Category: Data Source
Are cultural products getting longer?
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…
I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…
I calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.
Movies are getting longer too. Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us. I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up? In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:
- The dopamine boosts from endlessly scrolling short videos eventually produce anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. (I write about that here.) So even addicts grow dissatisfied with their addiction.
- More and more people are now rebelling against these manipulative digital interfaces. A sizable portion of the population simply refuses to become addicts. This has always been true with booze and drugs, and it’s now true with digital entertainment.
- Short form clickbait gets digested easily, and spreads quickly. But this doesn’t generate longterm loyalty. Short form is like a meme—spreading easily and then disappearing. Whereas long immersive experiences reach deeper into the hearts and souls of the audience. This creates a much stronger bond than any 15-second video or melody will ever match.
An important piece and useful corrective.
The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of city councils. I also estimate RCV’s effects on these outcomes relative to public opinion — in other words, whether RCV narrows the gap between outcomes and mass policy preferences. This article finds no empirical support for the proposition that RCV changed fiscal outcomes or the ideological composition of city councils — both on absolute terms and relative to mass opinion. Furthermore, the roll-call based ideal points of legislators serving before and after RCV did not change, and the relationship between city district opinion and city legislator ideology is unchanged post-adoption. Taken as a whole, this article does not find evidence that RCV has produced the types of transformative political effects that reformers have postulated.
Here is the full paper by Arjun Vishwanath. Source.
How do declining fertility and climate change interact?
There are lots of assumptions behind these results, but still it is good to see someone working through some scenarios:
A smaller human population would emit less carbon, other things equal, but how large is the effect? Here we test the widely-shared view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will be reductions in long-run temperatures. We contrast a baseline of global depopulation (the most likely future) with a counterfactual in which the world population continues to grow for two more centuries. Although the two population paths differ by billions of people in 2200, we find that the implied temperatures would differ by less than one tenth of a degree C—far too small to impact climate goals. Timing drives the result. Depopulation is coming within the 21st century, but not for decades. Fertility shifts take generations to meaningfully change population size, by which time per capita emissions are projected to have significantly declined, even under pessimistic policy assumptions. Meanwhile, a smaller population slows the non-rival innovation that powers improvements in long-run productivity and living standards, an effect we estimate to be quantitatively important. Once the possibility of large-scale net-negative emissions is accounted for, even the sign of the population-temperature link becomes ambiguous. Humans cause greenhouse gas emissions, but human depopulation, starting in a few decades, will not meet today’s climate challenges.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The antitrust case against U.S. higher education
Thirty prestigious independent American institutions of higher education were at some time members of the 568 higher education group (often labeled a cartel). Seventeen of them were sued by the U.S. Government and representative students who alleged that their meetings and deliberations resulted in collusion that caused students to pay higher prices. Twelve of the seventeen institutions subsequently settled their cases and by 2024 collectively had paid $284 million to do so. However, an inspection of these institutions’ pricing reveals that the median 568 Group institution lowered its average real net annual cost to its undergraduate students by 19.07% between 2009 and 2022. Further, this reduction was 1.70 times larger than the average real price reduction granted during the same period by the median institution among a sample of 475 other accredited, non-profit, independent four-year institutions and 11.63 times larger than the median price reduction granted by 78 public flagship state universities. The 568 group’s real price reductions stretched across every one of the five household income categories commonly used by the Government. Thus, there is little empirical support for the allegations that the Government has levied against the representative 568 group institution, and thus multiple members of this group appear to have paid unmerited fines to the Government to settle claims against them.
That is from a new paper by James V. Koch. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Who is using AI and how much?
Wet rain a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024) by 200,000 developers and track how fast—and where—these tools take hold. By December 2024, AI wrote an estimated 30.1% of Python functions from U.S. contributors, versus 24.3% in Germany, 23.2%in France, 21.6% in India,15.4% in Russia and 11.7% in China. Newer GitHub users use AI more than veterans, while male and female developers adopt at similar rates. Within-developer fixed-effects models show that moving to 30% AI use raises quarterly commits by 2.4%. Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion, rising to $64–$96 billion if we assume higher estimates of productivity effects reported by randomized control trials. Moreover, generative AI prompts learning and innovation, leading to increases in the number of new libraries and library combinations that programmers use. In short, AI usage is already widespread but highly uneven, and the intensity of use, not only access, drives measurable gains in output and exploration.
That is from a new research paper by Simone Daniotti, Johannes Wachs, Xiangnan Feng and Frank Neffke. I am surprised that China does not do better.
Markets are forward-looking
LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.)
Deutsche Bank analysts drew a similar conclusion: “Geopolitics doesn’t normally matter much for long-run market performance,” Henry Allen, a markets strategist, wrote in a note on Monday.
Here is the NYT piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The value of good management, and also talent allocation
Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers as the top 30% by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. Seven years after the manager transition, workers earn 30% more and perform better on objective performance measures. In terms of aggregate firm productivity, doubling the share of good managers would increase output per worker by 61% at the establishment level. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.
That is from a recent paper by Virginia Minni. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Japan facts of the day
Japan must stop being overly optimistic about how quickly its population is going to shrink, economists have warned, as births plunge at a pace far ahead of core estimates.
Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline.
The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime — to a record low of 1.15…
The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births — which does not include children born to non-Japanese people — dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.
Here is more from Leo Lewis at the FT.
Equity sentences to ponder
Relative to prior observational methods, the estimates suggest a substantial role for amenity substitution in explaining the gender pay gap—accounting for roughly two-thirds of the observed gap—and little role for amenities in explaining inequalities by race or parent background.
That is from a new paper by Alex Bell, via Daniel.
Racial Disparities in Mortality by Sex, Age, and Cause of Death
Racial differences in mortality are large, persistent and likely caused, at least in part, by racism. While the causal pathways linking racism to mortality are conceptually well defined, empirical evidence to support causal claims related to its effect on health is incomplete. In this study, we provide a unique set of facts about racial disparities in mortality that all theories of racism and health need to confront to be convincing. We measure racial disparities in mortality between ages 40 and 80 for both males and females and for several causes of death and, measure how those disparities change with age. Estimates indicate that racial disparities in mortality grow with age but at a decreasing rate. Estimates also indicate that the source of racial disparities in mortality changes with age, sex and cause of death. For men in their fifties, racial disparities in mortality are primarily caused by disparities in deaths due to external causes. For both sexes, it is racial disparities in death from healthcare amenable causes that are the main cause of racial disparities in mortality between ages 55 and 75. Notably, racial disparities in cancer and other causes of death are relatively small even though these causes of death account for over half of all deaths. Adjusting for economic resources and health largely eliminate racial disparities in mortality at all ages and the mediating effect of these factors grows with age. The pattern of results suggests that, to the extent that racism influences health, it is primarily through racism’s effect on investments to treat healthcare amenable diseases that cause racial disparities in mortality.
In other words, much of the discourse on this topic is quite off. That is from a new NBER working paper by Robert Kaestner, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, and Cuiping Schiman.
Adam Tooze on European military spending
Now, you might think that the US figure is inflated by the notorious bloat within the American military-industrial complex. I would be the last person who would wish to minimize that. But the evidence suggests that the bias may be the other way around. American defense dollars likely go further than European euros.
Look for instance at the price of modern, third-generation battle tanks and the cost of self-propelled howitzers, which have been key to the fighting in Ukraine. German prices are far higher than their American counterparts.
And, as work by Juan Mejino-López and Guntram B. Wolff at the Bruegel policy think tank has shown, these higher costs have to do with smaller procurement runs and smaller procurement runs are, in turn, tied to the fragmentation of Europe’s militaries and their strong preference for national procurement.
Right-now there is often lamentation about the tendency of European militaries to import key weapons systems from the US. And there is, of course, plenty of geopolitical and political maneuvering involved, for instance, in Berlin’s initiative to build an air defense system heavily reliant American and Israeli missiles. As the data show, Germany does have a strong preference for imports from the US rather than its European neighbors.
But, on average, across the entire defense budget, the besetting sin of European militaries is not that they rely too heavily on foreign weapons, but that they import not enough. They are too self-sufficient. The problem is not that Germany buys too many weapons from the US, but that it buys too many in Germany.
National fragmentation creates the balkanized defense market, the inefficient proliferation of major weapons systems and in terms of global industrial competition, the small size of European defense contractors.
Here is the full Substack, very good throughout. Via Felipe.
Ideological Reversals Amongst Economists
Research in economics often carries direct political implications, with findings supporting either right-wing or left-wing perspectives. But what happens when a researcher known for publishing right-wing findings publishes a paper with left-wing findings (or vice versa)? We refer to these instances as ideological reversals. This study explores whether such researchers face penalties – such as losing their existing audience without attracting a new one – or if they are rewarded with a broader audience and increased citations. The answers to these questions are crucial for understanding whether academia promotes the advancement of knowledge or the reinforcement of echo chambers. In order to identify ideological reversals, we begin by categorizing papers included in meta-analyses of key literatures in economics as “right” or “left” based on their findings relative to other papers in their literature (e.g., the presence or absence of disemployment effects in the minimum wage literature). We then scrape the abstracts (and other metadata) of every economics paper ever published, and we deploy machine learning in order to categorize the ideological implications of these papers. We find that reversals are associated with gaining a broader audience and more citations. This result is robust to a variety of checks, including restricting analysis to the citation trajectory of papers already published before an author’s reversal. Most optimistically, authors who have left-to-right (right-to-left) reversals not only attract a new rightwing (left-wing) audience for their recent work, this new audience also engages with and cites the author’s previous left-wing (right-wing) papers, thereby helping to break down echo chambers.
That is from a new paper by Matt Knepper and Brian Wheaton, via Kris Gulati. If it is audience-expanding for researchers to write such papers, does that mean we should trust their results less?
Claims about debt and productivity growth
- To stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio through productivity growth, we’d need to grow at an unrealistically fast rate. If productivity growth was 0.5 percentage point per year faster than CBO expects throughout the next three decades, then the ratio of debt-to-GDP would be stabilized. These estimates don’t include the effects of the 2025 tax bill now being debated in Congress; if that bill is enacted in the form it passed the House, we’d need even higher rates of productivity growth to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio.
- Pro-growth policies alone won’t get us there. The authors examine seven policy areas–immigration, housing, the safety net, electricity transmission, R&D, taxes on business investment, and permitting–and find no evidence that, even taken together, they can produce a sustained, large enough increase in productivity growth to offset their potential direct budgetary cost and significantly reduce the deficit.
- But while tax hikes and spending cuts will be needed, pro-growth policies could lessen the pain. Some policy changes in those areas would boost economic growth, and some of those changes would do so at a low enough direct budgetary cost that they would lower the trajectory of debt relative to GDP. For example, increasing the immigration of high-skilled workers or relaxing restrictions on housing construction would increase economic growth and lower the trajectory of debt.
- Pro-growth regulatory changes are especially promising. Some of these regulatory changes would be deregulatory–for example reforming permitting for infrastructure–and others would strengthen regulation–for example federal intervention to improve electricity transmission. Tax cuts, in contrast, directly widen budget deficits, and evidence suggests that they very rarely have a big enough impact on growth to offset those direct deficit increases.
That is from a new study by Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard, and Zachary Liscow.
Sentence of the Day
FT: Analysis by Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo, suggested that US government credit default swap spreads — which reflect the cost of protecting a loan against default — are trading at levels similar to Greece and Italy.
Yikes!
Do more laws boost economic growth?
This paper analyzes the conditions under which more legislation contributes to economic growth. In the context of US states, we apply natural language processing tools to measure legislative flows for the years 1965–2012. We implement a novel shift-share design for text data, where the instrument for legislation is leave-one-out legal topic flows interacted with pretreatment legal topic shares. We find that at the margin, higher legislative output causes more economic growth. Consistent with more complete laws reducing ex post holdup, we find that the effect is driven by the use of contingent clauses, is largest in sectors with high relationship-specific investments, and is increasing with local economic uncertainty.
That is from a new issue of the JPE, by Elliott Ash, Massimo Morelli, and Matia Vannoni.