Category: Data Source

Long-term relatedness and income distribution

by  Tyler Cowen in

This article explores the role of long-term relatedness between countries, captured by an index of genetic distance, in driving worldwide differences in income inequality. The main hypothesis is that genetic distance gives rise to barriers to the international diffusion of redistributive policies and measures, and institutions, leading to greater income disparities. Using cross-country data, I consistently find that countries that are genetically distant to Denmark—the world frontier of egalitarian income distribution—tend to suffer from higher inequality, ceteris paribus. I also demonstrate that genetic distance is associated with greater bilateral differences in income inequality between countries. Employing data from the European Social Survey, I document that second-generation Europeans descending from countries with greater genetic distance to Denmark are less likely to exhibit positive attitudes towards equality. Further evidence suggests that effective fiscal redistribution is a key mechanism through which genetic distance to Denmark transmits to greater income inequality.

That is from a newly published paper by Trung V Vu.

Vaccination sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

None of the incidences of myopericarditis pooled in the current study were higher than those after smallpox vaccinations and non-COVID-19 vaccinations, and all of them were significantly lower than those in adolescents aged 12–17 years after COVID-19 infection.

I would gladly see a refereed symposium on attempts to overturn this result.  Individuals with rejected papers could publish those rejected works on a separate website, with the accompanying referee reports of course.  One side will try to tell you that “the elites” are against debate.  It is sooner the case that the level of rigor in a useful debate should correspond to the level of rigor a subject matter requires.

Via Megan McArdle.

Update on the War on Poverty

by  Tyler Cowen in

We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty, as President Johnson defined it, which established a 20 percent baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 10.5 percent in 2019, our absolute Full-income Poverty Measure, which uses a fuller income measures and updates poverty thresholds only for inflation, fell from 19.5 to 1.6 percent. However, we also show that relative poverty reductions have been modest.  Additionally, government dependence increased over this time, with the share of working-age adults receiving under half their income from market sources more than doubling.

That is from a newly published Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore piece in the JPE.  Here are ungated versions of the paper.

Black Magic Technology

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here’s an example. You know those ubiquitous little LEDs on devices like speakers, card readers, microphones etc. that simply indicate that the device has power? The authors show that these LEDs can bleed information about power consumption that can be used to deduce when and for how long a computer is computing cryptographic keys and that can be used to deduce the keys. For example, using a “hijacked” security camera the author’s were able to film the power LED on a smart card reader from 16 meters away and from that able to deduce the keys. Paper here. Video below.

Now some people will say, well all you have to do is make sure the LEDs are properly insulated from the main power and adjust the cryptographic algorithms to not take some shortcuts and your systems will be safe. Uh huh.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a more realistic perspective. Although this is not about AI per se, he notes this is a good example of the kind of thing that a superintelligence could do that would not have been predicted in advance and would seem to require magical powers.

A mild return for Danish phrenology?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new study in Denmark used machine learning techniques on photographs of faces of Danish politicians to predict whether their political ideology is left- or right-wing. The accuracy of predictions was 61%. Faces of right-wing politicians were more likely to have happy and less likely to have neutral facial expressions. Women with attractive faces were more likely to be right-wing, while women whose faces showed contempt were more likely to be left-wing. The study was published in Scientific Reports.

Of course such results rarely replicate across different countries, including the United States.  Here is the full link, via CB.

SHRUG 2 for India is out

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the home page.

GDP and temperature shocks

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is perhaps a not entirely welcome result:

We use local projections to estimate the cross-country distribution of real GDP per capita growth impulse responses to global and idiosyncratic temperature shocks. Negative growth responses to global temperature at longer horizons are found for all Group of Seven countries while positive responses are found for seven of the nine poorest countries. Global temperature shocks have negative effects on growth for around half of the countries and seemingly anomalous positive effects for the other half. After controlling for latitude and average temperature, positive growth responses to global temperature shocks are more likely for countries that are poorer, have experienced slower growth, are less educated (lower high school attainment), less open to trade, and more authoritarian.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Kimberly A. Berg, Chadwick C. Curtis, and Nelson Mark.  I would rather see this contested than ignored, but perhaps I am expecting the latter?

Virtue signaling on Twitter

by  Tyler Cowen in

We study whether tweets about racial justice predict the offline behaviors of nearly 20,000 US academics. In an audit study, academics that tweet about racial justice discriminate more in favor of minority students than academics that do not tweet about racial justice. Racial justice tweets are more predictive of race-related political tweets than political contributions, suggesting that visibility increases informativeness. In contrast, the informativeness of tweets is lower during periods of high social pressure to tweet about racial justice. Finally, most graduate students mispredict informativeness, more often underestimating than overestimating, reducing the welfare benefits of social media.

Here is the paper by Deivis Angeli, Matt Lowe, and The Village Team.

Kenya facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

The total fertility rate for 2019 was 3.4 births which marks a drop of about one birth from 4.8 births in 2009.

But here is the more interesting part:

The gap between the highest and lowest TFR continues to increase – which is lowest at 2.5 children in Nairobi and 8 children per woman in Mandera County.

Here is the full story.  Here is Wikipedia on Mandera County.  Here is another story: “The risk of dying in childbirth in Mandera, Kenya’s forgotten north-eastern region, is higher than anywhere else in the world.”

The Poop Detective

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Wastewater surveillance is one of the few tools that we can use to prepare for a pandemic and I am pleased that it is expanding rapidly in the US and around the world. Every major sewage plant in the world should be doing wasterwater surveillance and presenting the results to the world on a dashboard.

I was surprised to learn that wastewater surveillance is now so good it can potentially lock-on to viral RNA from a single infected individual. An individual with an infection from a common SARS-COV-2 lineage like omicron won’t jump out of the data but there are rare, “cryptic lineages” which may be unique to a single individual.

Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of a recent paper on cryptic lineages in wastewater, believes he has evidence for a single infected individual who likely lives in Columbus, Ohio but works in the nearby town, Washington Court House. In other words, they poop mostly at home but sometimes at work.

Twitter: First, the signal is almost always present in the Columbus Southerly sewershed, but not always at Washington Court House. I assume this means the person lives in Columbus and travels to WCH, presumably for work. Second, the signal is increasing with time. Washington Court House had its highest SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels ever in May, and the most recent sequencing indicates that this is entirely the cryptic lineage.

Moreover the person is likely quite sick:

Third, I’ve tried to calculate how much viral material this person is shedding. (Multiply the cryptic concentration by the total volume). I’ve done this several times and gotten pretty consistent results. They are shedding a few trillion (10^12) genomes/day. What does this tell us? How much tissue is infected? It’s impossible to know for sure. Chronically infected cells probably don’t release much, but acutely infected cells produce a lot more. I gather a typical output in the lab is around 1,000 virus per infected cell. If we assume we are getting 1,000 viral particles per infected cell, that would mean there are at least a billion infected cells. The density of monolayer epithelial cells is around 300k cells/sq cm. A billion cells would represent around 3.5 square feet of epithelial tissue! Don’t get me wrong. The intestines have a huge surface are and 3 square feet is a tiny fraction of the total. But it’s still a massive infection, no matter how you slice it….My point is that this patient is not well, even if they don’t know it, but they could probably be helped if they were identified.

…If you are the individual, let me know. There is a lab in the US that can do ‘official’ tests for COVID in stool, and there are doctors that I can put you in contact with that would like to try to help you.

So if you poop in Columbus Ohio and occasionally in Washington Court House and have been having some GI issues contact Marc!

Hat tip to Marc for using the twitter handle @SolidEvidence.

Evidence from Italy’s ChatGPT Ban

by  Tyler Cowen in

We analyse the effects of the ban of ChatGPT, a generative pre-trained transformer chatbot, on individual productivity. We first compile data on the hourly coding output of over 8,000 professional GitHub users in Italy and other European countries to analyse the impact of the ban on individual productivity. Combining the high-frequency data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the output of Italian developers decreased by around 50% in the first two business days after the ban and recovered after that. Applying a synthetic control approach to daily Google search and Tor usage data shows that the ban led to a significant increase in the use of censorship bypassing tools. Our findings show that users swiftly implement strategies to bypass Internet restrictions but this adaptation activity creates short-term disruptions and hampers productivity.

That is from a recent paper by David Kreitmeir and Paul A. Raschky.  Via Pradyumna Shyama Prasad.

How the Russian Revolution boosted Marx’s influence

by  Tyler Cowen in

Karl Marx’s high academic stature outside of economics diverges sharply from his peripheral influence within the discipline, particularly after nineteenth-century developments rendered the labor theory of value obsolete. We hypothesize that the 1917 Russian Revolution is responsible for elevating Marx into the academic mainstream. Using the synthetic control method, we construct a counterfactual for Marx’s citation patterns in Google Ngram data. This allows us to predict how often Marx would have been cited if the Russian Revolution had not happened. We find a significant treatment effect, meaning that Marx’s academic stature today owes a substantial debt to political happenstance.

That is from a new JPE paper by Philip W. Magness and Michael Makovi.  Here are ungated versions of the paper.

The value of informal mentoring

by  Tyler Cowen in

We document a largely unrecognized pathway through which schools promote human capital development – by fostering informal mentoring relationships between students and teachers, counselors, and coaches. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we explore the nature and consequences of natural mentoring relationships by leveraging within-student variation in the timing of mentorship formation as well as differences in exposure among pairs of twins, best friends, and romantic partners. Results across difference-in-differences and pair fixed-effect specifications show consistent and meaningful positive effects on student attainment, with a conservative estimate of a 9.4 percentage point increase in college attendance. Effects are largest for students of lower socioeconomic status and robust to controls for individual characteristics and bounding exercises for selection on unobservables. Smaller class sizes and a school culture where students have a strong sense of belonging are important school-level predictors of having a K-12 natural mentor.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves, and Noelle M. Hurd.

Are We Running Out of Exhaustible Resources?

by  Tyler Cowen in

No, or so says a new paper by Felix Pretis, Cameron Hepburn, Alex Pfeiffer, and Alexander Teytelboym:

Mineral and material commodities are essential inputs to economic production, but there have been periodical concerns about mineral scarcity. However, there has been no systematic recent study that has determined whether mineral commodities have become scarcer over the longer run. Here we provide systematic evidence that worldwide, near-term exhaustion of economically valuable commodities is unlikely. We construct and analyse a new database of 48 economically-relevant commodities from 1957–2015, including estimates of worldwide production, reserves and reserve bases, prices, and production, using publicly-available data and further data requested from the United States Geological Survey. We explore trends in prices, reserves-to-production ratios, and production itself, on a commodity-by-commodity basis, using econometric techniques allowing for structural changes, and further estimate overall trends robust to outlying observations. For almost all commodities, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no trend in prices and exhaustion, while production has increased. Price signals appear to have guided consumption and provided incentives for innovation and substitution. Concerns about mineral depletion therefore appear to be less important than concerns about externalities, such as pollution and conflict, and ecosystem services (e.g. climate stability) where price signals are often absent.

Julian Simon lives…

Via Jason Crawford.

Do tax increases tame inflation?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new AER article by James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtax, and Paolo Surico.  After an extensive data analysis, they arrive at this conclusion:

Based on US federal tax changes post–World War II, our answer is “yes” if personal income taxes are increased but “no” if corporate income taxes are increased.

Of course this is consistent with the view — no longer so commonly admitted — that higher corporate tax rates do have negative supply side effects.  There is an ungated version of the paper here.