Month: June 2023

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Noise pollution and killer whales.

2. “We estimate an MPC [marginal propensity to consume] out of unrealized crypto gains that is more than double the MPC out of unrealized equity gains but smaller than the MPC from exogenous cash flow shocks.”

3. Why so little recent progress on improved Covid vaccines? (NYT)

4. How well does he understand decentralized or for that matter centralized systems?: ““I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good.”  Nice!

5. Claims by Marco Rubio.

6. The deputy mayor Midsummer’s Eve culture that is Helsinki.

+1 For the Veil of Ignorance

by  Alex Tabarrok in

From a new paper in Cognitive Science:

Most people in the United States agree they want some income inequality but debate exactly how much is fair. High-status people generally prefer more inequality than low-status individuals. Here we examine how much preferences for inequality are (or are not) driven by self-interest. Past work has generally investigated this idea in two ways: The first is by stratifying preferences by income, and the second is by randomly assigning financial status within lab-constructed scenarios. In this paper, we develop a method that combines both experimental control and the social experience of inequality—a simulated society experiment. Across two experiments (N = 138, observations = 690), participants voted on the distribution of rewards—first behind a veil of ignorance, and then when they were randomly assigned a status within a game of chance. Status varied repeatedly across five rounds, allowing us to measure dynamic preferences. Under the veil of ignorance, people preferred inequality favoring the top status. When the veil of ignorance disappeared, self-interest immediately influenced inequality preferences. Those who randomly landed in top positions were satisfied with the status quo established under the veil of ignorance, whereas those who randomly landed in bottom positions wanted more equality. Yet these preferences were not stable; decisions about the optimal level of inequality changed according to changes in social status. Our results also showed that, when inequality grows in a society, preferences regarding inequality become polarized by social status. Individuals in low-status positions, particularly, tend to demand more equality.

Contra Rawls, people behind the veil of ignorance choose greater inequality which should thus be given high ethical weight. It’s the demand for equality that should be interrogated for self-interested motivations.

Hat tip: The excellent Kevin Lewis.

What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In just about any scientific literature, there is an undercurrent of tacit knowledge which is not very directly expressed in any of the published pieces.  That knowledge may cover the following issues, among many others:

1. How the rules of the conversation operate, and how a body of literature on a question coheres.

2. Why certain papers and methods are not taken seriously any more (you don’t generally find outright refutations of them).

3. Which results and papers are taken how seriously.  Citations metrics help here, but not nearly as much as you might think.

4. What kinds of results and methods would be required to induce researchers to move to a new conclusion.

5. Why/when one paper pointing in a particular direction doesn’t prove much of anything, and why people don’t do things a certain way.

6. How, by asking around, you can figure out some (not all) of these issues, even if you do no work in that field.  This includes knowledge of how to interpret the verbal feedback you receive from practitioners and how to integrate it into a broader knowledge of the body of research.

There is much more, as that is a very brief introduction to some key issues.  I now have a few points:

a. I wish people would present this knowledge more directly!  If only in oral form.  Why not have some key people in a field talk through how their field actually works?  Record that, issue transcripts, and yes feed it into LLMs.

b. LLMs should be more explicitly tested for their skill at explaining how these matters work.  It is an important question for how much LLMs might speed up scientific progress.

c. Debates between people will not go well when one person has a good understanding of a particular field in this manner, and the other person does not.  The debates will go even less well when one of the participants doesn’t understand these matters for any field whatsoever, and has no real idea that these questions even exist.  That said, debates stand a chance of going well when both parties share a common understanding on these matters.

d. Many of the people who claim the mantle of science might cite published papers, but in fact they have little or no understanding of science as a conversation and a body of literature.

(Ilya Novak wrote to me: “I think the issue is less that RFk JR is a conspiracy theorist, but that he thinks being “pro science” means being able to reference this or that paper. He does not understand the concept of science as a research agenda among a community of scholars having a long running conversation with back and forth papers. He can reference “big” papers, but he can tell you nothing about their research methods or criticism made of them by subsequent papers.)

e. It is possible to be a successful researcher and not have a great sense of the tacit conventions across other fields, or how you might learn them if you had to.

f. Many contrarian science-related books fail because they fail on this question.  Having the author throw a lot of arguments against the mainstream doesn’t solve this problem.  Very often such commentators fail utterly at identifying and addressing the hinge questions upon which their most substantive propositions depend.

g. The very best science and social science journalists understand these matters, but most do not.

h. There is something unfair about this standard, because it is not extremely transparent and the quality of a person’s scientific understanding cannot always be easily verified to an external audience.  That is bad news for the public acceptance of science, but it does not make these matters less important.

It’s the malaise and gloom, not the anger

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Omer Ali, Klaus Desmet, and Romain Wacziarg:

We study whether anger fuels the rise of populism. Anger as an emotion tends to act as a call to action against individuals or groups that are blamed for negative situations, making it conducive to voting for populist politicians. Using a unique dataset tracking emotions for a large sample of respondents from 2008 to 2017, we explore the relationship between anger and the populist vote share across U.S. counties. More angry counties displayed stronger preferences for populist candidates during the 2016 presidential primaries and elections. However, once we control for other negative emotions and life satisfaction, anger no longer operates as a separate channel in driving the populist vote share. Instead, our results indicate that a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.

Here is the full NBER working paper.

The Harried Leisure Class

by  Alex Tabarrok in

How easy is it for a male breadwinner to raise a family? Oren Cass argues that the cost of “thriving,” is increasing. That’s false. When you do the numbers correctly, Winship and Horpedahl show that the cost of thriving is falling. It’s falling more slowly than we would like–but it’s still the case that current generations are, on the whole, better off than previous generations. 

Still, Winship and Horpedahl face an upward battle because while they are right on the numbers many people feel that they are wrong. Almost every generation harbors a nostalgic belief that circumstances were more favorable during their youth. Moreover, even though people are better off today, social media may have magnified invidious comparisons so everyone feels they are worse off than someone else.

I offer a third reason: the Linder Theorem. Real GDP per capita has doubled since the early 1980s but there are still only 24 hours in a day. How do consumers  respond to all that increased wealth and no additional time? By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring. A search at Amazon for “time management,” for example, leads to over 10,000 hits.

Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.

So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs.

It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption require a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively. It feels hard.

By the way, the same theory also explains why life often appears to unfold at a slower, more serene pace in developing nations. It’s not just an illusion of being on holiday. In places where time is less economically valuable, meals stretch more leisurely, conversations delve deeper, and time itself seems to trudge rather than race. In contrast, with economic development comes an increased pace of life–characterized by a proliferation of fast food, accelerated conversation, and even brisker walking (Levine & Norenzayan, 1999).

Linder’s theorem, as you may have correctly surmised, is related to Baumol’s theorem. In fact, Baumol (1973, p. 630) explained Linder’s theorem succinctly, “rising productivity decreases the demand for commodities whose consumption is expensive in time.” In essence, Baumol’s theorem is about the cost of production while Linder’s theorem is about the cost of consumption. I discuss Baumol and Linder at greater length here (ungated).

If the value of time fell, we might find ourselves eating more leisurely meals and taking more time to appreciate the simple pleasures in life. But, contrary to popular belief, neither Baumol nor Linder effects reduce our well-being; instead, they are a byproduct of economic growth and greater wealth. Rather than lamenting the rise in relative prices, we should recognize and appreciate our ability to afford them, and even acknowledge that on certain occasions, they are worth paying.

Long-term relatedness and income distribution

by  Tyler Cowen in

This article explores the role of long-term relatedness between countries, captured by an index of genetic distance, in driving worldwide differences in income inequality. The main hypothesis is that genetic distance gives rise to barriers to the international diffusion of redistributive policies and measures, and institutions, leading to greater income disparities. Using cross-country data, I consistently find that countries that are genetically distant to Denmark—the world frontier of egalitarian income distribution—tend to suffer from higher inequality, ceteris paribus. I also demonstrate that genetic distance is associated with greater bilateral differences in income inequality between countries. Employing data from the European Social Survey, I document that second-generation Europeans descending from countries with greater genetic distance to Denmark are less likely to exhibit positive attitudes towards equality. Further evidence suggests that effective fiscal redistribution is a key mechanism through which genetic distance to Denmark transmits to greater income inequality.

That is from a newly published paper by Trung V Vu.

*Toward a Free Economy*

by  Tyler Cowen

The author is Aditya Balasubramanian and the subtitle is Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India.  Amartya Sen’s blurb says the following:

Toward a Free Economy is a brilliant history of economic ideas in independent India. It provides a new view of the origins of conservatism in Indian politics, libertarian rather than authoritarian and committed to free markets rather than to Hindu nationalism, which should make a big difference.

Here is one excerpt:

Kusum sacrificed a career as a sports journalist to run the day-to-day operations of the institute [Libertarian Social Institute] during the 1950s.  Her dedication and everyday labor made Indian libertarianism viable.  By this time, her septuagenarian father had retired to a life of reading and writing in the nearby town of Deolali.  Nevertheless, consistent with the patriarchy of the times, the historical record offers far more information about Ranchoddas than Kusum.  Ranchoddas’ obituary merely described Kusum as “the devoted co-worker and collaborator in Mr. Lotvala’s journalistic and ideological work.”  Perhaps she subtly asserted her independence from the strictures of matrimony by signing off documents as “Miss Kusum Lotvala.”  And yet, even this choice took place i nthe context of performing clerical activities on Ranchoddas’ behalf.

The institute was strongly influenced by the American, New York state-based Foundation for Economic Education.  There is also plenty in the book about the influence of Mises.  Recommended and long overdue.

What does Geoffrey Hinton believe about AGI existential risk?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I was struck by a recent article in the (often quite interesting) New Statesman.  Here is Harry Lambert interviewing Hinton:

I asked Hinton for the strongest argument against his own position [on AGI risk]. “Yann thinks its rubbish,” he replied. “It’s all a question of whether you think that when ChatGPT says something, it understands what it’s saying. I do.”

There are, he conceded, aspects of the world ChatGPT is describing that it does not understand. But he rejected LeCun’s belief that you have to “act on” the world physically in order to understand it, which current AI models cannot do. (“That’s awfully tough on astrophysicists. They can’t act on black holes.”) Hinton thinks such reasoning quickly leads you towards what he has described as a “pre-scientific concept”: consciousness, an idea he can do without. “Understanding isn’t some kind of magic internal essence. It’s an updating of what it knows.”

In that sense, he thinks ChatGPT understands just as humans do. It absorbs data and adjusts its impression of the world. But there is nothing else going on, in man or machine.

“I believe in [the philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s position, which is that there is no ‘inner theatre’.” If you are asked to imagine a picnic on a sunny day, Hinton suggested, you do not see the picnic in an inner theatre inside your head; it is something conjured by your perceptual system in response to a demand for data. “There is no mental stuff as opposed to physical stuff.” There are “only nerve fibres coming in”. All we do is react to sensory input.

The difference between us and current AIs, Hinton thinks, is the range of input.

As I interpret that passage, the claim is that AGI risk is significant because ChatGPT possesses sentient understanding of a kind not less valid than what humans have, though the current GPT understanding is monomodal only.  Furthermore, humans (and AIs) should not be understood as being conscious.  On top of that, he seems to suggest that his arguments for AGI risk rest upon the fundamental non-divergence of humans and AIs.

Now, I am not sure what is the polite way to put this, but…I think those arguments are just a teeny, tiny, teensy, trifling bit ever so slightly wrong.  As in “not entirely accurate” by at least a smidgen.

No, I am not going to go “full Bryan Caplan” on you, as I believe we are not in control through our “inner theatre,” and furthermore the nature of that “inner theatre” is not transparent to us.  But an inner theatre there is of some kind!  I am not persuaded otherwise, not even if your inner theatre is screaming “no”!

Hinton’s view oddly cuts against his own AGI risk argument.  Let’s say there were some kind of intrinsic difference between AIs and the human “inner theatre,” as my own inner theatre seems to want to insist.  Why does that make it so hard to imagine highly dangerous AI scenarios?  (And I am hardly the biggest AI doomster.)

Here is further feedback from Philip Ball:

I’m quite taken aback at some of the simplistic comments Hinton makes. He seems to feel that the only thing separating deep-learning AI from the human mind is a matter of scale. I can’t fathom this conviction that somehow all intelligence must be heading towards ours.

…”But there is nothing else going on, in man or machine.” But this is not how cognitive scientists think about human cognition.

And more at the link.  You might argue that, in considering Hinton’s claims, I am not steelmanning the AI worry arguments.  But that is exactly the point here.  We have a movement — the AGI worriers — that uses single sentence statements, backed by signatures and arguments from authority.  Hinton signed the latest letter, and in this area his name carries a lot of force.

So perhaps it is worth looking more closely at what those authorities actually believe, and whether that should impress us.

Is “Lab Leak” now proven?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The WSJ ran a widely discussed article a few days ago, and many people have concluded that the Lab Leak hypothesis is now confirmed.  I’ve now read the piece, and I don’t see relevant new information in there.  The New York Times ran a rebuttal of sorts, with this as one key paragraph:

Recent news reports have unearthed new information about researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick in 2019. The news reports suggested that one of them could be patient zero. The information about the sick workers was first discovered at the end of the Trump administration. By August 2022, however, intelligence analysts had dismissed the evidence, saying it was not relevant. Intelligence officials determined that the sick workers could not tell them anything about whether a lab leak or natural transmission was more likely. Intelligence agencies view the information about the cases neutrally, arguing that they do not buttress the case for the lab leak or for natural transmission, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

I read the London Times report, and didn’t see fundamentally new information in there either.

To be clear, I think the chance of Lab Leak being true is reasonably high, due to the accumulation of a lot of circumstantial evidence.  But I don’t think the new accounts are anything close to a slam-dunk, nor do they show that any of the researchers were “Patient Zero.”  That may well change as further information comes out, but so far it is a mistake to conclude that Lab Leak has been demonstrated to be true.

Addendum: As a side note, I am a little worried by how many people seem to be happy that Lab Leak hypothesis is (supposedly) confirmed.  I suppose it would mean you could feel vindicated in a certain kind of contempt for elites, both American and Chinese.  But under most normal views, the world where Lab Leak is true is a worse world than the world where Lab Leak is false.  So you should instead feel sad and upset if you think it is true, rather than happy or gleeful.  If you feel vindicated, it is a sign of a partial cognitive and emotive defect.

Second Addendum: This new national intelligence report doesn’t seem to confirm the Lab Leak take (though it doesn’t refute it either).  It pretty definitely downplays the import of the scientists getting sick.  Again, it is fine to not trust this report, but still a likely mistake to think new information has been coming out.  Here is a good WaPo look at where things stand.  Here are comments from Scott Sumner.

Does Britain Have High or Low State Capacity?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Tim Harford writing at the FT covers the question “Is it even possible to prepare for a pandemic?” drawing on my paper with Tucker Omberg.

[I]n an unsettling study published late last year, the economists Robert Tucker Omberg and Alex Tabarrok took a more sophisticated look at this question and found that “almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic”. This was true whether one looked at indicators of medical preparedness, or softer cultural factors such as levels of individualism or trust. Some countries responded much more effectively than others, of course — but there was no foretelling which ones would rise to the challenge by looking at indicators published in 2019. One response to this counter-intuitive finding is that the GHS Index doesn’t do a good job of measuring preparedness. Yet it seemed plausible at the time and it still looks reasonable now.

…perhaps we need to take the Omberg/Tabarrok study seriously: maybe conventional preparations really won’t help much. What follows? One conclusion is that we should prepare, but in a different way….Preparing a nimble system of testing and of compensating self-isolating people would not have figured in many 2019 pandemic plans. It will now. Another form of preparation which might yet pay off is sewage monitoring, which can cost-effectively spot the resurgence of old pathogens and the appearance of new ones, and may give enough warning to stop some future pandemics before they start. And, says Tabarrok, “Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines”. The faster our systems for making, testing and producing vaccines, the better our chances; all these things can be prepared.

One thing that did seem to matter, as Tim notes, was state capacity. In other words, it’s not so much being prepared as being prepared to act. And here I have a mild disagreement with Tim. He writes:

In an ill-prepared world, the UK is often thought to have been more ill-prepared than most, perhaps because of the strains caused by austerity and the distractions of the Brexit process.

My view is that the UK got three very important things right. The UK was the first stringent authority to approve a COVID vaccine. The UK switched to first doses first and the UK produced and ran the most important therapeutics trial, the Recovery trial. Each of these decisions and programs saved the lives of tens of thousands of Britons. The Recovery trial may have saved millions of lives worldwide.

I don’t claim that Britain did everything right, or that they did all that they could have done, but these three decisions were important, bold and correct. The coexistence of both high and low state capacity within the same nation can be surprising. The United States, for example, achieved an impressive feat with Operation Warp Speed, yet simultaneously, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) flailed and failed. Likewise, India maintains a commendable space program and an efficient electoral system, even while struggling with tasks that seem comparatively simpler, like issuing driver’s licenses.

Instead of painting countries with a broad brush of ‘high’ or ‘low’ state capacity, we should recognize multi-dimensionality and divergence. How do political will, resources, institutional robustness, culture, and history explain capacity divergence? If we understood the reasons for capacity divergence we might be able to improve state capacity more generally. Or we might better be able to assign tasks to state or market with perhaps very different assignments depending on the country.