Month: October 2023
Ross Douthat, telephone!
In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.
Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.
Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.
Christina Oakley Harrington, a retired academic of medieval history and the founder of Treadwell’s, a London bookstore specializing in literature on magic and spiritualism, said that many witches she knew were talking about the degree program, announced last week, and were thinking about enrolling.
Here is more from the NYT. The school has received hundreds of inquiries in the last few days.
Upzoning with Strings Attached
The subtitle of this paper is: “Evidence from Seattle’s Affordable Housing Mandate.” Here is the abstract:
This paper analyzes the effects of a major municipal residential land use reform on new home construction and developer behavior. We examine Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, which relaxed zoning regulations while also encouraging affordable housing construction in 33 neighborhoods in 2017 and 2019. The reforms allowed for more dense new development (‘upzoning’), but they also required developers to either reserve some units of each project as below market rate rentals or pay into a citywide affordable housing fund. Using a difference-in-differences estimation comparing areas the reforms affected versus those not affected, we show new construction differentially fell in the upzoned, affordability-mandated census blocks. Our quasi-experimental border design finds strong evidence of developers strategically siting projects away from MHA-zoned plots – despite their upzoning – and instead to nearby blocks and parcels not subject to the program’s affordability requirements. The differential reduction from MHA to non-MHA zones could be as large as 70% of average permitting activity at the border. Lowrise multifamily and mixed-use development. Our findings speak to the mixed results of allowing for more density while simultaneously mandating affordable housing for the same project.
That is by Betty Xiao Wang and Jacob Krimmel. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults’ Subjective Wellbeing
Using four cross-sectional data files for the United States and Europe we show that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) have a significant impact on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in adulthood. Death of a parent, parental separation or divorce, financial difficulties, the prolonged absence of a parent, quarreling between parents, parental unemployment, sexual assault, experiencing long-term health problems, being bullied at school and being beaten or punched as a child all have long-term impacts on wellbeing. These experiences impact a wide range of wellbeing measures in adulthood including satisfaction with many aspects of everyday life, happiness and life satisfaction, self-assessed health, and are positively linked to measures of negative affect including the GHQ6. The evidence linking ACEs to lower SWB in adulthood is consistent across fifty different measures including sixteen positive affect and twenty-six negative affect measures relating to assessments of one’s one life, and eight variables capturing how the individual feels about the area she lives in, including unemployment, drugs, violence and vandalism plus democracy in their country. Trauma in childhood is long lasting.
That is from a new paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Perhaps those are not surprising results, but these are some of the most important questions for human welfare.
Might a few Kiwi reforms resume or be restored?
New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.
Here is the full NYT story. Jacinda Ardern is revered in many circles, but note support for her Labour Party collapsed to 27 percent, in part due to their inability to solve cost of living issues. Via tekl.
It is better that Elon bought Twitter
I have disagreed with most of his design decisions, do not like the name change or rebrand, and I have been disappointed by many of his tweets and points of view, often disagreeing vehemently. That said, allowing the videos to be seen on Twitter is the right decision, and it is a very, very important decision.
So I end up glad that he bought Twitter. I also very much like the general feed and also the “Community Notes” features, the latter supported but not initiated by Elon.
I am not sure how widely acknowledged this will be, but someone should say it, and I am happy to be the one. In general, more attention needs to be paid to “getting one big thing right.”
Saturday assorted links
2. Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons.
3. Israeli billionaire quits Harvard board.
4. What might be in those scrolls.
5. Louise Gluck, RIP. She was one of our best poets, even if not the equal of Shakespeare.
Does alleviating poverty increase cognitive performance?
From an RCT by Barnabas Szaszi et.al, due to travel I have not yet had the chance to look at this one:
In this Registered Report, we investigated the impact of a cash transfer based poverty alleviation program on cognitive performance. We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial conducted on low-income, high-risk individuals in Liberia where a random half of the participants (n=251) received a $200 lump-sum unconditional cash transfer – equivalent approximately to 300% of their monthly income – while the other half (n= 222) did not. We tested both the short-term (2-5 weeks) and the long-term (12-13 months) impact of the treatment via several executive function measures. The observed effect sizes of cash transfers on cognitive performance (b = 0.13 for the short- and b = 0.08 for the long-term) were roughly three and four times smaller than suggested by prior non-randomized research. Bayesian analyses revealed that the overall evidence supporting the existence of these effects is inconclusive. A multiverse analysis showed that neither alternative analytical specifications nor alternative processing of the dataset changed the results consistently. However cognitive performance varied between the executive function measures, suggesting that cash transfers may affect the subcomponents of executive function differently.
Via Michelle Dawson.
Some observations on universities and recent outrages
1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms. Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.
2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs. Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents. Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.
3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this. They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives. They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.
3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias. Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction. (What should I call it? The “Democratic Party direction”? That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found. Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?) If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.
4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people. Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?). They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events. Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts. They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.
I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.
4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly. That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong. They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.” In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense. As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too. That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.
5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged. It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in. I have never met such a person. Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today. It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.
6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally. Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net. It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.
Have a nice day!
Friday assorted links
Further positive results on school choice
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 paper by Christopher and Caitlin Kearns in the QJE.
What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination
Compare two otherwise similar towns. In Town A there have always been 1000 deaths every month from disease X. In contrast, Town B has been free of disease X for as long as anyone can remember until very recently when disease X suddenly started to kill 1000 people per month. A vaccine for disease X is developed. Which town should receive expedited vaccinations?
From a utilitarian perspective, both towns present equally compelling cases for immediate vaccination (1). Vaccination will avert 1,000 deaths per month in either location. The ethical imperative is thus to act swiftly in both instances. Lives are lives. However, given human psychology and societal norms, Town B is more likely to be perceived as facing an “emergency,” whereas Town A’s situation may be erroneously dismissed as less dire because deaths are the status quo.
A case in point. The WHO just approved a malaria vaccine for use in children, the R21/Matrix-M vaccine. Great! There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s not 1000 deaths a month but more than 1000 deaths of children every day. The WHO, however, is planning on rolling out the vaccine next year.
Adrian Hill, one of the key scientists behind the vaccine is dismayed by the lack of urgency:
“Why would you allow children to die instead of distributing the vaccine? There’s no sensible answer to that — of course you wouldn’t,” Hill told the Financial Times. The SII said it “already” had capacity to produce 100mn doses annually.
…“There’s plenty of vaccine, let’s get it out there this year. We’ve done our best to answer huge amounts of questions, none of which a mother with a child at risk of malaria would be interested in.”
Hill is correct: the case for urgency is strong. More than a thousand children are dying daily and the Serum Institute already has 20 million doses on ice and is capable of producing 100 million doses a year. Why not treat this as an emergency?! Implicitly, however, people think that the case for urgency in Africa is weak because “what will another few months matter?” The benefits of vaccination in Africa are treated as small because they are measured relative to the total deaths that have already occurred. In contrast, vaccination for say COVID in the developed world (Town B) ended the emergency and restored normality thus saving a large percent of the deaths that might have occurred. But the percentages are irrelevant. This is a base rate fallacy, albeit the opposite of the one usually considered. Lives are lives, irrespective of the historical context.
Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, compared the timeframe with the swift rollout of the first Covid vaccines, which were distributed “within weeks” of approval.
“We’d like to see the same importance given to the malaria vaccine for children in Africa. We don’t want them sitting in a fridge in India,” he said. “We don’t think this would be fair to rural African countries if they were not provided with the same rapidity of review and supply.”
The term “emergency” inherently embodies the conundrum I highlight. Emergency is defined as an unexpected set of events or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. When formulating a response to an emergency, however, the focus should not be on whether the events were unexpected but on the resulting state. The resulting state is what is important. The resulting state is the end that legitimizes the means. The unexpected draws our attention–our emotional systems, like our visual systems, alert on change and movement–but what matters is not what draws our attention but the situational reality.
Lives are lives and we should act with all justifiable speed to save lives. The WHO should accelerate malaria vaccination for children in Africa.
(1) You might argue that in Town B the 1000 deaths are more unusual and thus more disruptive but you might also argue that Town A has undergone the deaths for so much longer that the case for speed as matter of justice is even greater. These are quibbles.
How will AI remake the rules of international trade?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Posting a query to ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy, by one estimate 10 times more than a Google search. Currently large language models are sufficiently limited that this is not a major factor in aggregate energy consumption. But as use of AI services increases, the energy burden will rise. Countries with expensive energy, or which will not allow energy consumption to rise much for climate or regulatory reasons, will look to import their AI services from energy-rich countries.
In the future, energy-rich regions may include Spain and Morocco with solar power, South Korea with affordable nuclear power, and whichever nations are pioneers in nuclear fusion. Those nations may end up as major exporters of AI-generated data. They might draw their AI inputs from the US, but specialize in cheap calculation and information transmission. And some regions of America may join this list as well, especially if they are well-suited for solar and hydroelectric power.
To be clear, the US will export a lot of AI services, through such companies as OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic. But the US is not as good at building affordable infrastructure, and that will put it at a disadvantage in the AI revolution and distribute many of the gains abroad.
It remains to be seen whether there are higher profits in selling the original source code or the more derivative electricity-driven, infrastructure-based AI calculations. Nonetheless, this is a potential economic and national security risk for the US. It could end up with a strong lead in the source product, but fall badly behind in making (“manufacturing,” you could say) the final AI outputs.
Recommended.
We are reading the scrolls!
Megabytes of ancient text are coming https://t.co/zTAzZbpCwf
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 12, 2023
Here is further information.
What should I ask John Gray?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is from Wikipedia:
John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.
John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. So what should I ask him?