Month: December 2022

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Looking for work, they stumbled upon an audition call at Dive Bar, and emerged into the world of professional mermaidhood.”  Those new (old?) service sector jobs…

2. Timeline of the Sober Curious movement.

3. Various short essays on Adam Smith.

4. Andrew Batson best music of 2022.

5. The Economist on The Repugnant Conclusion.

6. Okie-Dokie.

7. “For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.”  WSJ link.

8. Agentic simulation for GPT?

Phonics in High School!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It stuns me that the United States educational establishment tried to teach reading by thinking of words as pictures (whole word) or by literally using pictures to decode words (cueing). These are anti-conceptual methods and the result has been such a disaster that phonics is now being taught in high school in a (laudable) attempt to remediate.

NYTimes: In the early to mid-2010s, when high schoolers today were in elementary school, many schools practiced — and still practice — “balanced literacy,” which focuses on fostering a love of books and storytelling. Instruction may include some phonics, but also other strategies, like prompting children to use context clues — such as pictures — to guess words, a technique that has been heavily criticized for turning children away from the letters themselves.

…For some Oakhaven students, filling in gaps means going back to the beginning.

In an intensive class focused on phonics, ninth graders [AT] recently learned about adjacent consonants that make one sound, as in “rabbit,” and silent vowels. Students were mostly enthusiastic, competing to spell “repel” and giggling through an example about “dandruff.” After years of frustration, breakthroughs can feel exciting — and empowering.

One student said her grades had improved, and she was thinking about reading “The Vampire Diaries” novels, an undertaking, she said, that she previously would not have considered.

See my previous posts on Direct Instruction for more.

The EU’s carbon tariffs

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt, starting with the basic idea:

Importers would have to register to receive authorization to import goods, and they would pay a tax per ton of carbon dioxide produced. These fees are intended to match those already applied within the EU, which are currently about 90 euros per ton. The policy is also intended to place EU industry on a more competitive footing and encourage foreign countries to adopt greener energy policies.

But will it work?:

But would it? Economic changes take place at the margin, and currently the EU is engaged in substitution toward coal, a very dirty energy source.

In light of that reality, consider the proposed tariffs as having (at least) two effects. First, they will push some production out of foreign nations and into the EU. Second, they will induce some foreign nations to move to greener energy sources over time, to avoid the tax.

In the short run, the first effect dominates: The tariffs will lead to more coal use and a dirtier energy supply.

Be suspicious of green energy policies which at first make the problem worse. However promising the longer-run promises may sound, there is always the risk that bureaucratic inertia will intervene and the short-run policy effects will dominate.

The rationale for the beneficial long-run effects of the tariffs is that foreign nations, including some relatively poor nations such as India, will move toward greener energy at a more rapid pace. That might happen. But look at the EU itself over the past year. Its energy prices went up, due to the Russian attack on Ukraine, but the EU did not move toward greener energy, such as more nuclear or wind power. It moved toward dirtier energy, in part because domestic interest groups opposed the more beneficial adjustments.

So, despite about as strong an incentive as possible — a war — the EU made the harmful rather than the beneficial adjustment. Now it is expecting that much poorer nations, often with worse governance structures, to do better. Not only is this naïve, but it is also protectionist.

And this:

Even the positive long-run effects are up for grabs. On one hand, the tariff hike provides an incentive to move toward greener energy. On the other, it makes the exporting nations poorer than they otherwise would be. Poorer nations tend to be less interested in improving their environments, as clean environments are largely a luxury good. And extreme poverty worsens other global problems, including issues stemming from migration. Should EU policy make it more difficult for Africa to industrialize?

One also has to wonder whether the promise of lower tariffs in return for greener energy is credible. Once protectionist measures are in place, they are hard to reverse. The EU would be reaping tariff revenue, and domestic EU industries would be receiving trade protection. Any reclassification of the imports as fundamentally “greener” would require an investigation across borders and clearance through multiple levels of bureaucracy. Such changes will not be easy to accomplish, especially in an era increasingly enamored of trade restrictions.

Worth a ponder.  EU coal consumption has been up over the last two years.  And what is relevant here is energy supply at the margin.

What to Watch: Holiday Edition 2022

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.

The Fabelmans—a paean to movie making and a close biography of Spielberg. He waited till his parents had died to make this movie. Yes, his mother actually brought home a monkey as a pet. The parents, the arty, flighty wife and the analytical, scientific husband couldn’t make it together but produced Spielberg who can and does—the opening scene with Spielberg watching his first movie between his parents says it all.

Avatar 2 I saw it in IMAX 3D. As spectacle it was great, especially the quieter water scenes. As movie it was good but broke no new ground. Indeed, Avatar 2 was exactly the same as Avatar only with more water. If you can’t see it in 3D or at least on a giant screen don’t bother. 

The Recruit (Netflix): A fun CIA series which is ridiculous but rises a bit above the genre with some insight into the functions of a bureaucracy which kills people but attempts to do so legally.

Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.

The future of public transit?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via the excellent Samir Varma.

The return of economic orthodoxy

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

This year has turned out to be a very good one for classical and traditional approaches to economics. Exotic doctrines have performed poorly, while standard predictions — based on common sense and straightforward mechanisms of operation — have done well.

Start with macroeconomics. The big story of the year has been inflation, and the two biggest culprits are in line with standard theory: growth in the money supply and hikes in energy prices. Over a recent two-year period, the US Federal Reserve allowed the M2 money supply to rise by about 40%. It is no surprise that prices increased so much…

One of the most classical of economic lessons is that supply constraints truly matter. Along these lines, energy price hikes, most of all in Europe, showed that downturns and recessions can be brought on by old-fashioned scarcity. Sadly, this was the year that Nobel Laureate Edward C. Prescott passed away. Critics mocked Prescott for emphasizing the supply side as a force behind business cycles, but this year showed that Prescott was right. If not for the war in Ukraine and its associated energy supply disruptions, the global economy would be in much better shape.

And the close:

As for the UK: Economists predicted that a move away from free trade with the EU would hurt the British economy. And it has.

Some years induce us to question established theory, and to see new and unusual possibilities for the future. Not 2022. This is the year that orthodoxy took its revenge.

Next year will perhaps be doctrinally weirder!  Or maybe not.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Marc Thiessen on the best things Biden did in 2022.  Not all will approve, but a perspective you don’t usually hear.

2. The famous pupils of Hawick High School in Scotland.

3. How easy is it to convert office space into apartments? (NYT, can’t say I am convinced by the pessimism but interesting).

4. New Mark Calabria book on mortgage policy during the pandemic.

5. My most liked tweets of 2022.

6. A weird essay about Captain Kirk, link now fixed.  Too weird, as it should be.

7. Magnus shows up 2.5 minutes late for a 3-minute blitz games against a strong GM.  And wins (video).

Year summary CWT episode, Jeff Holmes interviews Tyler

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the audio, transcript, and video.  Here is part of the episode summary:

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes talk about the past year on the show, including which guests he’d like to have on in 2023, what stands out to him now about his conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried in light of the collapse of FTX, the most popular and most underrated episodes of the year, what makes a guest authentic, why he hasn’t asked the “production function” question much this year, his essay on Marginal Revolution on the New Right, and what he’s working on next. They also evaluate Tyler’s pop culture picks from 2012 and answer listener questions from Twitter.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Vaughn Smith, the polyglot and carpet cleaner, probably is an underrated episode. The people who listened to it seemed to quite like it. I already mentioned Roy Foster. Ireland just doesn’t have that large a population, but that was a great take on Irish history. I liked most of them, I have to say. I think a lot of them are properly rated.

HOLMES: I had Roy Foster and Vaughn Smith. I would throw in, if you look at download counts, maybe Lydia Davis a little underperformed, but she still performed well. I personally really enjoyed Walter Russell Mead.

COWEN: Absolutely.

HOLMES: It was just a great back-and-forth.

COWEN: You could have him on an endless number of times, and he would always have something to say.

HOLMES: Absolutely.

COWEN: He’s one of those kinds of guests.

Recommended.

Combination Rapid Tests

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Once again, the US is behind on at-home rapid antigen tests–this time on combination tests that let you test for COVID, Influenza, and RSV all at once. These tests are widely available in Europe but have not been approved by the FDA. Rapid flu tests especially are potentially very useful in assigning appropriate treatment and reducing the overuse of antibiotics.

Does reducing lead exposure limit crime?

by  Tyler Cowen in

These results seem a bit underwhelming, and furthermore there seems to be publication bias, this is all from a recent meta-study on lead and crime.  Here goes:

Does lead pollution increase crime? We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests. This publication bias means that the effect of lead is overstated in the literature. We perform over 1 million meta-regression specifications, controlling for this bias, and conditioning on observable between-study heterogeneity. When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero. When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample. We calculate a plausible elasticity range of 0.22-0.02 for the full sample and 0.03-0.00 for the high-quality sample. Back-ofenvelope calculations suggest that the fall in lead over recent decades is responsible for between 36%-0% of the fall in homicide in the US. Our results suggest lead does not explain the majority of the large fall in crime observed in some countries, and additional explanations are needed.

Here is one image from the paper:

Image

The authors on the paper are Anthony Higney, Nick Hanley, and Mirko Moroa.  I have long been agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, simply because I never had the time to look into it, rather than for any particular substantive reason.  (I suppose I did have some worries that the time series and cross-national estimates seemed strongly at variance.)  I can report that my belief in it is weakening…

In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide

by  Tyler Cowen in

School attendance, possibly through mechanisms of status competition and bullying, seems to raise the rate of youth suicide:

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction. Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25. Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Benjamin Hansen, Joseph J. Sabia, and Jessamyn Schaller.  I am reminded of my earlier Bloomberg column on Covid and school reopening.