Month: October 2025
Does economics make you more sexist?
We provide direct evidence on explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduates in Chile, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above, combining a wide battery of measures to create an index of gender bias. Economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics students are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to economics classes. The gap becomes more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, especially for male students.
That is from a newly published paper by Valentina Paredes, M. Daniele Paserman, and Francisco J. Pino.
Friday assorted links
Time to Privatize U.S. Air Traffic Control—Copy Canada’s Model
Yesterday, the FAA grounded flights at Reagan (DCA) because there weren’t enough air traffic controllers. By mid‑afternoon, thousands of flights were delayed nationwide. The same thing is happening at major airports across the country.
The proximate cause is that the FAA is short about ~3,500 controllers, forcing the rest to work mandatory overtime, six days a week, and now, during the shutdown, sometimes without pay! The more fundamental problem is that we have a poorly incentivized system. It’s absurd that a mission‑critical service is financed by annual appropriations subject to political failure. We need to remove the politics.
Canada fixed this in 1996 by spinning off air navigation services to NAV CANADA, a private, non‑profit utility funded by user fees, not taxes. Safety regulation stayed with the government; operations moved to a professionally governed, bond‑financed utility with multi‑year budgets. NAV Canada has been instrumental in moving Canada to more accurate and safer satellite-based navigation, rather than relying on ground-based radar as in the US.
NAV CANADA – in conjunction with the United Kingdom’s NATS – was the first in the world to deploy space-based ADS-B, by implementing it in 2019 over the North Atlantic, the world’s busiest oceanic airspace.
NAV CANADA was also the first air navigation service provider worldwide to implement space-based ADS-B in its domestic airspace.
Meanwhile, America’s NextGen has delivered a fraction of promised benefits, years late and over budget. As the Office of Inspector General reports:
Lengthy delays and cost growth have been a recurring feature of FAA’s modernization efforts through the course of NextGen’s over 20-year lifespan. FAA faced significant challenges throughout NextGen’s development and implementation phases that resulted in delaying or reducing benefits and delivering fewer capabilities than expected. While NextGen programs and capabilities have delivered some benefits in the form of more efficient air traffic management and reduced flight delays and airline operating costs, as of December 2024, FAA had achieved only about 16 percent of NextGen’s total expected benefits.
Airlines bleed money when planes idle, gates clog, and crews time out. The airlines have every reason to demand reliability, capacity, and modernization—Congress does not. Thus, fund air traffic control with user fees paid by those who depend on performance. Put the airline executives on the board of the non-profit, as in Canada. Give them the power to tax themselves to benefit themselves.
Align power with incentives and performance will follow.
Why did we think wages are rigid for all those years?
Thelarge spike at zero in the distribution of year-to-year nominal wage changes in household surveys is often seen as evidence of nominal wage rigidity. But measurement error—especially from workers rounding their reported wages—can exaggerate this spike. Using U.S. Current Population Survey data, we adjust for potential rounding behavior and find that the zero-change spike falls from 15–20 percent to 7–12 percent, aligning closely with recent estimates from administrative data.
That is from See-Yu Chan, Stephan Hobler, and Thijs van Rens. Note that Hobler, from LSE, is on the job market this year (with a different job market paper).
*The Master of Contradictions*
The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions. Here is one excerpt:
It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind. And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.
…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters. One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage. It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.
Recommended.
Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550
Abstract: This paper considers how movable-type printing’s economic features shaped the early modern book market using product-level data. Building on a lively medieval tradition of manuscript production, Gutenberg’s innovation did not simply reduce costs; it introduced new incentives and constraints that altered both the product’s nature and the market’s structure. First, printing’s business model encouraged the production of shorter and simpler books targeting a poorer and less literate audience. Second, its cost structure led to product differentiation and prolific trade rather than direct competition and localized production, making available a greater variety of products offering diverse information and perspectives. Rather than simply making medieval books cheaper and more abundant, these changes may represent printing technology’s true contribution to European economic development.
That is from the job market paper of Qiyi Charlotte Zhao, who is on the market this year from Stanford. Excellent topic.
Thursday assorted links
1. J.D. Vance models the UAP world.
2. “…wages at 50 are better predicted by cognitive skills at 16 than by cognitive skills at 50.”
3. Mississippi River fact of the day.
4. NYT profile of Helen DeWitt.
5. Do food stamps increase spending on food?
6. “More than 100 people have been injured by bears in Japan this year, and 11 have died, a record. Now the government is preparing to dispatch the military to one hard-hit area to help deal with the problem.” (NYT)
The microfoundations of the baby boom?
Between 1936 and 1957, fertility rates in the U.S. increased 62 percent and the maternal mortality rate declined by 93 percent. We explore the effects of changes in maternal mortality rates on white and nonwhite fertility rates during this period, exploiting contemporaneous or lagged changes in maternal mortality at the state-by-year level. We estimate that declines in maternal mortality explain 47-73 percent of the increase in fertility between 1939 and 1957 among white women and 64-88 percent of the increase in fertility among nonwhite women during our sample period.
Here is the full article by Christopher Handy and Katharine Shester, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Overall, I take this as a negative for the prospect of another, future baby boom? We just cannot make maternity all that much safer, starting from current margins.
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
Noah Smith has economic ideas for Japan
Excerpt from the opening:
Fortunately, Japan is in an OK macroeconomic situation right now. Government debt, the country’s thorniest problem, is actually falling as a percent of GDP, thanks in part to higher inflation and in part to rising corporate profits and tax revenues…
The deflation problem that bedeviled Japan for decades has finally been defeated. And at the same time, unemployment in Japan remains very low…
This means that Takaichi and her cabinet don’t need to focus as much energy and attention on macroeconomics, as Abe did. There is no need for further stimulus, monetary or fiscal. Instead, Takaichi is free to concentrate on improving Japan’s underlying economic model, in order to promote productivity and growth.
Noah has six specific ideas of note, starting with improving capital markets. Here is the whole post.
Wednesday assorted links
The Game Theory of House of Dynamite
In the comments to yesterday’s review of House of Dynamite, some people balked at the movie’s central premise: that the U.S. has to decide—immediately—whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. “Why not wait?” they asked. “Why not take a few days, even a few months, to figure out who actually fired the missile?”
That question even came up at GMU lunch, so it’s worth explaining why the time pressure is realistic. No real spoilers.
The U.S. doesn’t know whether the missile came from China, Russia, or North Korea and that seems to weigh in favor of waiting and gathering evidence. But here’s the problem: Russia, China, and North Korea don’t know what the U.S. knows. Suppose Russia thinks the U.S. believes Russia launched the strike. Then Russia expects retaliation. Expecting retaliation makes it rational for Russia to attack first. So Russia mobilizes.
The mobilization convinces the U.S. that Russia is preparing to attack—so now it’s rational for the U.S. to strike first. Which, of course, confirms Russia’s fears and pushes them closer to launching.
Even if the U.S. doesn’t actually think Russia fired the missile, it might still attack. Why? Because it believes that Russia believes the U.S. believes Russia did.
In this belief spiral, delay brings doom not clarity. In the film, Jake Baerington tries to break the doom loop but the logic is strong and amplified by speed and fear. Breaking the loop isn’t impossible, but as the movie suggests, it requires an act that cuts against immediate self-interest.
Informative jury disagreement
The article introduces a counterintuitive argument, contending that jury disagreement on the defendant’s guilt-a nonunanimous conviction-may well provide a more informative signal, compared to consensus. Because stronger consensus implies higher likelihood of herding, it is shown that beyond some threshold, further accumulation of votes to convict would carry negligible epistemic contribution, barely enhancing the posterior probability of guilt. On the other hand, while dissenting votes provide a direct signal of innocence, they indicate that herding has not been involved in the decision-making process, hence increase the epistemic contribution of any vote generated by said processincluding votes to convict-and may thus offer an indirect signal of guilt, potentially increasing the posterior. This unravels the informational value of dissent and the possible disadvantageousness of consensus.
That is from a new paper by Roy Baharad, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
On a possible China deal
Tyler Cowen, Free Press columnist and Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University:
What do I want from a U.S. trade deal with China? Most of all, stability and predictability. America has a great deal it needs to do to “deal with China.” That might include boosting our own supplies of rare-earth elements, maintaining our lead in generative AI, and making sure that enough high-quality chips come from somewhere other than Taiwan.
Vigorous action is required on all these fronts. While we are at the wish-making stage, how about better fiscal policies for long-term sustainability, improved science funding, a more rapid and effective military procurement system, and an education system with fewer holes?
But here is the thing—none of those will be accomplished through a trade deal with China. Success or failure on those fronts will depend solely on ourselves. The purpose of a trade deal, at this point, should simply be to put U.S.-China relations back on a normal footing. We are not going to stop significant supplies of dangerous drugs from entering the United States, no matter what China does or does not agree to. We are not going to end China’s trade surplus with us, nor should we fear that trade surplus. And we are not going to end the ability of the Chinese government to have some influence over the real value of its currency, just as we have that same ability.
We could and should turn the drama down a notch. Whether that is what you will get from this episode in the reality TV season, however, remains to be seen.
Here are numerous other contributions, including from Dan Wang and Niall Ferguson.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Did mass species extinctions peak one hundred years ago?
4. “Delegating to an AI whose alignment is unknown.”
5. Those new service sector jobs: pumpkinstylists (WSJ).
6. South Korean stock market is the best performing this year (FT).