Month: October 2024
Science and politics podcast
From the Institute for Progress, here is the link, the participants were Caleb Watney, Dylan Matthews, Alexander Berger, and myself. Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: I would stress just how decentralized science funding is in the United States. The public universities are run at the state level. We have tax incentives for donations where you have to give to a nonprofit, but there’s otherwise very little control over what counts as a viable nonprofit.
One specific issue that I think has become quite large is how much we run our universities through an overhead system. On federal grants and many other kinds of grants, an overhead is charged. The overhead rates are very high, and well above what the actual marginal overhead costs.
You might think that’s a crazy system, and in some ways it is crazy. It means there’s intense pressure on professors to bring in contracts, regardless of the quality of the work. That’s clearly a major negative. Everyone complains about this.
But the hidden upside is that when universities fund themselves through overhead, there’s a kind of indirect free speech privilege because they can spend the overhead how they want. Now, I actually think they are violating the implicit social contract right now by spending the overhead poorly. But for a long while, this was why our system worked well. You had very indirect federal appropriations: some parts of which went to science, other parts of which went to education. It was done on a free speech basis.
But like many good systems, it doesn’t last forever. It gets abused. If we try to clean up the mess — which now in my view clearly is a mess — well, I’m afraid we’ll get a system where Congress or someone else is trying to dictate all the time how the funds actually should be allocated.
That’s a question I’ve thought through a good amount: how or whether we should fix the overhead system? I feel we’ve somehow painted ourselves into a corner where there is no good political way out in any direction. But I think you’ll find case by case that the specifics are really going to matter.
Dylan Matthews: Let’s get into some of the specifics. Do you have an example of the overhead system breaking down that is motivating for you here?
Tyler Cowen: Well, universities are spending more and more of their surplus on staff and facilities — on ends that even if you think they’re defensible in some deep sense like “Oh, we need this building,” it’s about the university. It’s about what leads to long run donations, but it’s seen as a violation of public trust.
The money is neither being spent on possibly useful research, nor educating students. The backlash against universities is huge, most of all in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina. It seems to me that where we are at isn’t stable. How we fund science through universities is, in some ways, collapsing in bad ways. The complaints are often justified, but odds are that we’ll end up with something worse.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Scott Alexander on the Progress Studies conference
Here is one excerpt:
Over-regulation was the enemy at many presentations, but this wasn’t a libertarian conference. Everyone agreed that safety, quality, the environment, etc, were important and should be regulated for. They just thought existing regulations were colossally stupid, so much so that they made everything worse including safety, the environment, etc. With enough political will, it would be easy to draft regulations that improved innovation, price, safety, the environment, and everything else.
For example, consider supersonic flight. Supersonic aircraft create “sonic booms”, minor explosions that rattle windows and disturb people underneath their path. Annoyed with these booms, Congress banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Now we’ve invented better aircraft whose booms are barely noticeable, or not noticeable at all. But because Congress banned supersonic flight – rather than sonic booms themselves – we’re stuck with normal boring 6-hour coast-to-coast flights. If aircraft progress had continued at the same rate it was going before the supersonic ban, we’d be up to 2,500 mph now (coast-to-coast in ~2 hours). Can Congress change the regulation so it bans booms and not speed? Yes, but Congress is busy, and doing it through the FAA and other agencies would take 10-15 years of environmental impact reports.
Or consider solar power. The average large solar project is delayed 5-10 years by bureaucracy. Part of the problem is NEPA, the infamous environmental protection law saying that anyone can sue any project for any reason if they object on environmental grounds. If a fossil fuel company worries about a competition from solar, they can sue upcoming solar plants on the grounds that some ants might get crushed beneath the solar panels; even in the best-case where the solar company fights and wins, they’ve suffered years of delay and lost millions of dollars. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies have it easier; they’ve had good lobbyists for decades, and accrued a nice collection of formal and informal NEPA exemptions.
Even if a solar project survives court challenges, it has to get connected to the grid. This poses its own layer of bureaucracy and potential pitfalls.
Do read the whole thing. And congratulations to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson for pulling off this event.
Risers and Fallers, mostly Fallers
Here is a fun post by Arnold Kling on which thinkers have kept name recognition and also influence. Excerpt:
Sociology (Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Robert Nisbet, Charles Murray, Matt Granovetter, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould)
Is there not a good case to be made that we are living in Erving Goffman’s world? I think he coined the term “impression management,” and certainly with the advent of social media that is now a big part of our lives. But he is a Faller. Probably if you would read him now, you would dismiss him as offering Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious. Parsons and Nisbet are also Fallers.
Murray is still polarizing, but much lesser known than he was in the 20th century. So he is a Faller, but too much of one.
Granovetter is a Riser, no? Social networks are a big deal now, and he is known for his work on those.
I put the sociobiology controversialists in the sociology category, since the public doesn’t care about insects or peacocks. I would say that Gould’s crusade against evolutionary biology failed, so he seems to be somewhat of a Faller. Dawkins and Trivers seem like Risers, but Wilson was much more well known, and controversial, in his prime.
Keynes, Tolkien, and Rand are among the risers (sometimes relatively speaking), so what does that tell us about the current world?
Thursday assorted links
1. First robot painting to auction at Sotheby’s.
2. A Large Language Model for Interpreting Longitudinal Medical Records. Twitter summary here.
3. Practical suggestions for federal action on housing affordability.
4. Pseudoerasmus.
5. Are drivers an especially right-wing group of people?
6. Might Argentina have to default? (FT)
Quantifying the Super-Villains
There is a new paper on this topic:
We investigate the effects of substantial Medicare price reductions in the medicaldevice industry, which amounted to a 61% decrease over 10 years for certain devicetypes. Analyzing over 20 years of administrative and proprietary data, we find theseprice cuts led to a 25% decline in new product introductions and a 75% decrease inpatent filings, indicating significant reductions in innovation activity. Manufacturersdecreased market entry and increased outsourcing to foreign producers, associatedwith higher rates of product defects. Our calculations suggest the value of lost inno-vation may fully offset the direct cost savings from the price cuts. We propose thatbetter-targeted pricing reforms could mitigate these negative effects. These findingsunderscore the need to balance cost containment with incentives for innovation andquality in policy design.
By Yunan Ji and Parker Rogers. Here is a summary tweet storm. Via Sam Hammond.
Metascience podcast on science and safety
From the Institute for Progress. There are four of us, namely Dylan Matthews, Matt Clancy, and Jacob Trefethen as well. There is a transcript, and here is one very brief excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: I see the longer run risks of economic growth as primarily centered around warfare. There is lots of literature on the Industrial Revolution. People were displaced. Some parts of the country did worse. Those are a bit overstated.
But the more productive power you have, you can quite easily – and almost always do – have more destructive power. The next time there’s a major war, which could be many decades later, more people will be killed, there’ll be higher risks, more political disorder. That’s the other end of the balance sheet. Now, you always hope that the next time we go through this we’ll do a better job. We all hope that, but I don’t know.
And:
Tyler Cowen: But the puzzle is why we don’t have more terror attacks than we do, right? You could imagine people dumping basic poisons into the reservoir or showing up at suburban shopping malls with submachine guns, but it really doesn’t happen much. I’m not sure what the binding constraint is, but since I don’t think it’s science, that’s one factor that makes me more optimistic than many other people in this area.
Dylan Matthews: I’m curious what people’s theories are, since I often think of things that seem like they would have a lot of potential for terrorist attacks. I don’t Google them because after Edward Snowden, that doesn’t seem safe.
I live in DC, and I keep seeing large groups of very powerful people. I ask myself, “Why does everyone feel so safe? Why, given the current state of things, do we not see much more of this?” Tyler, you said you didn’t know what the binding constraint was. Jacob, do you have a theory about what the binding constraint is?
Jacob Trefethen: I don’t think I have a theory that explains the basis.
Tyler Cowen: Management would be mine. For instance, it’d be weird if the greatest risk of GPT models was that they helped terrorists have better management, just giving them basic management tips like those you would get out of a very cheap best-selling management book. That’s my best guess.
I would note that this was recorded some while ago, and on some of the AI safety issues I would put things differently now. Maybe some of that is having changed my mind, but most of all I simply would present the points in a very different context.
Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition
Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies (N = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social costs, while simultaneously impairing targets’ reputations. Study 1 examined sex differences in gossip motivations. Compared to men, women endorsed stronger concern than harm motivations, especially when gossiping about other women, suggesting these motivations characterize female intrasexual gossip. In Study 2, female gossipers who phrased their negative gossip with concern (versus maliciously or neutrally) were evaluated as more trustworthy and desirable as social and romantic partners. Study 3 replicated the favorable evaluations of concerned female gossipers. Female participants especially disliked malicious female gossipers, suggesting professions of concern might help to avoid women’s scorn. Male participants reported lower romantic interest in female gossip targets when they learned concern (versus malicious or no) gossip, suggesting concerned gossip can harm female targets’ romantic prospects. Study 4 revealed these patterns extend to face-to-face interactions. A female gossiper was preferred as a social partner when she phrased her gossip with concern versus maliciously. Moreover, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the female target as effectively as malicious gossip. Altogether, findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets’ reputations, while also protecting gossipers’ reputations, indicating a viable strategy in female intrasexual competition.
That is from a recent paper by Reynolds, Vaner, and Baumeister. Via a loyal MR reader.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The latest @pmarca gambit. Crypto + AI. And a Brian Armstrong offer, take it!
2. Where did all that Millennial wealth come from so suddenly?
3. Anthropic’s new computer use capabilities. And further observations on that.
4. The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school (Atlantic).
5. New James Boyle book on AI and the future of personhood, open access version.
6. OpenAI hires chief economist (NYT).
Does it matter who Satoshi was?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It also matters if Satoshi was a single person or a small team. If a single person, that might mean future innovations are more likely than generally thought: If Satoshi is a lone individual, then maybe there there are more unknown geniuses out there. On the other hand, the Satoshi-as-a-team theory would mean that secrets are easier to keep than people think. If that’s the case, then maybe conspiracy theories are more true than most of us would care to admit.
According to many speculations, Satoshi came out of a movement obsessed with e-cash and e-gold mechanisms, dating to the 1980s. People from those movements who have been identified as potential Satoshi candidates include Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, David Chaum and Douglas Jackson, among others. At the time, those movements were considered failures because their products did not prove sustainable. The lesson here would be that movements do not truly and permanently fail. It is worth experimenting in unusual directions because something useful might come out of those efforts.
If Peter Todd is Satoshi, then it’s appropriate to upgrade any estimates of the ability of very young people to get things done. Todd would have been working on Bitcoin and the associated white paper as a student in his early 20s. At the same time, if the more mainstream Adam Back is involved, then maybe the takeaway is that rebellious young people should seek out older mentors on matters of process and marketing.
I believe that in less than two years we will know who Satoshi is.
Quantitative Economics with Deep Learning
We argue that deep learning provides a promising avenue for taming the curse of dimensionality in quantitative economics. We begin by exploring the unique challenges posed by solving dynamic equilibrium models, especially the feedback loop between individual agents’ decisions and the aggregate consistency conditions required by equilibrium. Following this, we introduce deep neural networks and demonstrate their application by solving the stochastic neoclassical growth model. Next, we compare deep neural networks with traditional solution methods in quantitative economics. We conclude with a survey of neural network applications in quantitative economics and offer reasons for cautious optimism.
That is from a new paper by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Galo Nuño, and Jesse Perla.
The new Claude can run and direct your computer for you
Watch here. (It’s happening.)
Tuesday assorted links
1. The importance of conditional risk in finance.
2. Brendan Greeley on how exclusive and inclusive institutions fit together (FT). “Rather, this inability to see how London, Virginia and Barbados function within the same system is, ironically, an institutional problem within the profession of economics.”
3. Joseph Walker and Larry Summers podcast on AGI and the next Industrial Revolution.
4. Who is afraid of AI in the workplace?
6. Jason Furman’s five books to understand the economy (NYT).
The MR Podcast–Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War
Our second podcast on the 1970s titled Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War is now available! Here’s one bit:
Tabarrok: …Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, in a famous statement, he was the oil minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he’s a leader of OPEC, he says on October 16th, this is 10 days after the war begins, “This is a moment for which I have been waiting for a long time. The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.” They raise the price of oil. Oil production falls by about 9 percent to 10 percent. That doesn’t seem on the surface to be a huge amount, but it reveals something which people had not been prepared for, and that was the inelasticity of oil demand.
I would put it this way. I think this is the key idea here. Almost accidentally, the exporting countries had discovered that the demand for oil was more inelastic than anyone had ever realized. The main lesson they drew before 1973, the oil exporting countries thought that the only way to increase revenues was to produce more. After 1973, they learned that an even better way to increase revenues was to produce less.
Here’s another:
COWEN: Since the 1980s, economists, for a number of reasons, have underrated real shocks as a source of business cycles and downturns. You have the Keynesians who didn’t want to talk about it, and then you had the Monetarists, Milton Friedman, who wanted to promote their own recipe, and people just stopped talking about it. Even 2008, which clearly had a lot to do with a major negative shock to aggregate demand, but the price of oil is quite high at the time when that’s breaking, and it was a major factor behind the downturn.
TABARROK: Absolutely.
COWEN: No one wants to talk about that.
Here is the MR Podcast home page. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
*A Voyage Around the Queen*
I loved this Craig Brown book, although many of you won’t. A good biography typically brings a subject to life. This biography sets out to convince you that Queen Elizabeth II could never be understood whatsoever, that she was a literal cipher and always was going to stand outside our typical categories. She did love jigsaw puzzles.
Can you stand a book that has sentences like?:
The Queen Mother’s corgis were every bit as edgy.
The Queen was born in 1926, and the book lists some words that were first chronicled in that same year:
Bible belt, business lunch, car park, kitsch, market research, pop song, publicity stunt, recycle, sugar daddy, and totalitarian.
Recommended, for some of you at least. You need to have a touch of mischief in you perhaps?
What predicts success in science?
How does a person’s childhood socioeconomic status (SES) influence their chances to participate and succeed in science? To investigate this question, we use machine-learning methods to link scientists in a comprehensive biographical dictionary, the American Men of Science (1921), with their childhood home in the US Census and with publications. First, we show that children from low-SES homes were already severely underrepresented in the early 1900s. Second, we find that SES influences peer recognition, even conditional on participation: Scientists from high-SES families have 38% higher odds of becoming stars, controlling for age, publications, and disciplines. Using live-in servants as an alternative measure for SES confirms the strong link between childhood SES and becoming a star. Applying text analysis to assign scientists to disciplines, we find that mathematics is the only discipline in which SES influences stardom through the number and the quality of a scientist’s publications. Using detailed data on job titles to distinguish academic from industry scientists, we find that industry scientists have lower odds of being stars. Controlling for industry employment further strengthens the link between childhood SES and stardom. Elite undergraduate degrees explain more of the correlation between SES and stardom than any other control. At the same time, controls for birth order, family size, foreign-born parents, maternal education, patents, and connections with existing stars leave estimates unchanged, highlighting the importance of SES.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Anna Airoldi and Petra Moser.