Marginal Returns to Public Universities

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jack Mountjoy, forthcoming in the QJE:

This paper studies the returns to enrolling in American public universities by comparing the long-term outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of all American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment. The typical marginally admitted student gains an additional year of education in the four-year sector, becomes 12 percentage points more likely to ever earn a bachelor’s degree, and eventually earns 8 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart. Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 26 percent for the marginal students themselves, 16 percent for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 7 percent for the government budget. Earnings gains are similar across admitting institutions of varying selectivity, but smaller for students from low-income families, who spend more time enrolled but complete fewer degrees and major in less lucrative fields. Finally, I develop a method to separately identify effects for students on the extensive margin of attending any university versus those on the margin of attending a more selective one, revealing larger effects on the extensive margin.

That is one simple way of seeing why I do not think of higher education as largely signaling, noting that signaling theories might give you a higher wage up front but not over extended periods of time, as worker quality becomes known.

Wyoming has as many Senators as escalators?

by  Tyler Cowen in

There used to be a third set of escalators, in the Cheyenne JCPenney building, but it was lost when JCPenney moved to the Frontier Mall and the escalator was removed when the old building was renovated…

What’s more interesting is the ages of Wyoming’s escalators…

In Casper, the First Interstate Bank building was built in 1958, while the Hilltop Bank opened in December 1979. The escalators were part of the original design of both buildings.

It’s not just that there are only two escalators in Wyoming, there hasn’t been a new one in 44 years.

Here is the article, but maybe there are some very new ones?  Via Tommy Smokes.

Year end CWT retrospective episode with Jeff Holmes

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  In this episode we look back on the year in CWT podcast space, excerpt:

HOLMES: Yes. All right. Next question from Jumfrey Tuckins: “When was the last time you had uncontrollable laughter, and what caused it?”

COWEN: Probably the correct answer is never. Literally never in my life.

HOLMES: Aw, Tyler.

COWEN: Why should it be uncontrollable? Things just aren’t that funny. How good can something taste? Take the best sushi I’ve ever had, which was quite good. Things can taste a bit better than that, but not much. Funniness is a maximum. It does not bring me to uncontrollable laughter. That’s just the equilibrium.

HOLMES: This is consistent with how you presented yourself before, where you’ve talked about how you feel like you don’t have the extreme highs and lows of other people. You’re much more of a steady middle kind of person. Either displeasureor pleasure, you don’t get the extremes as much.

COWEN: Isn’t uncontrollable laughter in some ways a kind of displeasure? I don’t know, since I’ve never had it.

HOLMES: In the sense that sometimes, if you get tickled, sometimes you’re laughing, but you want it to stop.

COWEN: Right.

HOLMES: No, I think what that’s getting at is those times where something has just so metaphorically tickled you that you — usually, it’s with another person.

COWEN: Not going to happen. Sorry.

HOLMES: That makes me a little sad.

COWEN: Maybe just you’re not funny enough. Have you considered that?

HOLMES: Oh, shots fired, Tyler. Oh, my gosh.

COWEN: I don’t mean you, but you, collective humanity.

HOLMES: Okay, collective you. All right.

COWEN: I heard Louis C.K. live, which is the funniest show I’ve ever heard. I laughed quite a bit, but I was not close to uncontrollably laughing.

HOLMES: Do you have any theory as to why that is? When that happens, again, there’s something that you and another person are experiencing together, that you’ve realized you’ve had the same thought or same experience, and it’s just —

COWEN: I suspect it’s heritable, with apologies to Alison Gopnik.

Rrecommended, and of course this year there will be much more to come.

Which published results can you trust?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, starting with the recent Oliver Sacks debacle.  Here is one excerpt:

…as my George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan suggests, trust literatures, not individual research studies. By a “literature,” I mean the collective work conducted by many researchers, acting in decentralized fashion, to publish and circulate the results that will best persuade other researchers.

Second, treat research articles, or their popular media coverage, as possibilities to put in your mental toolbox rather than settled truths.

Literatures are more trustworthy than individual articles because they reflect a collective effort to establish reliable results. A supposed correlation gets refereed and scrutinized dozens of times, or maybe hundreds of times. If you have a new hypothesis, other researchers have a chance to make their names by knocking it down. There are also more eyes watching, in case real-world experience delivers results at odds with what a particular theory had been postulating. Or maybe there was a simple mistake in writing the computer code behind the paper’s result. Literatures contain a variety of different ways to come to a particular conclusion, and you can see whether they end up pointing in the same general direction.

You may not have time or the background to master a complete literature on a research topic, but these days you can send well-written prompts to GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, or Gemini 3.0 for some very good summaries of any literature you want. Furthermore, you can cross-check across these different AI models for additional reliability.

This is useful advice which is rarely heeded, and learning how to interpret a research literature is one of the most important skills in intellectual life.

What should I ask Kim Bowes?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is Wikipedia:

Kimberly D. Bowes (born 1970) is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017.[2] She is the author of three monographs…

While she is continuously focused on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman and later Roman worlds, her research interests have shifted from late antiquity and the archeologies of religion and elite space to historical economies with a distinct focus on poverty and the lived experience of the poor. Her forthcoming study on Roman peasants in Italy reflects a greater attention to non-elites in the studies of Roman archaeology and economic history and a shift in  her methodology, integrating archaeological and scientific data, anthropological theory and  historical economics become.

I am a big fan of her new book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent.  So what should I ask her?

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Does AI weaken the Lucas critique? And a comment from Benjamin Manning.

2. “The economist view sees the comp sci position as a category error about knowledge is – not a claim about future capability levels but about the structure of the problem.”

3. Heritage Foundation is falling apart.

4. Kalshi Research, new arm of the company devoted to research on prediction markets.

5. Travel notes from a visit to Mecca.

6. Palmer Luckey on UAPs.  I am not persuaded by his explanation, but clearly he (unlike most of you) has seen the data.

7. Russian billionaire has at least one hundred children (WSJ).

8. Jason Furman on the new economic data (NYT).

9. New Substack on abundance and growth.

Muscat, Oman travel notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Oman feels more relaxed than much of the Middle East or Gulf, and vistas in Muscat can include the sea, white alabaster buildings, mountains in the backdrop, and some older castles.

There are plenty of foreigners around, but unlike in much of the Gulf most of the people you see are natives not migrants.  English is spoken widely, and is present on most of the signs and menus.  Women wear headscarves, but they are not usually veiled.  The vibes are friendly and everything feels extremely safe.

Muscat is not quite “the linear city,” but most activity is located on or near one main road which stretches east-west.  There is no center of town, and you find yourself going back and forth on that road multiple times a day.  The plus is that you see the water and the mountains often.  Nonetheless there is a monotony to getting around, and much of the town does not feel walkable.

Frequently you will see a poster of the current Sultan, next to a photograph of the previous Sultan, who ruled for fifty years.  Does this dual presentation enhance or limit the credibility of the current Sultan?  Was it the intent of the current Sultan, or was he somehow locked into that presentation by the interest groups and supporters of the previous Sultan?

The National Museum is very good, and shows that Oman historically, along with Yemen, has held the role of a great civilization. In fact, Oman drove out the Portuguese and then ruled Zanzibar from 1698 to 1856.  That explains why the island has so many Arabic doors and motifs.

Per capita income, PPP-adjusted, clocks in at about 45k, but distribution is uneven and the country does not feel that wealthy.  I cannot find a single number for median income, but I suspect it would underrate actual living standards.  Even deep into the countryside you will find high-quality homes and roads, indicating that public funds are spent with some efficiency, at least relative to some comparison countries.

Misfat al Abriyeen is a small village, largely vertical, where they still use water and irrigation systems from at least two thousand years ago. 

Nizwa is a town of about 80,000, about two hours from Muscat, with a much older and more traditional souk.

When driving around Oman, the Peter Gabriel soundtrack “Passion,” from The Last Temptation of Christ, is effective.

For food, try Persian at Shandiz or grilled fish at Turkish House, or Yemeni or Afghan offerings.  There are several restaurants with “Omani food,” but the problem is that they are authentic, not that they are insufficiently authentic.  You should try some, much of it is not bad but it is also not the best food in town.  At one place they flat outright refused to bring me the dried, salted shark dish.  Nor did I wish to order camel meat, which is supposed to be gamey.  The soups with meat and barley are good, but basically for Omani food you wish to keep returning to the grilled fish.

Overall, Oman is an underrated travel destination.  It is exotic and beautiful and comfortable, all at the same time.  The further reaches of the country are renowned for hiking and birdwatching, but perhaps two days in Oman and a one day trip to the countryside is the optimal dose here?

For U.S: and many other citizens, it is easy to enter the country without a visa.

*38 Londres Street*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia.  This book made many “best of the year” lists, but at first I resisted buying and reading it, fearing it was just more mood affiliation on Pinochet.  In reality it is highly substantive, not just deserving of a place on my best non-fiction of the year list, but likely in the top ten of that list.  It has the narrative sweep of a good novel, and is profound on the following topics: the nature of political evil, the banality of evil in the Arendt sense, why Pinochet remains such an emotional issue in Chile, how former Nazis can slip through the cracks, what former Nazis do for their next act, what kind of autocracy Chile gives rise to and why, how international law operates when faced with tricky extradition problems, and much more.

So recommended, and added to my own list.  And yes I did buy another book by Philippe Sands, the acid test of whether I really liked something.

Harvey Mansfield on Rousseau and the dilemma of our age

by  Tyler Cowen in

Thus, it would seem that Rousseau compels us to choose either science or morality.  If we choose morality ,we must enforce ignorance by maintaining political control over the sciences and the arts.  We must believe in something like creationism because it says that nature was created for our good, and not believe in technology that exploits nature by exposing its disadvantages and hardships, such as cloning human beings to avoid the troubles of natural birth.  But if we choose science, we run the risk of an explosion as human morals worsen as human power grows…There is hardly any issue today more fateful than the questison of whether modern science is the friend of politics and morality, as Hume says, or the enemy, as Rousseau says.

That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims.  There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914.

2. Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop.  A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.

3. Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It.  Dube notes his main theme is that employers have discretion in setting the real wage. A good overview of his work in labor economics.  I would stress that if you think “tight labor markets” are good for workers, you should be obsessed with doing lots to favor capital.

4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History.  A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.  Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.

For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future.

There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design.

Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.

You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians.