Month: November 2022

Teenage mental health has been a source of growing concern over the past decade, with recent whistleblower testimony pointing to the mental health risks of spending time on social media platforms, especially for girls. This paper investigates the extent to which social media are harmful for teenagers, leveraging rich administrative data from the Canadian province of British Columbia and quasi-experimental variation related to the introduction of wireless internet there. I show  neighbourhoods covered by highspeed wireless internet have significantly higher social media use, based on Google search volume data. In the main analysis, I link spatial data on broadband coverage  to 20 years of student records that provide detailed information about individual student health. Using this novel data linkage, I estimate a triple-difference model comparing teen girls to teen boys in terms of school-reported mental health diagnoses, before and after visual social media emerged, and across neighbourhoods with and without access to high-speed wireless internet. Estimates indicate high-speed wireless internet significantly increased teen girls’ severe mental health conditions – by 90% – relative to teen boys’ over the period when visual social media became dominant in teenage internet use. I find similar effects across all subgroups. When applying the same strategy, I find null impacts for placebo health conditions – ones for which there is no clear channel for social media to operate. The evidence points to adverse effects of visual social media, in light of large gender gaps in visual social media use and documented risks. In turn, the analysis calls attention to policy interventions that could mitigate the harm to young people due to their online activities.

That is from a new paper by Elaine Guo, who is on the job market from University of Toronto.

Since I have written on related questions, normally I would comment here, but when it comes to the job market I feel the candidate and not the blogger should have the last word.  Elaine Guo is an excellent and possibly undervalued job candidate, and I hope you employers out there give her absolutely full consideration.  Hers is one of the most interesting and most important papers on this job market season.

Here.

1. Andy Partridge update.  What is it like to enter your “withdrawal years”?  And what if you had to choose between Partridge and Roy Lichtenstein?

2. Benjamin Yeoh on Talent and the Unconference.  And Benjamin does a podcast with Saloni.

3. How is the “Young Right” evolving in Britain?

4. Nurse accused of amputating man’s foot for her family’s taxidermy shop.  “Mary K. Brown wanted a sign next to the foot — ‘wear your boots kids’ — other nurses told investigators.”

5. I am excited and hopeful about the new British organisation Civic Future.  Next week in London I am doing a dialogue with John Gray for them.

6. More on the problems with the current system of clinical trials.

7. Ed Prescott still underrated!  But understood by many.

8. Not all proposed mergers happen.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, excerpt:

One reason the current economic situation is so fraught is that the world is facing three kinds of business-cycle mechanisms at the same time. The first two are well-known, but the third — known as the Austrian theory of the business cycle — is not.

And in more detail:

When the combination of high inflation and pending disinflation came along, real interest rates spiked upwards. It is difficult to estimate the current level of expected future real interest rates, because market participants disagree about the likely future course of inflation. Nonetheless, market prices are indicating that traders expect higher interest rates to continue through the decade, if not longer. Anecdotal evidence from secondary capital markets, such as venture capital, is strongly consistent with the notion of capital being harder and more costly to obtain.

The more significant issue concerns a decline in long-term building and long-term projects.

The decline in asset prices came first to crypto in late 2021. Crypto was originally marketed as a hedge against inflation, but the data have refuted that idea. Instead, crypto has become a project to build out a new and different kind of financial system. That project has been years in the making, and even true believers admit that the revolution is years away, if it comes at all.

In fact, at higher real interest rates — in essence, higher rates of discount — the project looks less appealing. It is striking that crypto prices, which are about the least “establishment-determined” of all major classes of asset prices, were to first to register this change in market expectations.

Major tech companies have also seen their valuations fall significantly due to higher interest rates. Whatever else they may be, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon are also some of America’s more promising corporate research labs, and now they don’t have the resources they did less than two years ago. Their successors will have a hard time as well, due to rising capital costs, again at the expense of innovation and America’s collective future.

I am always struck by both a) how many economists will badmouth the Austrian theory, and b) how many of the same will resort to some partial version of it to explain current events.

Read it here.  And a few tweets here.

1. James Broughel on classical liberalism and anti-intellectualism (and me).

2. History of private turnpikes in 19th century Britain.

3. Native Americans and adoption law — the whole mess doesn’t make much sense.  Does that mean it is more likely or less likely to persist?

4. Japanese government seeks the power to turn down private home air conditioners remotely.

5. The Disciple is quite a good movie, and a good introduction to Indian classical music, at least on the vocal side.

6. How to beat AI at Go?

7. Deworming is looking better yet.

1. Are people in rice-farming areas less happy on average? (speculative)

2. Individualism and the decline of homicide (but does this hold in the broader cross-section?)

3. Earlier Twitter markets in everything.

4. The economics of writing crossword puzzles.

5. Andres Serrano “cancelled” again, this time for being (supposedly) pro-Trump.

6. How Washington works, Daylight Saving Time edition.