How minimal is our intelligence?
From a longer post by Douglas Reay, this is all worth a good ponder:
Q is polygenetic, meaning that many different genes are relevant to a person’s potential maximum IQ. (Note: there are many non-genetic factors that may prevent an individual reaching their potential). Algernon’s Law suggests that genes affecting IQ that have multiple alleles still common in the human population are likely to have a cost associated with the alleles tending to increase IQ, otherwise they’d have displaced the competing alleles. In the same way that an animal species that develops the capability to grow a fur coat in response to cold weather is more advanced than one whose genes strictly determine that it will have a thick fur coat at all times, whether the weather is cold or hot; the polygenetic nature of human IQ gives human populations the ability to adapt and react on the time scale of just a few generations, increasing or decreasing the average IQ of the population as the environment changes to reduce or increase the penalties of particular trade-offs for particular alleles contributing to IQ. In particular, if the trade-off for some of those alleles is increased energy consumption and we look at a population of humans moving from an environment where calories are the bottleneck on how many offspring can be produced and survive, to an environment where calories are more easily available, then we might expect to see something similar to the Flynn effect.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson. Here are some not totally unrelated remarks from James Flynn.
Robert Bork has passed away
Here is an appreciation from AEI, and here is LA Times coverage, and the NYT. Here is Bork on scholar.google.com. I liked him as an antitrust analyst, less as a moralist or legal or political theorist.
“Soviet Power Plus Electrification: what is the long-run legacy of communism?”
That is a newly published paper by Wendy Carlin, Mark Schaffer, and Paul Seabright, and here is the abstract:
Two decades after the end of central planning, we investigate the extent to which the advantages bequeathed by planning in terms of high investment in physical infrastructure and human capital compensated for the costs in allocative inefficiency and weak incentives for innovation. We assemble and analyse three separate types of evidence. First, we find that countries that were initially relatively poor prior to planning benefited more, as measured by long-run GDP per capita levels, from infrastructure and human capital than they suffered from weak market incentives. For initially relatively rich countries the opposite is true. Second, using various measures of physical stocks of infrastructure and human capital we show that at the end of planning, formerly planned countries had substantially different endowments from their contemporaneous market economy counterparts. However, these differences were much more important for poor than for rich countries. Finally, we use firm-level data to measure the cost of a wide range of constraints on firm performance, and we show that after more than a decade of transition in 2002-05, poor ex-planned economies differ much more from their market counterparts, in respect to both good and bad aspects of the planning legacy, than do relatively rich ones. However, the persistent beneficial legacy effects disappeared under the pressure of strong growth in the formerly planned economies in the run-up to the global financial crisis.
This paper is a very good place to start for trying to seriously figure out what communism did and did not do. It accounts for the relatively disastrous performance of East relative to West Germany, while helping to explain why Russia is in some regards a better place to live than Mexico. It is also a very strong testament to the extreme importance of human capital and good formal education.
They also cite a recent Broadberry and Klein piece, “When and Why did Eastern European Economies Begin to Fail?, Lessons from a Czechoslovak/UK Productivity Comparison, 1921-1991,” available in an earlier form here (pdf); in this case I worry more about the quality of the statistics, plus legacy effects can sustain a formerly successful economy for some while.
Assorted links
1. Prizes for Dubai drivers who do not commit traffic infractions, hat tip Yana.
2. The expiration of the US. assault weapons ban increased violence in Mexico.
4. Illinois re-confronts the Coasian problem.
5. There is structural unemployment in Chennai too, robot fortune teller. Note the multiplicity of religions in the photo. And note that Junior Khuppanna has excellent food from the interior of TN.
Does privacy make us productive?
Here is the job market paper and abstract from Ethan Bernstein, who is on the job market from Harvard Business School:
Does Privacy Make Us Productive?
We have grown accustomed to calls for transparency. Transparency, or accurate observability, of an organization’s low-level activities, routines, behaviors, output, and performance provides the foundation for both organizational learning and operational control, and it has an untarnished reputation: rarely does one hear about any negative effects of transparency or problems stemming from too much transparency. Nonetheless, using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I introduce the notion of a transparency paradox, whereby maintaining observability of workers may counterintuitively reduce their performance by inducing those being observed to conceal their activities through codes and other costly means; conversely, creating zones of privacy may, under certain conditions, increase performance. This research suggests that careful design and implementation of zones of visual privacy within an organization is an important performance lever but remains generally unrecognized and underutilized. Paradoxically, an organization that fails to design effective zones of privacy may inadvertently undermine its capacity for transparency.
AidGrade
I am sent this information and so I am passing it along. The venture looks interesting:
AidGrade (http://www.aidgrade.org) is a new, research-oriented non-profit. It is using crowdsourcing to compile results of impact evaluations of development programs, showing the different programs’ past effectiveness. Many characteristics of each academic paper are coded up, such as where the study took place, what kinds of methods it used, characteristics of the sample, etc. AidGrade also has a “meta-analysis app” which lets users select papers by these filters and get an instant online meta-analysis of the results.
Jared Diamond on how hunter-gathers raised their children
Speculative, in my view, but I pass it along nonetheless out of general interest. The article is here, and hat tip goes to The Browser.
By the way, here is Diamond’s forthcoming book (Dec.31) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?
MRU videos on poverty and health
A new set of MRU videos is up. In these videos, we cover:
· How the poor spend their money
· How stress can create a “tax” on the poor’s decision-making, focus, and cognitive abilities
· Causes of “missing women” in developing countries and what is really the bottom line on this claim
· The economics of child labor, and what is the nature of the potential market failure when sending children to work
· How a test involving a pregnant mare’s urine illustrates the value of randomized controlled trials
· Why private health insurance is relatively rare in poorer developing countries (hint: it’s not adverse selection)
· Can cash transfers help with low birth weight?
· How community participation can affect the success of health care programs
· And finally, the ugly effects of cholera, diarrhea, worms, and HIV/AIDS in developing countries
Click here to get started on these videos, with an introduction to randomized control trials. Or browse the whole list at MRUniversity.com, click on the Course section on the right to see the menu.
Elephants engage in Mengerian indirect exchange
At the main Pondicherry temple, an elephant will bless you — by tapping its trunk on your head — if you hand it some money. Of course this is a temple elephant and it is also a Mengerian elephant. The elephant has no use for money but understands that it is a general medium of exchange. The elephant hands the money over to the temple authority and is later rewarded with food.
The elephant is not merely trading, but it is engaged in indirect exchange and thus in monetary economics.
There is in fact a sign up forbidding such Mengerian transactions, but the elephant seems not to notice it.
And yet this is not the end of the story. In many parts of Tamil Nadu, temple elephants have attained so much prosperity through Mengerian indirect exchange, and been able to consume so much leisure, that now elephant obesity is a more serious problem than elephant malnutrition.
Do cash transfers reduce domestic violence?
Here is one set of new results from Ecuador, by Hidrobo M and Fernald L.
Violence against women is a major health and human rights problem yet there is little rigorous evidence as to how to reduce it. We take advantage of the randomized roll-out of Ecuador’s cash transfer program to mothers to investigate how an exogenous increase in a woman’s income affects domestic violence. We find that the effect of a cash transfer depends on a woman’s education and on her education relative to her partner’s. Our results show that for women with greater than primary school education a cash transfer significantly decreases psychological violence from her partner. For women with primary school education or less, however, the effect of a cash transfer depends on her education relative to her partner’s. Specifically, the cash transfer significantly increases emotional violence in households where the woman’s education is equal to or more than her partner’s.
Hat tip goes to @vaughnbell, who is excellent to follow on Twitter.
Assorted links
Bits of wisdom from the FT
On the new EU banking arrangement, here is Wolfgang Münchau:
If you study the details of what was agreed last week, the substance evaporates. The common supervisory structure will affect only about 100 to 150 banks out of a total of 6,000 – those with assets of more than €30bn. The ECB can usurp supervisory powers from national regulators but the rules of engagement are not clear. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said when he left the meeting that the ECB would need to make a well-argued case. But it is not clear how this would work in practice.
If you can get through the link there is much more, all devastating. There is of course no banking union whatsoever and no set of mutual guarantees. And this:
What happened was that the OMT has killed any appetite for a fiscal union, and has turned the banking union into a phantom.
The effect of the OMT will be negative in the long run because it has provided policy makers with a false sense of security. That was not the intention but the effect.
Let’s not leave Larry Summers out of the mix:
…the richest taxpayers actually make relatively little use of deductions and credits.
It is an excellent piece on tax reform.
On the implied theology of Indian hotel butlers
As the eldest of the three-man team, Mr. Guha. 29, said, he is fluent in 22 subjects related to five-star doting, which include in-room dining, knowledge of international customs and, of course, complaint handling. His skills also extend to fixing the remote, getting spots off the carpet and something called “power dressing.” Mr. Guha says that his primary role, however, is to act as a super-efficient liaison between the guest and the hotel staff — part fixer, part personal assistant, and all yes-man.
“I would never consider a request to be bizarre; we always say it’s challenging,” Mr. Guha said. “I have always been taught that guest is god, and god cannot have a bizarre request.”
Of course I interpret this last quotation in entirely Straussian fashion (furthermore he doesn’t say it’s true, only that he has been taught as such, a classic Straussian move). Here is more, interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Apoorv Trivedi.
Assorted links
From the comments, on UID
This is concerning the forthcoming Indian attempt to register individuals through unique eye scans and implement more cash transfers:
The domestic debate in India has largely been around :
1) This is just a sop before elections, a kind of brazen legitimised bribery. 2) The welfare architecture will not simply be migrated, it will be expanded. 3) Is conditionality critical to success? There remains no clear method to establish conditionality. 4) Identification of deserving families remains the problem. Until that is solved, nothing changes. 5) This is basically a turf war between ministeries and the previous operational/financial failures of the UID program are being hidden through the hasty implementation being planned now. 6) Getting in-kind subsidised goods through regular intervals during a month is superior cash flow management for a poor family than a lump-sum cash transfer at the end of the month
All the criticisms could be partially true. But the operational costs of the welfare delivery infrastructure will surely go down. Food and fertilizer have not yet been shifted – too politically sensitive – but amazingly, fuel has been. The biggest no-distortion gain is likely to come from there – the consumption of kerosene will most likely take a massive beating. It reduced by about 90% in a pilot.
The other corollary benefit – of using an Aadhar card as a means of establishing identity and for KYC norms in banks – is also absolutely tremendous.
It is indeed a top 5 most important economic policy issue in the world. But India is generally a low-trust society and in particular this gov’t is distrusted in most policy circles. Hence the rabid skepticism all around. I tend to be a lot more optimistic than that.
The great public choice question is – will they ever manage to bring food under this? For one, the PDS system was showing signs of an organic improvement. Second, the popular imagination has always conceived of the ‘man of the house’ frittering away hard earned money on country liquor if the woman of the house is not given grains directly. Third, giving away PDS distributorships has been an effective method of giving favours to those who the dirty work for national politicans at local levels – it is perhaps the longest running and biggest scam in India.
If they actually conclude that the greater ease for a poor family will convert into more votes than the losses they might take on the previous three fronts, it would be absolutely amazing. My sense is, like most great policy decisions, this will go through simply because it’s an idea whose ‘time has come’, and we will invent post-facto justifications of how it was politically rational to go through with this.
That is from Ritwik, who started off his comment with this sentence:
Privacy is actually a non-issue for most Indians.