Conor Friedersdorf nails it

by  Tyler Cowen in

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, “What went wrong?”, they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: “Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?”

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike 4 years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise.

Here is a key sentence:

They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Read the whole thing.  They should elevate him to something too.  And as Matt Lewis said on Twitter:

Conservative media outlets promote too many voices who mislead the base AND turnoff independents. Good for ratings & clicks/bad for America.

Women, education, and earnings

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the job market paper of Miriam Gensowski, from University of Chicago:

Yet for education levels beyond the bachelor’s, higher education is associated with slightly lower earnings through marriage. The more highly educated women are less likely to be married, and thus lose the opportunity to bolster their own earnings with their husband’s. In the case of women with a Masters degree, the negative effect is clearly related to lower probability of being married – as Fig. 8 shows. A woman’s propensity to be married is much lower for women with a master’s as opposed to a bachelor’s degree or high school diploma. Most interestingly, the exceptional women who obtained a Doctorate degree did not suffer significantly in the marriage market, as one might have anticipated. Even though they were significantly less likely to be married, when they were married their husbands had higher-than-average earnings, so overall the impact of their high education on the returns to marriage are not statistically different from zero.

Of course there is a tricky causal issue.  If you truly feel like getting a Masters degree, that may be enough to indicate your marriage prospects are lower and refraining from the Masters may not much help.  We don’t know.

The paper is interesting throughout.  For instance it finds a high return to education even after adjusting for IQ and personality traits.  It ascertains which male personality types benefit the most from education.  It also finds that the personality trait of neuroticism increases male earnings if correlated with a Masters or Ph.d but not otherwise.

From Scott Sumner

by  Tyler Cowen in

In this election Romney destroyed Obama in West Virginia, winning by around 27 points, his biggest margin east of the Mississippi.  A swing of 42 points from the 1996 election.  And Romney didn’t just win West Virginia, he swept the entire Appalachian region.  Meanwhile Obama won Virginia for the second time in a row.

West Virginia symbolizes the future of the GOP, while Virginia symbolizes the future of the Democratic Party.  Which party has a brighter future?

PS.  Thank God for the voters of Colorado.  For the first time in American history a state voted to legalize marijuana, and not just “for medicinal purposes.”  Maybe I should retire there, instead of California.

The link is here.  Scott and I are both market liberals, and we both basically know that the GOP needs to start all over again.  That process could start with a recognition of demographics.  I don’t however expect our point of view to have any more influence in the short run.  Someone should elevate Reihan Salaam to something or other, as soon as possible.

GMOs won handily in California, a victory for science and common sense.  In how many races last night did “demonization” win?  Bad night for the demons, or good night perhaps, depending on your point of view.  Like Gideon Rachmann, I still think Romney would have been fine as a President, but the broader array of interest groups, to support the real Romney, comes from another time and place.  In any case America still has the most enviable set of problems in the world and let’s build on that.  Now that the election is over, maybe the quality of discourse in the blogosphere will rise a bit too.

I am looking forward to the year to come, and as always thank you all for reading.

Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle of the paper is Evidence from a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment and the authors are Andreas Leibbrandt and John List.  Here is the abstract:

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.

An ungated copy I do not see, does anyone?

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Is the romantic view more true for the weird?

2. Elliott Carter passes away at 103; here is my favorite Carter CD.

3. Miles Kimball refines the “abolish currency” proposal.

4. More on the GMU expansion to Songdo, South Korea.

5. How the Japanese cut cucumbers (video).

6. Gas for sex price controls don’t work markets in everything.

7. A loyal MR reader writes to me: “You may have seen he updated his profile: This very OKCupid profile has been linked from Marginal Revolution (one of the most popular econblogs). I swear I am not making this up.”  Link here.

8. Will top economists be swapped in Catalonia?  Here is the latest rumor (in Spanish).

*The Redistribution Recession*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the new book by Casey Mulligan, and the subtitle is How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.  To get to the point, it’s quite good.

Maybe you’ve already read some of the other blogosphere reviews, a few of which are cited here.  Atrios calls him “the worst person in the world,” without showing he has read the book, and there is further invective from other sources.  The critics all misrepresent his arguments, and/or respond to the weakest rather than the strongest version of his arguments (“soup kitchens caused the Great Depression”).  They are not criticizing him from the vantage point of science.

The contributions of this book include:

1. Using data from seasonal cycles and seasonal changes to better understand supply-demand relationships during the Great Recession.  These sections are excellent and highly original.

2. Showing that the normal laws of supply and demand still held and that we were not living in anything resembling wrong-ways sloping AD curves.

3. Calculation of various implicit marginal tax rates during the Great Recession and showing their relevance for labor supply decisions.

By no means am I fully on board.  I believe he specifies the aggregate demand view incorrectly and significantly under-measures the impact of aggregate demand.  I don’t think the AD view has to imply sticky prices or completely inelastic labor demand, for instance, although one version of that view does (p.208).  I see Mulligan as underestimating labor supply composition effects and overestimating productivity growth during the period under consideration.  There are other points one can complain about and overall he ends up overstating the size of the effects he is measuring.

Still, there are only a few readable books which integrate actual empirical research with a look at the Great Recession.  This is by no means the whole story, but this is a book which anyone seriously interested in the topic should read.  People still will be consulting it after the invective against it has long since died away.

Markets in everything, gifts for science geeks edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one example:

9. Klein Bottle

If you want to give a mathematician something to try to wrap their head around, a Klein bottle is a good place to start. A real Klein bottle is an object with no inside and no outside that can only exist in four dimensions. These glass models exist in three, which means that unlike the real thing, they can actually hold liquid.

The difference between the models and the real thing is that by adding an extra dimension, you can make it so that the neck of the bottle doesn’t actually intersect the side of the bottle. Take a couple aspirin and try to picture that in your head.

Price: $35

There are many others here.  For the pointer I thank @induction_econ.

The Chronicle of Higher Education covers MRU

by  Tyler Cowen in

Mr. Cowen hopes the site will become a library of explanatory videos about economics, not all of which will be organized into courses. He pictures a day when professors routinely make videos to explain their latest research findings to supplement their scholarly papers. “In less than five years most papers of every note will have a five-minute video,” Mr. Cowen predicts. “People can view it, rewind, rewatch, relisten. You can show it to classes.”

Here is more (listed as gated, but it wasn’t for me).

And here is good additional Washington Post coverage.

Project Blue Sky, from Pearson

by  Tyler Cowen in

Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.

The site is here, press coverage is here.

How not to regulate driverless cars

by  Tyler Cowen in

One issue is that the laws are requiring licensed drivers to sit in the driving seat, eliminating one of the main advantages of the technology.  Yet there are more problems.  From Marc Scribner:

Bizarrely, Cheh’s bill also requires that autonomous vehicles operate only on alternative fuels.

And:

Another flaw in Cheh’s bill is that it would impose a special tax on drivers of autonomous vehicles. Instead of paying fuel taxes, “Owners of autonomous vehicles shall pay a vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) fee of 1.875 cents per mile.” Administrative details aside, a VMT tax would require drivers to install a recording device to be periodically audited by the government. There may be good reasons to replace fuel taxes with VMT fees, but greatly restricting the use of a potentially revolutionary new technology by singling it out for a new tax system would be a mistake.

Cheh is on the D.C. City Council.

What would it look like if we were to rewrite all of the regulations for “drivered” cars today?

The myth of the rational donor? (model this)

by  Tyler Cowen in

At first glance this may sound a little whacky, but perhaps the deeper question is why more donors are not like this?:

“I’m all mixed up between being a conservative and a liberal,” said Kurt Schoeneman, a grape grower from Northern California, who added that some of his friends thought he was “senile.” He had found himself seized by waves of enthusiasm, Mr. Schoeneman said — first for one candidate and then for the other.

“Some of these people, they just loathe Obama, and they’ll write something really nasty about him,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has given checks to both candidates, most recently $100 to Mr. Romney in June and $100 to Mr. Obama in July. “And then something else will happen, and I’ll go give Romney some money.”

Charles Y. Chen, a salesman in Virginia, gave Mr. Romney $100 on the day of his convention speech in late August. But in September, Mr. Chen donated to Mr. Obama every few days, $50 here, $55 there. Then he switched again, giving Mr. Romney $50.

“I think the Republicans have better ideas on the economy and the Democrats have better ideas on social issues, immigrationand social justice,” Mr. Chen said in an interview. “Just like anything, both have something that they do great and something that they need to improve.”

Gretchen Davidson, a homemaker in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb, said she had gone to several events to hear different ideas and arguments. She gave $500 to Mr. Romney in early August and $1,500 to Mr. Obama in late September.

“You have friends that throw parties on each side, and honestly, I am someone in the middle that didn’t really know which way I was going,” Ms. Davidson said. “You try to sort of see what people are so excited about.”

These are not lobbyists who need to hedge their giving:

Mr. Bagchi gave $100 each to both candidates on Sept. 8, he said, because “they are doing good work for the country. And I want them to come together. So for that reason, I gave to them both.”

Mr. Bagchi said that while he usually gave equally to both candidates, he had recently responded to a particularly personal appeal from the Obama campaign.

“I have given a little more to Barack Obama because he and Michelle were celebrating their anniversary,” he said. “But on balance it was very equal.”

Very good sentences

by  Tyler Cowen in

Call this hyperscience, a claim to scientific status that conflates the PR of science with its rather more messy, complicated and less than ideal everyday realities and that takes the PR far more seriously than do its stuck-in-the-mud orthodox opponents. Beware of hyperscience. It can be a sign that something isn’t kosher.  A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

That is from Shapin on Velikovsky, with the link from The Browser.