to tables has increased substantially over time…
And about five percent of top five papers were RCTs in 2019. Note also that “structural models” have been on the decline in Labor Economics, but on the rise in Public Economics and Industrial Organization.
That is all from a recent paper by Janet Currie, Henrik Kleven, and Esmee Zwiers, “Technology and Big Data are Changing Economics: Mining Text to Track Methods.”
Via Ilya Novak.
Is there a happiness cost to being too patient?
We find that excessive patience is costly for individual well-being. This result is consistent across nine different measures of subjective well-being. Our measure of patience varies from a minimum of -1.31 to a maximum of 2.76 (this measure has standardized mean of zero and standard deviation of 1). For one of the main well-being indices, the life evaluation index, the level of patience that maximizes happiness is equal to 1.56, a numerical value similar to the one obtained using other well-being indicators.
And:
…moving from a level of patience of 1.40 corresponding to the peak in the positive experience index to the 99thpercentile in patience reduces the positive experienced index by 1.07, equivalent to 26% of the difference in happiness between those who completed college (7.16) and those with a high school diploma (3.12).
Contrary to how the language of the authors might be interpreted, this is a correlation rather than an established relationship.
The 13 pp. paper by Paola Giuliano and Paola Sapienza is too short, but interesting nonetheless. I also would like to see a study on how the patience of parents affects the happiness of their children and grandchildren.
Credentialism run amok
The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growth in professional occupations and high-wage cities.
That is from a new NBER paper by Peter Q. Blair and David J. Deming, noting that the authors instead emphasize upskilling in the jobs themselves.
Monday assorted links
1. Will Wilkinson thread on E. Warren.
2. Ilya Somin part II on State Capacity Libertarianism.
3. Are investors confusing bitcoin and blockchain? Or is that confusion possibly not wrong?
4. David Perell podcast with Bob Cottrell of The Browser — self-recommending.
5. N.K. Jemisin profile (New Yorker).
U.S. military fact of the day
In 2016, Politico reported that the total number of trombone, trumpet, keyboard and other instrument players [in the U.S. military] stands at about 6,500.
That’s a lot of Souza marches, but the State Department fields a bigger squad of diplomats. There are 8,106 Foreign Service officers, according to a State Department report. (The State Department has about another 5,700 people to support the diplomats, but they don’t do direct diplomatic work.) Still, there are a good 1,600 more diplomats than musicians.
Here is further information. Here is another relevant source. Via Andrew Goldman.
The vicious cycle of disrespect and cynicism
We tested how cynicism emerges and what maintains it. Cynicism is the tendency to believe that people are morally bankrupt and behave treacherously to maximize self-interest. Drawing on literatures on norms of respectful treatment, we proposed that being the target of disrespect gives rise to cynical views, which predisposes people to further disrespect. The end result is a vicious cycle: cynicism and disrespect fuel one another. Study 1’s nationally representative survey showed that disrespect and cynicism are positively related to each other in 28 of 29 countries studied, and that cynicism’s associations with disrespect were independent of (and stronger than) associations with lacking social support. Study 2 used a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, spanning 4 years. In line with the vicious cycle hypothesis, feeling disrespected and holding cynical views gave rise to each other over time. Five preregistered experiments (including 2 in the online supplemental materials) provided causal evidence. Study 3 showed that bringing to mind previous experiences of being disrespected heightened cynical beliefs subsequently. Studies 4 and 5 showed that to the extent that people endorsed cynical beliefs, others were inclined to treat them disrespectfully. Study 6’s weeklong daily diary study replicated the vicious cycle pattern. Everyday experiences of disrespect elevated cynical beliefs and vice versa. Moreover, cynical individuals tended to treat others with disrespect, which in turn predicted more disrespectful treatment by others. In short, experiencing disrespect gives rise to cynicism and cynicism elicits disrespect from others, thereby reinforcing the worldview that caused these negative reactions in the first place.
That is from a new paper by Olga Stavrova, Daniel Ehlebracht, and Kathleen D. Vohs. Perhaps this is further microfoundations for the hypotheses of Martin Gurri?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Bryan Caplan’s stance on higher education policy
In my Warren post I wrote:
7. College free for all: Would wreck the relatively high quality of America’s state-run colleges and universities, which cover about 78 percent of all U.S. students and are the envy of other countries worldwide and furthermore a major source of American soft power. Makes sense only if you are a Caplanian on higher ed., and furthermore like student debt forgiveness this plan isn’t that egalitarian, as many of the neediest don’t finish high school, do not wish to start college, cannot finish college, or already reject near-free local options for higher education, typically involving community colleges.
Bryan wishes me to point out that he does not favor “free tuition for all,” and indeed that is true, as I can verify from years of discussion with him. Nonetheless I still believe such a policy would come closer to limiting educational signaling (by making so many schools worse and lowering the value of the signal) than would Bryan’s preferred policies toward higher ed.
Sunday assorted links
1. What questions should you ask God about the game of Go?
2. The “Share this article” at the bottom of this Royal family announcement is the funniest part.
4. Yuval Levin (NYT): “In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions.” And the new book is A Time to Build.
5. Should jaywalking be illegal? Is the latest Star Wars movie too right-wing?
U.S.A. fact of the day
The government granted 408,000 visas for guest workers in 2019, up from 103,000 in 2010. This growth began well before the start of Donald Trump’s term, but has recently come back into focus. If a proposed rule-change takes effect, guest workers could become an even larger source of labour in low-wage industries.
Here is more from The Economist.