Month: August 2023

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Maria Blanco and Alberto Mingardi have produced a very useful volume, Show and Biz: The Market Economy in TV Series and Popular Culture (2000-2020), providing an updated look at the (somewhat) rising popularity of business and capitalism in U.S. popular culture.

David O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism.  A very good book planting Eugene Delacroix — both his paintings and writings — squarely in a “progress studies” tradition.  Like so much other 19th (and also 18th) century art.  Good color plates too.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women.  Do you judge books by their degree of insight, or based on whether you agree with where they end up?  This volume is a litmus test for that question, and I give it either an A or an F minus, depending on your standard.  In my view, Dworkin remains an underrated and intellectually honest (if overly consistent) feminist thinker.  This one is from 1978, still interesting albeit repulsive if you try to apply any moral judgment to it.  But don’t!  If you are looking for reductios in support of reactionary points of view, this is the best place to start.  Better yet is to drop all the consistency requirements and end up somewhere in between.

Simon Shorvon, The Idea of Epilepsy: A Medical and Social History of Epilepsy in the Modern Era (1860-2020).  A remarkably thorough and intelligent treatment of a topic that now has a near-perfect stand-alone book.

There is Alan S. Kahan, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism.

And Michael J. Bonner, In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

Vikash Yadav, Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism.

Seth D. Kaplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, forthcoming in October.

Market depletion and the income of doctors

by  Tyler Cowen in

Rural regions rule the doctor rankings: Alaska, Wyoming and Nebraska join the Dakotas in the top five states for physician pay, confounding the intuition hammered into our souls by more than a decade of covering economics. None of those are high-earning states overall, with the evergreen exception of Alaska. They’re also not high-cost: North and South Dakota rank 41st and 45th, respectively, in cost of living among the states and D.C.; only Alaska costs more than average, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Of course the highest-paid lawyers do not live in the Dakotas.  Do note this:

Rural America has about 20 percent of the U.S. population but about 10 percent of its doctors, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. So the talented young physicians willing to hang their shingles in North Dakota don’t have to worry about rivals undercutting their prices. They can charge more for everything, from appendectomies to vasectomies.

Here is more from Andrew Van Dam.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Stuart Buck offers a partial history of meta-science.

2. Heidi Williams in WaPo on speeding up science funding.

3. Two economists from Argentina discuss the electoral results (in Spanish).

4. “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.” (FT)  China is involved too.

5. Did the young founders all go into crypto?

6. A young person’s guide to Lawrence F. Katz.

What makes for a good Royal Navy senior officer?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In most studies of talent, it is very difficult to get the top performers to respond or offer data.  This paper is a major exception to that general limitation:

This paper assesses the impact of general intelligence, as well as specific personality traits, and aspects of motivation, on performance, potential, and advancement of senior leaders. A questionnaire survey was conducted on the full population of 381 senior officers in the Royal Navy with an 80% response rate. Performance, potential, and rate of advancement were established direct from the organization’s appraisal system; intelligence, personality traits and motivation were assessed, at the time of the study, using the Verify G+ Test, Occupational Personality Questionnaire, and Motivation Questionnaire. Findings suggest differences in motivation are more important than differences in general intelligence, or personality traits, in predicting assessed performance, potential within, and actual rate of advancement to, senior leadership positions. This is a rare example of a study into very senior leaders, validated against both formal appraisal data and actual rates of advancement. As a consequence of this study the Royal Navy has started to use psychometric-based assessments as part of the selection and development of its most Senior Officers.

Here is the full (gated) paper by Mike Young and Victor Dulewicz.  I’ll pull out and repeat the key sentence there: “Findings suggest differences in motivation are more important than differences in general intelligence, or personality traits, in predicting assessed performance, potential within, and actual rate of advancement to, senior leadership positions.“

The economics of the UPS delivery deal

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the lead fact:

By the end of the five-year deal that the United Parcel Service and its drivers just agreed to, full-time drivers will make about $170,000 a year, counting health-care coverage and other benefits.

Sam Bowman, telephone!  And some further analysis:

It is all too common to decry the excessive profits of big business and root for higher wages for workers. But in reality, big business is more likely to bring about higher wages.

That said, countervailing forces will limit the distribution of worker gains. For instance, UPS package volumes have been dropping for several quarters, in part because pandemic-induced demand has fallen considerably. So don’t expect UPS to be hiring a lot more drivers, which probably made it easier for it to be so generous.

Going forward, UPS might also be expected to lose some market share. Amazon shipping already has been gaining at UPS expense, and that trend is now more likely to continue. The relevant Amazon workers are not unionized and are paid lower wages. In any case, if self-driving delivery trucks were just around the corner — metaphorically of course — then UPS probably would not have agreed to this package.

UPS can also claw back some of the worker gains by how it rations the driver jobs. Before they can drive, workers first must accept lower-paid jobs sorting and loading packages, a quasi-apprenticeship that can last for several years. That too is economics at work. That upfront deal also might worsen over time. After it was announced, one online jobs board saw searches for UPS driver openings rise about 50%. Higher demand may allow UPS to be pickier about hiring, and to offer lesser terms to loaders and sorters.

I expect the talent drain from academic life to increase.

Argentina update, canine Mastiff edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

A far-right libertarian candidate won Argentina’s open presidential primary election on Sunday, a surprising showing for a politician who wants to adopt the U.S. dollar as Argentina’s official currency and embraces comparisons to Donald Trump.

Javier Milei, 52, a congressman, economist and former television pundit, secured 30 percent of the vote with 96 percent of the ballots counted, making him the front-runner for the presidency in the fall general election.

Polls had suggested that Mr. Milei’s support was at about 20 percent, and political analysts had predicted that his radical policy proposals — including abolishing the country’s central bank — would prevent him from attracting many more voters…

Mr. Milei has pitched himself as the radical change that the collapsing Argentine economy needs, and he could be a shock to the system if elected. Besides his ideas about the currency and the central bank, he has proposed drastically lowering taxes and cutting public spending, including by charging people to use the public health care system; closing or privatizing all state-owned enterprises; and eliminating the health, education and environment ministries…

He then thanked his sister, who runs his campaign, and his five Mastiff dogs, each named after a conservative economist.

Here is the full NYT story, and one dog is named after Milton Friedman, one for Murray Rothbard, and two for Robert Lucas, another being named after Conan.  All are clones of the same underlying dog.

I thank MN for the pointer.

The WV Canary in the Coal Mine

by  Alex Tabarrok in

West Virginia University has announced a preliminary plan to cut 7% of its faculty and 9% of its majors:

Among the programs recommended for discontinuance, World Languages including all 32 faculty positions. WVU is also recommending the elimination of several programs in the College of Creative Arts, graduate programs in higher education administration and special education.

On twitter there is a lot of bemoaning about the importance of languages but the students are voting with their feet. Indeed, most of these programs are only sustained by foreign language requirements which are increasingly otiose in a world with ubiquitous instant translation. The students are correct, the value of learning a second language has fallen.

Where the ax should fall may be debatable but the ax must fall somewhere because of demographics. College enrollment peaked in 2010 and has since fallen by 15%. What’s going on in WV is thus a reflection of national trends, magnified by West Virginia’s own decline in  population. Full paying foreign students from China are also way down. Now add to declining college demographics, budgets hit by the great recession and then the pandemic. Now add in the rise of online learning which means that universities can outsource low-demand classes to other universities and save money and quite likely increase quality. (Indeed, the local teacher might have been teaching online anyway so why not substitute with a world expert and great teacher who has the backing of an entire team of delivery experts?) Finally, add in the fact that a substantial part of the electorate would like to see a decline in programs they see as politicized.

Put it all together and the only surprise is how long it has taken for the ax to fall. You can be sure, however, that there is more chopping to be done.

Public school choice programs in Los Angeles

by  Tyler Cowen in

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns.  Oh how underrated school choice programs were five to ten years ago!

Impact of major awards on the subsequent work of their recipients

by  Tyler Cowen in

To characterize the impact of major research awards on recipients’ subsequent work, we studied Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics and MacArthur Fellows working in scientific fields. Using a case-crossover design, we compared scientists’ citations, publications and citations-per-publication from work published in a 3-year pre-award period to their work published in a 3-year post-award period. Nobel Laureates and MacArthur Fellows received fewer citations for post- than for pre-award work. This was driven mostly by Nobel Laureates. Median decrease was 80.5 citations among Nobel Laureates (p = 0.004) and 2 among MacArthur Fellows (p = 0.857). Mid-career (42–57 years) and senior (greater than 57 years) researchers tended to earn fewer citations for post-award work. Early career researchers (less than 42 years, typically MacArthur Fellows) tended to earn more, but the difference was non-significant. MacArthur Fellows (p = 0.001) but not Nobel Laureates (p = 0.180) had significantly more post-award publications. Both populations had significantly fewer post-award citations per paper (p = 0.043 for Nobel Laureates, 0.005 for MacArthur Fellows, and 0.0004 for combined population). If major research awards indeed fail to increase (and even decrease) recipients’ impact, one may need to reassess the purposes, criteria, and impacts of awards to improve the scientific enterprise.

That is from a newly published paper by Andrew Nepomuceno, Hilary Bayer, and John P.A. Ioannidis, via Michelle Dawson.

The Jennifer Burns Milton Friedman biography, and what should I ask her?

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is a wonderful book which I felt compelled to read in a single sitting on a long plane ride.  Full of surprises and revelations, and fascinating in its portrait of a rather catty and spiteful economics profession in earlier days.  And who knew that Aaron Director and Mark Rothko were good childhood friends?  Definitely one of the best books of the year.

Here is Jennifer Burns on Twitter.  Here is her home page.  Here is her soon to be released Milton Friedman biography.  Here is her 2009 Ayn Rand biography.  She is currently associate professor of history at Stanford.

I will be doing a Conversation with her.  So what should I ask her?

Diego on gas station drugs

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my email:

The average gas station is now packed to the brim with drugs. This place had a Whip-it stand near the checkout, that I imagine is for recreational nitrous oxide users rather than whipped cream enjoyers, as well as a massive selection of kratom. ‘Whippets’ can cause irreversible brain damage and kratom has opiate-like effects, binding to the same receptors as morphine. There were also 3 stands near the checkout dedicated to weed-adjacent things including a mix of gummies, vapes, and flower bud containers. Unsure exactly what the weed-adjacent stuff was, some of it was Delta-8. Seems like a lot of these weed derivatives stemmed from the 2018 farm bill. The kratom proliferation has been insane. One of the main kratom brands, Botanic Tonics, sells super-popular small blue vials under the name ‘Feel Free’ that merely say ‘Plant-based herbal supplement’ on the front. Despite the FDA recently seizing $3M of kratom from Botanic Tonics as well as endless stories of addiction on the subreddit r/Quittingfeelfree, Botanic Tonics is an official sponsor of UT Austin and Florida State University and gives out free vials to students.

I do not personally have data on this question, but I thought this content was worth passing along.

Doha travel notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Qatar is a greatly underrated tourist destination.

The Museum of Islamic Art is one of the finest museums in the world, with a collection of unsurpassable quality, drawing on Islamic creations from as far away as Sumatra and the Philippines, as well as the more familiar Persian, Indian, Turkish, and Central Asian items.  The I.M. Pei building offers fantastic views, and there is an Alain Ducasse restaurant on the top floor.

The National Museum of Qatar is more didactic, but still I found it spectacular, including the architecture and external sculptures on the front side of the building.  Usually I dislike audiovisual displays in museums, but their films on the history of Qatar — shown on very large Imax-like screens — were spectacular.  The costumes and jewelry displays are hard to top.  “Culture” and “growth” seemed to be the organizing themes of the exhibits.  The progressions were logical, and at the end of it all I came away thinking that Qatar has had cultural sophistication for a long time, and is not just a place where they throw a lot of money at art.  I fell for their propaganda, but now I am going to read up and see just how true that is.

In value terms, the government of Qatar is the largest buyer of art in the world.  The country has other notable museums as well, but I did not have the time to visit them, as sometimes their hours are irregular, or they are private collections which require special appointments.

In most public spaces you will see some attempt to make them look creative or aesthetic.  By no means do all such displays succeed, but they are always trying.  Many of the contemporary buildings, or sculptures along the road, are worthy of inspection.

In the water you still can see wooden dhows, and on the roads you might see a man in desert gear shepherding his camels across the road.  The main souk has a whole section devoted to falcons and falconry.  The souk at dusk is magnificent.

Overall the place feels cheerier and homier than does Dubai.  Everyone I met was friendly.  English is the lingua franca, and most of the people here do in fact speak reasonable English.

“Cultural Village” and “Pearl Island” are hard to explain, but they are parts of town worth a visit, moving at times in Las Vegas and “Venetian” directions.

The nearby development of Lusail (is it a separate city?) has some iconic buildings and is worth a visit, check out the medical center, it looks better in real life than in the photos.

Doha sparkles when it comes to food.  The Parisa Persian restaurant in Souq Waqif (don’t go to the other Parisa restaurant, supposedly it is worse) was the best fesanjan I ever have had, excellent decor too.

Saasna is one local high-quality place for Qatari food.  Not cheap, but excellent ingredients.  The dishes skew in the Saudi direction (“lamb shank on saffron rice,” or “beef stewed with wheat”) rather than Persian.

Good Indian and Chinese places seem to abound, I even saw an apparently high-quality Miami restaurant.  The breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel was first-rate, most of all the pistachio labneh.

Based on n = 6, this seems to be one of those countries where they ask if you want lemon in your sparkling water, you say no, and they give it to you anyway.

On Fridays, the country does not open until 1:30 p.m., so if you are doing a short visit try to avoid that day.

The on-line visa form was easy to fill out, and I received a positive response within seconds.

Going in August, as I have done, is not crazy.  Sometimes the temperatures reach 47 degrees or higher, but somehow it is manageable, or at least it was for me.  Perhaps more people are around other times of the year?  In any case you should go, as Qatar ought to join the list of must-visit destinations, and it is easy enough to combine it with other trips, given the use of Doha as an air hub.