Further data on alcohol use amongst American youth

This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent alcohol control policies on later-life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information on state and year of birth to identify individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence and tracks the evolving impacts into middle age. We find that ZT Laws led to significant improvements in later-life health. Individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence were substantially less likely to suffer from cognitive and physical limitations in their 40s. The health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes. These patterns cannot be attributed to changes in educational attainment or marriage. Instead, we find that affected cohorts were significantly less likely to drink heavily by middle age, suggesting an important role for adolescent initiation and habit-formation in affecting long-term substance use.

Here is the article by Tatiana Abboud, Andriana Bellou, and Joshua Lewis, via tekl once again.  People, you can make things easier for the political philosophers — why should they have to weigh liberty against utility?  Just give up drinking voluntarily.

Kind of like the NBA All-Star game

In the NBA All-Star game, no one is playing defense any more, and so the score was a ridiculous 211-186, something which would never happen in a regular season game.  (Note that some of the league’s finer defenders were on the floor, though Joel Embiid, the reigning MVP and an intimidating defender, was sidelined due to injury.)  Some part of the ethic of (defensive) service has disappeared, though the players are still happy to shoot and score.  And they certainly will play defense hard when the playoffs roll around.

I’ve never seen papers on the labor supply of royal families (Cowen’s Second Law?), but I do wonder what it varies with.  It is hard to use one’s royal position to influence politics, at least in the UK.  And certainly you are not paid more if you work harder.  The King or Queen nominally owns a lot of land and art, but in practice one cannot pull income streams from those assets.  You can have a Michelangelo drawing hung in your bedroom, but that if anything is a reason not to go out in public.

You can use a royal family position to meet with lots of important people, but toward what end?  Raising money for your next start-up?  Alternatively, you can work harder to raise your stature and influence with the other royal family members (now we’re getting somewhere).  But what if that equilibrium falls apart, if only because of one or two initial defections, or in the case of the King an illness?  What external force would keep the whole struggle for royal family influence going?  Is this a case of multiple competitive equilibria, and now we (they?) are stuck in the low effort corner?  Can Lina Khan work on this?

What if they are all just pissed off with the lot of us?  In that case, what is our next move in this von Stackelberg game?  Should America reapply to the Empire with some trembling hand probability?  Would it suffice to give them Newfoundland back?  Take Northern Ireland off their hands?  Do they want us to send more or fewer tourists to London?  Should one of them marry Taylor Swift, or at least date her, to remain in the public eye?

If the NBA All-Star game is to improve, perhaps viewer censure (or mockery) for the non-cooperators is the primary way forward?

What I’ve been reading

1. Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.  I agree with many of the anti-therapy arguments in this book, but still I feel that “bad therapy” is a second-order phenomenon, not the initial cause of the growing mental health problems of America’s young people.  Furthermore, the analysis (much like Jon Haidt’s recent work) should be more tightly framed in the context of the “most interventions really don’t matter that much” results in social science at the very general level.

2. Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon.  Well-written and well-organized, this checks all the boxes for what I would want from a Fanon biography.  Here is an Adam Shatz NYT Op-Ed on Fanon.

3. Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic.  What is wrong with France, from a French-Algerian point of view.  The book is full of substance, and there aren’t enough “stand alone books on countries,” so this is a good one whether or not you agree with all of the observations.

4. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin.  “Tassting the urine was the doctors’ original test for diabetes.”  An excellent biomedical history, noting that the key breakthrough came in Toronto in the 1920s.

And the AEI Press has reprinted the 1951 Edward Banfield classic Government Project.

Rainer Zitelmann has a new book out How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity.

Lewis E. Lehrman has published his autobiography The Sum of It All.  He was one of the important figures behind the Reagan Revolution, in addition to his longstanding presence amongst New York elites.

Saturday assorted links

1. Is Somalia running on electronic money?

2. Lookism and blond privilege?

3. What do states do with fiscal windfalls?

4. Jane Austen fans oppose Jane Austen statue on the grounds that people might visit it.

5. A user has created a very useful guide to Marginal Revolution University videos.

6. Cowen’s Second Law.

7. Nvidia is now worth more than Saudi Aramco.

8. The Elon vs. OpenAI legal case.  Worth a read.

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises even though the confidence gap is expected and even though the confidence gap shouldn’t be contagious if evaluators are Bayesian. Only an intervention that facilitates Bayesian updating proves (somewhat) effective. Additional results highlight how similar findings follow even when there is no room for discriminatory motives or differences in priors because evaluators are asked about arbitrary, rather than gender-specific, groups.

That is a new piece by Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen in the new March 2024 AER.

*Dune 2*

From the get go it is far too self-consciously portentous, with nary a bit of humor to lighten it up.  It feels more like an adaptation of memes from gaming than a cinematic version of a novel, much less a living, breathing movie.  And exactly what is the moral stance we are supposed to hold on the war anyway?  I love Hans Zimmer but his score is not in the emotional service of anything meaningful.

By objective standards the visuals are quite good, but in The Age of Sora they no longer seem so creatively cutting-edge either.

The crowd mostly seemed bored, and I saw a lot of people looking at the time on their phones.  Was there any line from the movie that anyone is going to repeat?

Battery technology seems especially advanced in this world.

In terms of expressing the power of cinema, or captivating the viewer with a sense of magic, I’ll take that Robert Bresson film about the donkey any day of the week.

If you read the major reviews carefully, a lot of them feel the same way, though understandably they don’t want to crush Hollywood’s future economic prospects in the bud.

Are Economists’ Preferences Psychologists’ Personality Traits?

I propose a method for mapping psychological personality traits to economic preferences. I use factor analysis to extract information on individuals’ cognitive ability and personality and embed it within a random preference model to estimate distributions of risk and time preferences and parameters related to choice inconsistency. I explain up to 60% of variation in average risk and time preferences and individuals’ capacity to make consistent choices using factors related to cognitive ability and three of the Big Five personality traits. Differences in preferred outcomes are related to personality, whereas mistakes in decisions are related to cognitive skill.

That is from a new JPE article by Tomáš Jagelka.  Here are earlier, less gated versions of the piece.

Is a $600 a night hotel room better?

Lucy Huber and Alex T. debate that question, and they both seem pretty skeptical.  (I am surprised to see Alex’s view, I might add.)  I would not pay that much for a room, but sometimes when I am invited to events I end up staying in places that I suspect are in that price range, or higher.  I think they have a few big advantages:

1. Location, location, location.  What is a good beach hotel in Miami or Miami Beach these days?  I’m not sure, I don’t even love the beach.  But many people do — the Four Seasons room down there is going for over $1300 a night.  (It is odd to me to pick on $600 a night — in some places that is cheap!)  The best locations in London and Paris are expensive too.  If you have some business appointments, and only two days in Paris, is it so crazy to shell out such money to stay right where you want, so you can sneak into the Louvre during a break?

2. Concierge tickets.  At a very good hotel, the concierge can get you all sorts of reservations and tickets that otherwise would not be available.

3. Swimming pool.  It might be heated, or much better.  The on-site shops can be much better too, which matters for people with less flexible time budgets than mine.  Gyms I find do not vary so much in actual practical quality, though they vary a great deal in attractiveness and general mood.

4. They might have much better business and conference facilities, noting that some very expensive hotels don’t have those at all.

4. The hotel restaurants will be much better (and more expensive of course).  Much better breakfast too, and that is the meal you are least likely to eat out.

5. Some hotels are marvelous architectural landmarks.  I was very impressed by the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah when I visited.  I had only a meal and a tea there, both expensive but worth it.  Google claims “prices from $1,330,” for a room that is, but I suspect the variance of actual price is pretty high.  In any case it ain’t cheap.

6. The beds are more comfortable and the rooms are bigger.

7. The WiFi is less likely to go out, or if there is a problem you will get help more quickly.

8. In Malta only a few hotels have wonderful views.  I wonder what they cost.

So it’s not just status, you genuinely get a lot more for your money.  If you can afford it and have those priorities, that is.

I do, however, have two gripes about very expensive hotels.  First, the staff can be overly solicitous.  The worst version of this is when they want to knock on your door or call you too many times to see how things are going.  I also don’t like how they sometimes reorganize your things, in addition to cleaning up the room.  Do I really need my shoes to be put into the closet?  Second, sometimes the tech-laden shower and room lighting systems are so complicated I find them difficult to operate.  Boo hoo!  Not even a first world problem.  But in those cases perhaps the $400 a night hotel would have been better.

Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models

Forecasting future events is important for policy and decision making. In this work, we study whether language models (LMs) can forecast at the level of competitive human forecasters. Towards this goal, we develop a retrieval-augmented LM system designed to automatically search for relevant information, generate forecasts, and aggregate predictions. To facilitate our study, we collect a large dataset of questions from competitive forecasting platforms. Under a test set published after the knowledge cut-offs of our LMs, we evaluate the end-to-end performance of our system against the aggregates of human forecasts. On average, the system nears the crowd aggregate of competitive forecasters, and in some settings surpasses it. Our work suggests that using LMs to forecast the future could provide accurate predictions at scale and help to inform institutional decision making.

That is from a new paper by Danny Halawi, Fred Zhang, Chen Yueh-Han, and Jacob Steinhardt.  I hope you are all investing in that chrisma…

GPT as ethical advisor

This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is done by evaluating the perceived usefulness of the ethical advice across three distinct groups: random subjects recruited from an online platform, Wharton MBA students, and a panel of ethical decision-making experts comprising academics and clergy. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference.

That is a 2023 piece by Christian Terwiesch and Lennart Meincke, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  And here is my earlier 2019 CWT with Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah.