Month: October 2023
Monday assorted links
Claudia Goldin Wins Nobel
Claudia Goldin wins the Nobel! Goldin is an economic historian, she was inspired to go into economics by Alfred Kahn (later the architect of airline deregulation) and became a student of Robert Fogel at the University of Chicago. Goldin pioneered the historical analysis of the labor market and gender. If you want to read a single Goldin piece then very fortuitously and appropriately her NBER paper called…Why Women Won just appeared as an NBER working paper! The Nobel Prize committee’s Scientific Background is a good summary of her work including her important work on education with Larry Katz.
Goldin is well known at MR which makes covering this year’s Nobel easy as I can point to our MRU videos on Goldin and her podcast with Conversations with Tyler.
First, an overview of Goldin and her work, especially interesting on her archival work. Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!
Next is my video on one of Goldin’s key papers (with Katz) about how the development of the pill vastly accelerated women entering the workforce especially in the professions (we also cover Goldin’s paper in Modern Principles.)
Women working: What’s the Pill Got To Do With It?
Then there is Tyler’s Conversations with Tyler podcast with Goldin. I am struck by how little Goldin is willing to speculate, pontificate or advocate in that conversation and instead sticks to the data.
Finally, here are many other MR posts on Goldin.
“Why Women Won”
That is the title of a new NBER working paper, published today, by…Claudia Goldin. Here is the abstract:
How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men’s regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote? The story begins with the civil rights movement and the somewhat fortuitous nature of the early and key women’s rights legislation. The women’s movement formed and pressed for further rights. Of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history I’ve compiled from 1905 to 2023, 45% occurred between 1963 and 1973. The greatly increased employment of women, the formation of women’s rights associations, the belief that women’s votes mattered, and the unstinting efforts of various members of Congress were behind the advances. But women soon became splintered by marital status, employment, region, and religion far more than men. A substantial group of women emerged in the 1970s to oppose various rights for women, just as they did during the suffrage movement. They remain a potent force today.
I will read it soon…
Do looks matter for an academic career in economics?
We show that physical appearance plays a role in the success of economics PhD graduates and investigate the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship. Leveraging a unique dataset of career and research productivity trajectories of PhD graduates from leading economics departments in the United States, we provide robust evidence that appearance is a predictive factor for both research productivity and job placement. Our analysis goes beyond establishing the association between attractiveness and success within the profession. By jointly examining appearance, job outcome, and research productivity, as well as the longitudinal development of the latter two over time, we show that the effect of appearance can be partially, but not fully, attributed to its role as a predictor of research productivity, with the remainder of the effect reflecting an intrinsic demand for attractiveness.
That is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, by Galina Hale, Tali Regev, and Yona Rubinstein. Via Rolf Degen. And here is a recent piece on lookism and fund managers.
Sunday assorted links
*Maestros and Monsters*
The author is Robert Boyers and the subtitle is Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, and the book appears to be an account of their friendship, and also rivalry. Here is one early passage:
Still, it ought to have been obvious that what made Susan authentically cool was not principally her image or her beauty but her demeanor, the almost impossibly self-possession stamped on everything she wrote and in her every utterance. She was, after all, rigorous even about pleasure. She had little or no patience with those who wanted to relax. She wanted her pleasures rare and immoderate. In her presence, I felt my own impulses quicken. I felt smarter, more alert, poised to be contradicted, even undermined. I never doubted the force and ferocity of her will, never minded that to be in her company was to revolve around her. She was cool because she knew how to make conversation dangerous. There was no inclination in Susan towards the obvious or self-evident. Though she could be down to earth, even somewhat vulnerable, with those who were permitted to come close, she rarely let down her determination to be demanding. Cool was in her a perfect, unstudied resistance to banality and incoherence. Responsive to enigma and sublimity, she had no feeling for child’s play or frivolity. She had her chosen masters but was always also masterful in the exercise of her own seductive powers.
I will keep reading…
Who will win the next Nobel Prize in economics?
My prediction is a joint prize for Tim Bresnahan and Ariel Pakes, for Industrial Organization, a mix of game theory and empirical methods. Usually I am wrong (sorry guys!).
What are your predictions?
Note that for reasons of time zone and travel, I might not be around to cover the Prize this coming Monday, apologies! We will see. I believe that Alex in any case will be here…
What I’ve been reading
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Have you ever been confused by Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Wolf? Intellectually they are both pretty crazy. And they are both named Naomi. Some might think they bear some resemblance to each other. Well, here is a whole book on that confusion! And it is written by Naomi Klein. How much insight and self-awareness can one intellectually crazy person have about being confused for another intellectually crazy person? Quite a bit, it turns out. Recommended, though with the provision that I understand you never felt you needed to read a whole book about such a topic.
Benjamin Labutut, The Maniac. Chilean author, he has penned the story of von Neumann but in the latter part of the book switches to contemporary AI and AlphaGO, semi-fictionalized. Feels vital and not tired, mostly pretty good, thoiiugh for some MR readers the material may be excessively familiar.
J.M. Coetzee, The Pole. Short, compelling, self-contained, again deals with older men who have not resolved their issues concerning sex. Good but not great Coetzee.
Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker. I am honored to have blurbed this book.
Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans is one mighty fine book.
Shuchen Xiang, Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea. Chinese cosmopolitanism, there was more of it than you might have thought. Should we be asking “Where did it go?” Or is it there more than ever?
A few implications
I am not saying these are rational, or not, in any case they are predictions:
1. The momentum for gun control in the United States will weaken. There is a claim on Twitter that only two percent of Israeli households have guns at hand. May or may not be exactly true, but many people will become more attached to the idea of gun ownership as a means of defense.
2. We Americans will indeed build The Wall on our southern border.
3. The doctrine of deterrence has taken a beating. Few doubt that Israel can strike back at Gaza in a very powerful way, and yet that wasn’t enough to stop the attacks. I am still trying to digest this one.
4. A certain kind of military-flavored AI accelerationism will win out. Given #3, it no longer suffices to think you can deter a drone attack from your enemies, even if your country is very powerful. Rather you need your own drones, and your intelligence, to forestall major casualties in the first place.
Japan fact of the day
Employee earnings have dropped 2% in real terms in the past year and by 8% in the past decade.
Saturday assorted links
1. Model this.
2. A bunch of claims about nobles, genetics, and violence.
3. New results on interpretability. And much more detail. Potentially very good news. One interpretation. Some are becoming less pessimistic.
4. Arnold Kling on the trouble with books. Remedies will come!
Union Busted
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) just filed for bankruptcy because it lost a case with a port operator in Portland. The back story is amazing.
The ILWU is one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Since bloody riots in 1934 it has controlled all 29 seaports on the west coast of the United States, giving them monopoly power. The ILWU’s 22 thousand workers are known as the “lords of the dock” and they earn an average of just over $200,000 in salary and another $100,000 in benefits, a bit more than the typical CEO. Some ILWU foremen take home half a million a year.
The ILWU has a lock on dockworkers but there are other rival unions. In Portland, for example, there were two jobs for reefers–electrical workers who handle special refrigerated containers–that since 1974 had been held by members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The ILWU, however, wanted control of these jobs and in 2012 one of the heavies of the union, Leal Sundet, threatened the manager of the port operator that if he didn’t help him to take these jobs from the Brotherhood and give them to the Longshoremen he would create havoc. When the port operator didn’t comply–it wasn’t clear even that they could comply as the jobs were not under the port operator’s control–the ILWU followed through on its threat. Repeated shutdowns, slowdowns and discovered “safety violations” disrupted port operations so badly that the entire port closed.
The port operator, however, took the ILWU to court, arguing that the labor actions were illegal. The jury agreed giving the port operator an award of $93.6 million for its losses, later reduced to $19 million. The Union doesn’t have the $19 million, hence the bankruptcy.
Thus, the union has been bankrupted, the port closed, hundreds of millions of dollars lost and shipments slowed all because of a dispute over 2 jobs.
In related news, the just approved ILWU contract raises wages for ILWU workers and ensures that there will be no serious automation of the ports for at least another six years, again putting the United States behind the rest of the world in efficient shipping and logistics.
I am reminded of the day Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for their illegal strike.
Twitter channel covering Israel events
I thank S. for the pointer. What are some other good sources?
Are domesticated animals dumber than their wild relatives?
Highlights
-
Domestication is often thought to have a negative impact on the cognition of animals.
-
Domesticated animals deemed less cognitively capable than their wild relatives.
-
We reviewed 88 studies comparing cognitive abilities in domesticated and wild animals.
-
No clear impact of domestication on cognition was found.
-
Need to consider some constraints when interpreting domestication-cognition links.
That is from a new paper by Vitor Hugo Bessa Ferreira et.al., via Michelle Dawson.
Do Nice Guys Finish Last? Prosociality in the CEO Labor Market
Prosocial CEOs increase employee motivation but are often slower to implement layoffs. We present a model of CEO-firm matching wherein negative industry shocks that require downsizing asymmetrically reduce the match quality for prosocial CEOs and drive turnover. We find that prosocial CEOs are more likely to be dismissed and replaced with less prosocial successors during periods of intensifying import competition. Prosocial CEOs who are retained receive greater bonus-based pay relative to less prosocial CEOs, consistent with increased financial incentives to engage in downsizing. Our findings highlight a novel selection channel (i.e., increased dismissal) and treatment channel (i.e., increased bonus pay) that decrease CEO prosociality during industry downturns. We also highlight that foreign competition affected not only the firm’s economic activities but also the CEO’s psychological characteristics.
That is from a new paper by Daniel Keum and Nandil Bhatia, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.