Category: Economics
17-minute Tyler Cowen talk on charter cities
This was for Mark Lutter’s Center for Innovative Governance Research.
A new “ideal” proposal for immigration reform
The IDEAL policy creates a long-term visa program in which 3mm immigrants are selected to live in the U.S. per year.
The IDEAL policy is simple and includes the following details:
- Immigrants pay $30,000 for a five-year live/work visa renewable for an additional five years at no additional cost contingent upon each IDEAL immigrant proving to be a net asset to the U.S. economy.
- At the end of ten years, immigrants whose impact to the U.S. is net positive are eligible for citizenship. Immigrants with a net negative impact will be asked to leave the U.S. Acceptance and impact will be determined by a pre-determined scoring system.
- IDEAL visa-holders are ineligible for any government benefits until attaining full citizenship and IDEAL visa-holders will be required to secure health insurance through an employer or through other means during those ten years.
Each applicant is given an acceptance score and ranking based on the following criteria:
- Age;
- Education level;
- English language proficiency;
- Existing job offers from one or more U.S. companies;
- Previous successful U.S. work history; and
- Willingness to live in a IWC (Immigrant Welcoming Community).
An Immigrant Welcoming Community meets all of the following criteria:
- An urban or rural community in the bottom 25% of U.S. income;
- A community that has suffered population losses over the preceding decade; and
- A community that opts-in to the IDEAL program via local government consent.
Here is the full website.
A different and mortgage-related reason why monetary policy stimulus is weaker at lower rates
Using a household model of mortgage prepayment with endogenous mortgage pricing, wealth distributions and consumption matched to detailed loan-level evidence on the relationship between prepayment and rate incentives, we argue that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting rates depends not just on the level of current interest rates but also on their previous path: 1) Holding current rates constant, monetary policy is less effective if previous rates were low. 2) Monetary policy “reloads” stimulative power slowly after raising rates. 3) The strength of monetary policy via the mortgage prepayment channel has been amplified by the 30-year secular decline in mortgage rates. All three conclusions imply that even if the Fed raises rates substantially before the next recession arrives, it will likely have less ammunition available for stimulus than in recent recessions.
That is from David W. Berger, Konstantin Milbradt, Fabrice Tourre, and Joseph Vavra, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Specialization and the Flowering of Personality, and Choice
A new paper in Science adds support to the so-called gender-equality paradox. Using a survey of some 80,000 people across 76 countries Falk and Hermle find that for a variety of preferences the differences between the genders gets larger the greater is economic development and gender equality. The basic story is here:
As the authors put it:
In sum, greater availability of material and social resources to both women and men may facilitate the independent development and expression of gender-specific preferences, and hence may lead to an expansion of gender differences in more developed and gender-egalitarian countries.
As I pointed out in my post, Do Boys Have a Comparative Advantage in Math and Science? results like this can explain why there are proportionately fewer women entering STEM fields in richer and more gender-equal countries than in poorer and less gender-equal countries.
One point which many people are missing is that small but growing gender differences with development are only one minor effect of a much bigger phenomena. In a primitive economy, everyone does more or less the same thing, subsistence farming. Only in a market economy under the division of labor can people specialize. Specialization reflects and amplifies diverse personalities and interests. People sometimes complain about “excess” variety in a market economy but do they extend that complaint to careers, arts, and lifestyles? In a market society we get Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes and Coconut Flakes and we get cardiologists, dermatologists and otolaryngologists and we get Chicago Blues, dub step, and K-Pop and we also get a flowering of sexual preferences and lifestyles. As Mises once said the very idea of personality as we know it today is a result of the market economy. The small gender differences some people focus on are merely the averaging by gender of much larger individual differences. Thus, I would revise the authors:
In sum, greater availability of material and social resources facilitates the independent development and expression of individual-specific preferences, and hence may lead to an expansion of individual differences in more developed and equal-opportunity countries.
What should I ask Daniel Kahneman?
I will be having a Conversation with him on November 12, unfortunately the GMU event is already sold out. In the meantime, what do you suggest? What should I ask him?
Words of wisdom
Lant Pritchett’s new working paper, “Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth” should be required reading for every Effective Altruist. Bottom line: Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration – not redistribution or philanthropy.
That is from Bryan Caplan.
Convergence, Big Time
In his influential 1997 paper, Divergence, Big Time, Lant Pritchett estimated:
…that from 1870 to 1990 the ratio of per capita incomes between the richest and the poorest countries increased by roughly a factor of five and that the difference in income between the richest country and all others has increased by an order of magnitude.
Pritchett was correct but Patel, Sandeful and Subramanian show that just where Pritchett’s study ended, convergence began!
While unconditional convergence was singularly absent in the past, there has been unconditional convergence, beginning (weakly) around 1990 and emphatically for the last two decades.
The figure above plots the coefficient (“beta”) from the plain vanilla unconditional convergence regression (relating average growth of real per capita GDP over the long run to its initial level). A statistically significant negative beta denotes convergence and divergence otherwise. Since we know from Johnson et al. (2013) that growth rates vary widely across datasets, we plot the annual betas for three such sets: the Penn World Tables (PWT), the World Development Indicators, and the Maddison Project (Bolt et al. 2014).[1] While the point estimates vary across datasets, the consistent pattern across them all is a statistically significant negative beta since around 1995 (unconditional convergence) and its lack prior to that (see also Roy, Kessler and Subramanian, 2016).
Our basic point doesn’t require regressions. Looking at the 43 countries the World Bank classified as “low income” in 1990, 65 percent have grown faster than the high-income average since 1990. The same is true for 82 percent of the 62 middle-income countries circa 1990.
Neo-liberalism has been incredibly successful, essentially delivering on all of its promises of economic growth, declines in poverty, and peace. Yet, the ideas behind what Andrei Shleifer called The Age of Milton Friedman are now under attack and in retreat.
Does law and economics matter?
This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the effects of the law and economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts and 1 million District Court criminal sentencing decisions linked to judge identity, we estimate the effect of attendance in the controversial Manne economics training program, an intensive two-week course attended by almost half of federal judges. After attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language, render more conservative verdicts in economics cases, rule against regulatory agencies more often, and render longer criminal sentences. These results are robust to adjusting for a wide variety of covariates that predict the timing of attendance. Comparing non-Manne and Manne judges prior to program start and exploiting variation in instructors further assuage selection concerns. Non-Manne judges randomly exposed to Manne peers on previous cases increase their use of economics language in subsequent opinions, suggesting economic ideas diffused throughout the judiciary. Variation in topic ordering finds that economic ideas were portable from regulatory to criminal cases.
That is from Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu, via Rethinking Economics and also S.
Robert Wiblin’s Conversation with Tyler Cowen
This was two and a half hours (!), and it is a special bonus episode in Conversations in Tyler, here is the text and audio. The starting base of the discussion was my new, just today published book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision of a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, but of course we ranged far and wide. Here are a few excerpts:
WIBLIN: Speaking of Tetlock, are there any really important questions in economics or social science that . . . What would be your top three questions that you’d love to see get more attention?
COWEN: Well, what’s the single question is hard to say. But in general, the role of what is sometimes called culture. What is culture? How does environment matter? I’m sure you know the twin studies where you have identical twins separated at birth, and they grow up in two separate environments and they seem to turn out more or less the same. That’s suggesting some kinds of environmental differences don’t matter.
But then if you simply look at different countries, people who grow up, say, in Croatia compared to people who grow up in Sweden — they have quite different norms, attitudes, practices. So when you’re controlling the environment that much, surrounding culture matters a great deal. So what are the margins where it matters and doesn’t? What are the mechanisms? That, to me, is one important question.
A question that will become increasingly important is why do face-to-face interactions matter? Why don’t we only interact with people online? Teach them online, have them work for us online. Seems that doesn’t work. You need to meet people.
But what is it? Is it the ability to kind of look them square in the eye in meet space? Is it that you have your peripheral vision picking up other things they do? Is it that subconsciously somehow you’re smelling them or taking in some other kind of input?
What’s really special about face-to-face? How can we measure it? How can we try to recreate that through AR or VR? I think that’s a big frontier question right now. It’d help us boost productivity a lot.
Those would be two examples of issues I think about.
And this:
COWEN: I think most people are actually pretty good at knowing their weaknesses. They’re often not very good at knowing their talents and strengths. And I include highly successful people. You ask them to account for their success, and they’ll resort to a bunch of cliches, which are probably true, but not really getting at exactly what they are good at.
If I ask you, “Robert Wiblin, what exactly are you good at?” I suspect your answer isn’t good enough. So just figuring that out and investing more in friends, support network, peers who can help you realize that vision, people still don’t do enough of that.
And:
COWEN: But you might be more robust. So the old story is two polarities of power versus many, and then the two looks pretty stable, right? Deterrents. USA, USSR.
But if it’s three compared to a world with many centers of power, I don’t know that three is very stable. Didn’t Sartre say, “Three people is hell”? Or seven — is seven a stable number? We don’t know very much. So it could just be once you get out of two-party stability, you want a certain flattening.
And maybe some parts of the world will have conflicts that are undesirable. But nonetheless, by having the major powers keep their distance, that’s better, maybe.
Recommended!
The Big Push Failed
In 2004, Jeff Sachs and co-authors revived an old theory to explain Africa’s failure to develop, the poverty trap, and an old solution, the big push.
Our explanation is that tropical Africa, even the well-governed parts, is stuck in a poverty trap, too poor to achieve robust, high levels of economic growth and, in many places, simply too poor to grow at all. More policy or governance reform, by itself, will not be sufficient to over-come this trap. Specifically, Africa’s extreme poverty leads to low national saving rates, which in turn lead to low or negative economic growth rates. Low domestic saving is not offset by large inflows of private foreign capital, for example foreign direct investment, because Africa’s poor infrastructure and weak human capital discourage such inflows. With very low domestic saving and low rates of market-based foreign capital inflows, there is little in Africa’s current dynamics that promotes an escape from poverty. Something new is needed.
We argue that what is needed is a “big push” in public investments to produce a rapid “step” increase in Africa’s underlying productivity, both rural and urban.
As the title of the blog might suggest, I was skeptical. But even if a big push wasn’t exactly the right idea, I’m all in favor of Big Ideas and Sachs pursued his Big Idea with tremendous skill and media savvy. Pilot programs were soon up and running and then quickly expanded into full programs. In June 2010, the Millennium Villages Project released its first public evaluation and that is when things started to fall apart.
The initial MVP evaluation claimed great success but simply compared some development indicators before and after in the treated villages without comparing to trends elsewhere. In 2010 such a study was completely out of step with contemporary practices in impact evaluation. Red flag! Clemens and Demombynes showed that comparing to trends elsewhere significantly moderated the impact. A second MVP paper was published in the Lancet but then was quickly retracted when Bump, Clemens, Demombynes and Haddad demonstrated that it had significant errors. Clemens and Demombynes wrote a summary piece on the controversy then in an astounding and under-reported scandal the MVP tried to stifle Clemens and Demombynes. The MVP, with Jeff Sachs at the head, also sicced their lawyers on Nina Munk and her book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. More red flags.
Yet, despite all of this controversy and bad behavior, the MVP project continued to move ahead and in 2012, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) funded US $11 million into an MVP in Northern Ghana that ran until December 2016. Under the auspices of the DFID, we now finally have the first in-depth, independent evaluation of one MVP project and it doesn’t look great. The project did some good but the big push failed and the good that was done could have been done at lower cost.
Overall, the MVP in northern Ghana did not achieve the overall MDG target to reduce extreme poverty and hunger at the local level. Where there are attributable changes to the MDG targets, these tended to be the more limited changes than those that will fundamentally improve people’s health, educational and other outcomes. For instance, the project did increase attendance at primary school (Goal 2) but did not go beyond this MDG and improve the learning outcomes of children; the project did increase the proportion of births attended by professionals and women said to be using contraceptive methods (MDG indicators), but it is not possible to assess the effect on maternal health (Goal 5); and the project did increase the number of toilets (a target under Goal 7), but not beyond this MDG in terms of hygiene and sanitation practices. There are, however, exceptions. The project had a remarkable impact on stunting, which is a long-term health indicator and a predictor of socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood.
So the MVP had some good effects on some indicators:
But is this impact sufficient given the size of the investment? And, by doing everything together, is there a synergistic effect that offers greater value for money than would arise through implementing individual sector-based interventions? In our cost-effectiveness analysis, we demonstrate that the project has so far not yielded sufficiently positive results, and what has been achieved could have been attained at a substantially lower cost (even when we take account of investments made for future usage). As such, the project seems to have fallen short of producing a synergistic effect; and the impact is not large enough for the project to be regarded as cost-effective, even when each sector is assessed independently of the others. Of course, in the longer run, the MVP may produce welfare gains. Importantly the investments in improving the health care service may enhance health outcomes later on; or other considerable investments in infrastructure (roads, health and school facilities) may have an impact on future outcomes.
Perhaps then, the most concerning findings are the early indications that the MVP approach will be difficult to be sustained by district institutions and at the community level; and there are signs that any gains made under the project are already being undermined.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman and co-authors, including Jeff Sachs, offer a broadly similar although less negative in tone evaluation of the entire MVP project.
How streaming has changed song structures
From Martin Connor, here is a list of seven mechanisms, you can read the explanations at the link:
1. Streamings’ Data Collection Makes Songs Simpler
2. Streaming Sites’ Social Media Makes Songs Confessional
3. Small Streaming Profits Make Songs Shorter
4. Streaming’s Customizability Makes Songs Built To Order
5. Content Digitization Makes Songs More Diverse [TC: does that contradict some of the other general claims?]
6. Free Content Makes Songs More Collaborative [TC: and here’s the explanation for this one:]
Artistic competition is so fierce nowadays that artists need to constantly release music. One way to do this is to make songs shorter and simpler; another way is to get a producer to make the beat, a singer to make the chorus, and another rapper for the second verse. This leads to Migos member Offset, DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Chance The Rapper, and Lil Wayne all appearing on the same 2017 song, “I’m The One.” It also means that fans start to see credits like those from Cardi B’s new album “Invasion of Privacy”. The 13 tracks on the album features 104 total writing credits, meaning 8 people per track. Its single “Be Careful” has 17 alone.
7. Video’s Increasing Dominance Makes Songs Into Soundtracks
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
*Stubborn Attachments* blurbs
You can find them here, note you may need to click on the right to read the furthest right-hand side of the page. Here are excerpts from those blurbs:
Tim Harford: “His best, most ambitious and most personal work.”
Cardiff Garcia: “I think you’ll find that following the logic in Stubborn Attachments is as fun as it is intellectually provocative.”
Mason Hartman: “The book invites you to fight it.”
Cass Sunstein: “It’s a book for right now, and a book for all times. A magnificent achievement.”
Tomorrow is publication date for the book, you can order here, and here is some background on Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
Note I am donating all of the proceeds to a man in Ethiopia.
Is innovation democracy’s unique advantage?
I say yes, though I don’t think it is easy to prove. Here is part of the abstract, from Rui Tang and Shiping Tang:
We contend that the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation is the most critical channel in which democracy holds a unique advantage over autocracy in promoting growth, especially during the stage of growth via innovation. Our theory thus predicts that democracy holds a positive but indirect effect upon growth via the channel of liberty‐to‐innovation, conditioned by the level of economic development. We then present quantitative evidence for our theory.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Claims about Ukraine
There is a bank in Ukraine that is offering *21%* interest on a checking account.
But you must take 10,000 steps a day, tracked by their app, to qualify.
Miss one day and you get nothing.
I can’t decide if it’s insanity or brilliance.
That is from Kyle Trouble, via Samir Varma.
We Cannot Avoid the Ugly Tradeoffs of Bail Reform
Many people think that “innocent until proven guilty” implies that everyone should be let loose on their own recognizance before trial. A moment’s thought reveals that this is idiotic. The white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people on June 17, 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His image was captured on security cameras and he was arrested the next day. Roof’s trial, however, didn’t start until more than a year later, December 7, 2016, and he wasn’t convicted of anything until December 15, 2016. Should Roof have been released before trial because he was “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course not. I stand second to none in demanding high standards before the state can deprive a person of their liberty but high standards do not demand binary divisions. Tradeoffs are everywhere and when the evidence against the accused is strong and the danger to the public is high, it’s not unreasonable to deprive the legally innocent of some liberty prior to trial. The tradeoffs are ugly, as they always are when trading off two sacred values, but the tradeoffs cannot be avoided.
Consider now the issue of bail reform. In the days when the default was that every accused person was held before trial, the idea of money bail was seen as a liberal, progressive measure that allowed more people to get out of jail. Today the natural default is seen as release until trial and bail is therefore perceived as a conservative, regressive measure that unjustly and unfairly keep poor people in jail. As a result, reformers are trying to reduce or eliminate money bail but they are doing so without thought for the ugly tradeoffs.
The bail reformers frame the issue in a way that I think is misleading. Anytime someone can’t pay for bail they call that “unaffordable bail”. Well that’s literally true but it also gives an incorrect impression of destitute people being denied their freedom because they don’t have a buck. To be sure that does happen but here’s an open secret of the judicial process. Judges sometimes set bail expecting and indeed hoping that it won’t be affordable. Everyone knows this but the bail reformers don’t like to acknowledge it because it brings up the ugly tradeoffs. Consider the following, from Chicago, where the bail reform movement is very active:
…there are about 2,700 people being held in jail because they can’t afford bail but [the Chicago court official noted] 87 percent had a current violent or weapons-related charge, a risk assessment recommending “maximum conditions” if released, an assessment flagging them for violence, and/or an active probation or parole case.
In other words, the judges set a high bail amount for a reason. Under orders from the Chief Judge, however, Chicago has been trying to reduce bail:
Chicago and its surrounding county was supposed to be a beacon of bail reform. After Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans imposed new rules and made sweeping changes to the bench, advocates hoped that virtually no one would be jailed because they didn’t have the money to make bail.
…At first, it seemed to have the intended effect: In the first month after the order, the number of people who had to post money bonds dropped by more than half, while the number of people who were released on their own recognizance—allowed to leave upon promising to return for trial—doubled. Bail amounts also decreased, as did the number of people in jail.
So what happened when bail reform met reality? Under the new system, judges that set a lot of “unaffordable” bail looked bad but most of the people who can’t pay their bail can’t pay not because they are especially poor but because the judge thought that they were a danger to the public. Judges continue to believe that many defendants are dangerous but now rather than setting bail they simply deny bail altogether. In fact, under the new system the rate of denying bail has risen fourfold. In addition, judges soon discovered that the cost of releasing defendants in terms of crime, failure to appear, and perhaps bad publicity was too high so they started to ignore the demands of the Chief Judge.
…But a year later, [the Coalition to End Money Bond] found that not only are judges still setting bail amounts that defendants can’t afford—meaning that more than 2,700 people are in Cook County Jail because they don’t have enough money [recall these are the 2,700 with serious records, AT] —but that things are getting worse. The initial gains “have steadily evaporated and bond court outcomes are now approaching pre-Order levels,” the report states. The authors note that if judges were sticking to the order, there would be no bail amounts set at levels that defendants can’t afford; instead, it says, nearly 30 percent of bail amounts were unaffordable. Between November 2017 and June 2018, judges set unaffordable bail amounts for more than 1,350 people.
Bail reformers are blind to the tradeoffs that must be made between public safety and the rights of defendants. Since the reformers are blind to these tradeoffs they can’t see that money bail actually helps to alleviate these tradeoffs. Reformers think that money bail simply keeps the poor in jail but in fact money bail is a half-way house between release on own recognizance and hold until trial. Money bail lets judges release more people. Bail reformers assume that if they eliminate money bail then judges will release everyone. In fact, as the Dylann Roof case illustrates, that is never going to happen. And when the public realizes that judges are releasing lots of defendants who subsequently commit more crimes there will be a backlash, as is already evident in Chicago. By eliminating the half-way house of money bail, bail reformers force judges to either release or hold until trial. Some people who under the current system are released on bail will, under the new system, be held until trial. Indeed, the unintended consequence of bail reform may be that more people are held until trial with no possibility of release.
Sometimes poor people are unfairly held until trial. Eliminating money bail, however, is a crude and dangerous approach to this problem. Instead we should deal with it directly by flagging and reevaluating jailed, non-violent offenders with low bail amounts, use alternative release measures such as ankle bracelets and most importantly, we should look to the constitution. The founders understood the ugly tradeoffs which is why the constitution guarantees the right to a “speedy trial.” Unfortunately, that right today is widely ignored. My route to reform would begin by putting teeth back into the constitutional right to a speedy trial.
Addendum: Illinois doesn’t allow commercial bail so I haven’t mentioned bounty hunters but in other parts of the country their role in the criminal justice system is important, even if widely misunderstood and disparaged. My paper (with Eric Helland) shows that bounty hunters are more effective than the police at recapturing escaped defendants. More specifically, compared to similar defendants released using other methods, defendants released on commercial bail are much more likely to show up at trial and are much more likely to be recaptured should they flee. See also my adventures as a bounty hunter.