Month: March 2025
“What do I think of the Trump-Zelensky dust-up?”
A reader requests that in the comments, but it is exactly the kind of topic I can tire of. Nonetheless I will jot down a few quick pointers on how I think about it:
1. Downweight almost every opinion you read on Twitter, instead check the Ukrainian bond market. If need be, query with Grok on matters such as this. You can however consider Twitter opinions as sociological data of a sort, so downweight them for truth value but do not ignore them. Especially downweight comments designed to raise or lower various individuals in status, they are a kind of epistemic poison.
2. Look for say commentary from China, among other unusual sources. They have a stake in the matter, are often quite perceptive, and won’t be trapped by the same ol’ mood affiliations (they do of course have their own).
3. Consult with some friends and contacts involved in Ukraine, with good inside perspectives.
Triangulate and aggregate!
You will end up with something quite different from what either (American) “side” is saying.
Do female experts face an authority gap? Evidence from economics
This paper reports results from a survey experiment comparing the effect of (the same) opinions expressed by visibly senior, female versus male experts. Members of the public were asked for their opinion on topical issues and shown the opinion of either a named male or a named female economist, all professors at leading US universities. There are three findings. First, experts can persuade members of the public – the opinions of individual expert economists affect the opinions expressed by the public. Second, the opinions expressed by visibly senior female economists are more persuasive than the same opinions expressed by male economists. Third, removing credentials (university and professor title) eliminates the gender difference in persuasiveness, suggesting that credentials act as a differential information signal about the credibility of female experts.
Here is the full paper by Hans H. Sievertsen and Sarah Smith, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Some reasons why I do not cover various topics much
1. I feel that writing about the topic will make me stupider.
2. I believe that you reading more about the topic will make you stupider.
3. I believe that performative outrage usually brings low or negative returns. Matt Yglesias has had some good writing on this lately.
4. I don’t have anything to add on the topic. Abortion and the Middle East would be two examples here.
5. Sometimes I have good inside information on a topic, but I cannot reveal it, not even without attribution. And I don’t want to write something stupider than my best understanding of the topic.
6,. I just don’t feel like it.
7. On a few topics I feel it is Alex’s province.
Addendum: Pearl, in the comments, adds an excellent #8: “8. Choosing sides in these debates would reduce my overall influence and access to new information”
Personality traits and gender gaps
This paper examines the effects of the Big Five personality traits on labor market outcomes and gender wage gaps using a job search and bargaining model with parameters that vary at the individual level. The analysis, based on German panel data, reveals that both cognitive and noncognitive traits significantly influence wages and employment outcomes. Higher conscientiousness and emotional stability and lower agreeableness levels enhance earnings and job stability for both genders. Differences in the distributions of personality characteristics between men and women account for as much of the gender wage gap as do the large differences in labor market experience.
That is from German data, published in the JPE by Christopher J. Flinn, Petra E. Todd, and Weilong Zhang.
Saturday assorted links
2. Writing for the AI is paying off.
3. You’ve quoted Gerhard Richter as saying that a good picture “takes away our certainty,” and suggested (Philip Guston) that doing so enables us to “begin to see the push and pull of impulse, recanting, and reconfiguration that constitute painting and, by extension, life itself.” From Prudence Crowther.
4. Details on DOGE history (NYT).
5. Anthropic wants someone to write on the economic effects of AI.
6. “Access to legal status reduces the probability of immigrants intermarrying with natives by 40% and increases the hazard rate of separation for intermarriages by 20%.” USA data — incentives matter!
USA fact of the day
After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.
Here is more from the NYT. The youngest cohort does not seem to be declining in religiosity (unlike earlier generational shifts), and for that youngest cohort the gender gap in religiousity basically has disappeared.
The Economist 1843 magazine does a profile of me
I believe you can get through the gate by registering. A very good and accurate piece, first-rate photos as well, including of Spinoza too, here is the link. Here is one excerpt:
I asked Cowen – it is the kind of question you come to ask him – what were the criteria for a perfect Central American square. He began plucking details from the scene around us. Music, trees, a church, a fountain, children playing. “Good balloons,” he noted, looking approvingly at a balloon seller. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he was extemporising from the available details, or indexing what he saw against a pre-existing model of what the ideal square should look like.
And:
When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He had never been clinically depressed? Depressed for a month? For a week? An afternoon? I looked up from my notebook. An enormous smile, one I’d not seen before, had spread across the whole of Cowen’s face.
“Like, for a whole afternoon?” he asked, hugely grinning.
Here is the closing bit, taken from when the reporter (John Phipps) and I were together in Roatan:
As we came back to shore, Cowen smiled at the unremarkable, deserted village. “I’m long Jonesville,” he said warmly. (He often speaks about places and people as though they were stocks you could go long or short on.) I asked him if he would think about investing in property here. He shrugged as if to say “why bother?”
The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was the only person there. He’d been doing this for two decades now; it was an efficient form of exercise; the weather was mostly good. I asked him what he’d learned playing basketball alone for decades. “That you can do something for a long time and still not be very good at it,” he said. The car began to roll downhill.
Self-recommending, and with some significant cameos, most of all Alex T. and also Spinoza.