Category: Education
My New Jersey history podcast with “Exit Interviews”
Exit Interviews is a new podcast run by David Piegaro. I am honored to be one of the first few guests, along with Chris Christie. Think of this session as “Tyler Cowen as regional thinker.” Almost 100% fresh material, not to mention some trolling directed at Central and South Jersey, Philly too. Here is my episode.
Definitely recommended, and let us hope that David Remnick gets on soon to defend the honor of River Vale vs. Hillsdale in Bergen County…
My simple model of fertility decline
My core model is both simple and depressing. Fertility rates have declined around the world because birth control technologies became much better and easier to use. And people — women in particular — just do not want that many kids.
I do understand that better birth control happened a long time ago, for instance birth control pills become widely available in the wealthier countries in the 1960s, or sometimes the 1970s. Nonetheless the diffusion of new technologies can be very slow, and for norms to shift it can take generational turnover or even a bit more. Plus “fertility contagion effects” take a long time to work their way fully through the system.
Those long lags may be difficult to swallow, but social science has numerous examples of very long operative mechanisms. (Just think of how long it took potential migrants to exploit open borders, for instance pre-WWI.) Furthermore, fertility rates have indeed been falling for a long time in the wealthier countries.
So a lot of women, once they face the realities of the stress and trying to make ends meet, want only one kid. You end up with a large number of one kid families, some people who never marry/procreate at all, and a modest percentage of families with 2-4 kids. There are also plenty of cases cases where the guy leaves, self-destructs, or never marries, after siring a single child with a woman. That gives you the fertility rates we are seeing, albeit with cultural and economic variation.
Richard Hanania considers why income is not the driving force behind the decline, and why the decline is continuing.
Part of this model is that many women just love having a child. They love “children” so much that a single child fills up their needs and desires.
I see a similar mechanism in my own life. I very much enjoy having Spinoza around the house, but I have zero desire to take in another canine. Whenever I want more “dog attention,” I can assure you that the supply is highly elastic. Similarly, a single kid can take up a lot of your time and affection, again supply is elastic from the side of the kid. Maybe parents learning how much they can enjoy a single kid has been another cultural lag?
Under my preference-driven model, fertility declines are very difficult to reverse. I believe that is also consistent with the evidence to date.
So this is a problem we need to worry about. The asymptote is rather unpleasant, and the path along the way involve less human well-being, possibly less innovation, and maybe some major fiscal crises as well.
As Arnold Kling would say, “Have a nice day.”
Mainstream research views on kids, teens, and screens
From Michael Coren at The Washington Post:
The child development researchers I spoke to about it? Practically blasé. They saw screens as a valuable tool — overused but useful — that can help families when handled well.
What I didn’t hear: bans, panic or moral judgments. It was framed as a choice — one you can make better or worse. Researchers expressed a lot of compassion for parents squaring off against massive technology companies whose profit models aren’t always aligned with what’s best for children’s health.
“I am just a lot more concerned about how we design the digital landscape for kids than I am about whether we allow kids to use screens or not,” said Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I haven’t seen concrete evidence that convinces me that screen use itself is creating problematic behavior.”
And for older age groups, there is a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, excerpt:
The change in the age profile of workers’ wellbeing may reflect changes in selection into (out of) employment by age, changes in job quality, or changes in young workers’ orientation to similar jobs over time. But changes in smartphone usage – often the focus of debate regarding declining young peoples’ wellbeing – are unlikely to be the main culprit unless there are sizeable differences in smartphone usage across young workers and non-workers, which appears unlikely.
I am a great believer in work as a way to help improve mental health problems. Here is a quick discussion of media bias on the screens issue. I would stress that none of what I am citing here is at variance with mainstream perspectives on these issues.
Spinoza the Bayesian fine-tunes his own training
Formerly he would run to the kitchen every time I opened the refrigerator door. Now he comes only when I open the cheese compartment.
He has learned the difference between getting “a pee” (only modestly fun, a quick stint outdoors) vs. “a walk in the park,” the latter being very fun indeed. He knows the words pee and park, but also can tell from my body language alone what will await him. He wags his bum for only the park trip.
Often he knows when we are talking about him, even when we do not refer to him by name. And if someone he knows calls on the phone, he comes over to listen. Otherwise he does not budge.
Spinoza, a miniature Australian shepherd, is now over eleven years old.
Is school worse for your kids than social media?
For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?
If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.
Great. So let’s get rid of school.
Yes, there’s the obvious twist — all the data I just listed is true for the effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest threat to the mental health of children. At the very least, the evidence for its negative effects is unambiguous: the same cannot be said for social media…
From 1990-2019, suicide rates among young people have always dropped precipitously during the summers and spiked again in September. Adults show no such trend…
Beyond these clinical statistics, there’s also the simple fact that kids say they find school more stressful than pretty much anything else in their life.
Here is much more from Eli Stark-Elster, interesting throughout.
*You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition*
By Bryan Caplan, now on sale. From Bryan’s Substack:
My latest book of essays, You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition, flips this narrative. All of these demands for “reshaping culture” are thinly-veiled calls for coercing humans. As the title essay explains:
[C]ulture is… other people! Culture is who other people want to date and marry. Culture is how other people raise their kids. Culture is the movies other people want to see. Culture is the hobbies other people value. Culture is the sports other people play. Culture is the food other people cook and eat. Culture is the religion other people choose to practice. To have a “right to your culture” is to have a right to rule all of these choices — and more.
What’s the alternative? Instead of treating capitalism as the root of cultural decay, the world should embrace capitalist cultural competition. Actions speak louder than words; instead of using government to “shape” culture, let’s see what practices, beliefs, styles, and flavors pass the market test. Which in practice, as I explain elsewhere in the book, largely means the global triumph of Western culture, infused with an array of glorious culinary, musical, and literary imports. Nativists who bemoan immigrants’ failure to assimilate are truly blind; the truth is that even non-immigrants are pre-assimilating at a staggering pace.
Recommended. Bryan also offers some essays on what he finds valuable in GMU Econ sub-culture.
Emergent Ventures winners, 51st cohort
Joseph Schmid, Princeton philosophy, and co-authors. To write up new and better arguments for the existence of god.
Monica Lewis, Sydney, Australia, center-right podcast.
Ashwin Somu, 17, Ontario, payments systems.
Sam Kahn, Kyrgyzstan, digital publication, Republic of Letters.
Nelson Jing, Seattle, decentralized AI systems.
Anubhav Nigam, Cornell, underwater charging stations.
Jordan McGillis, San Diego, the economics and politics of Alaska.
Juan Navarrete, Madrid, Cervantes and liberalism.
Jeff Stine, Chicago, matching scientists and donors.
Syrine Ben Driss, San Francisco/Tunisia, biology start-up for AI-powered bio.
Shakti Mb, NYC, how people use AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
Sonia Litwin, London, robotics and emotions.
Alby Churven, 14, Sydney, Clovr, an AI tool.
Mikhail Khotyakov and Igor Kogan, Munich, Aimathic, personal math tutoring.
Archaeology cohort, sponsored by Yonatan Ben Shimon.
Bryce Hoenigman, Chicago, archaeology, linguistics, and AI.
Benjamin Arbuckle, Chapel Hill, archaeology and ancient DNA.
Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
Seb Krier
I think this is spot on. The most useful work in the coming years will be about leveraging AI to help improve and reform liberal democracy, the rule of law, separation of powers, free speech, coordination, and constitutional safeguards.
One heuristic I have for AI is: if somone can instantiate their preference or desire really easily, if principal agent problems are materially reduced, if you can no longer rely on inefficiency or bloat as indirect hedge – then the ‘rules of the game’ matter more than ever.
These are all very difficult questions with or without AI. And I’m concerned with two things in particular: first, the easy appeal of anti-elite populism – people who just think ‘well let’s have vetocracy everywhere, let’s leverage the emotions of the masses for short term gain’.
And second, the appeal of scheme-y behaviour – instrumental convergence for political operators. This is harder to pin down, but basically a variant of “I want goal X, so anything that gets me closer to this goal is good” – what leads to all sorts of bad policy and unsavoury alliances.
And instead of trying to 4D chess it or try to recreate politics from first principles, I think technologists should actively enage with experts in all sorts of discplines: constitutional scholars, public choice economists, game theorists etc. Converesely, many of these experts should engage with technologists more instead of coping with obsolete op-eds about how AI is fake or something.
Lastly, improved AI capabilities means you can now use these systems for more things than you could have before. I couldn’t write software a year ago and now I can create a viable app in a day. This dynamic will continue, and will reward people who are agentic and creative.
Are you a local councillor? Well now you have 1000 agents at your disposal – what can you now that that was otherwise unthinkable? Are you someone who lives in their district? Now you have even better tools to hold them to account. Are you an academic? Great, now consider how the many bylaws, rules, structures, institutions, incentives are messing up incentives and progress, what should be improved, and how to get streamlined coordination rather than automated obstruction.
Here is the link. Here is the related Dean Ball tweet.
My AI and education talk at University of Austin
Keep in mind I am not out to design the best, highest-tech solution, rather something that non-white-pilled normies might experiment with on a short-term basis.
The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies
The great biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, gave his retirement lecture at UNC. It’s an excellent overview on the theme of the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. After encomiums, Bart starts around the 13:30 mark with about 10 minutes of amusing biography. He gets into the meat of the lecture at 24:38 which is where it is cued.
Morally judging famous and semi-famous people
This is one of the worst things you can do for your own intellect, whatever you think the social benefits may be. I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.
I am not saying everyone is an angel — sometimes you come to learn negative information that in fact is not part of the standard press reports or internet whines.
If you are going to possibly be working with someone on a concrete and important project, absolutely you should be trying to form an assessment of their moral quality and reliability. (And you are allowed to do it once per electoral race, when deciding for whom to vote.) But if not, spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider. Focus on the substantive arguments for and against various policies and propositions, not the people involved. Furthermore, smart people do not seem to be immune from this form of mental deterioration. Here is my 2008 post on “pressing the button.”
A corollary of this is that if you read an internet comment that, when a substantive issue is raised, switches to judging a famous or semi-famous person, the quality of that comment is almost always low. Once you start seeing this, you cannot stop seeing it.
Addendum: If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.
Podcast with Salvador Duarte
Salvador is 17, and is an EV winner from Portugal. Here is the transcript. Here is the list of discussed topics:
0:00 – We’re discovering talent quicker than ever 5:14 – Being in San Francisco is more important than ever 8:01 – There is such a thing like a winning organization 11:43 – Talent and conformity on startup and big businesses 19:17 – Giving money to poor people vs talented people 22:18 – EA is fragmenting 25:44 – Longtermism and existential risks 33:24 – Religious conformity is weaker than secular conformity 36:38 – GMU Econ professors religious beliefs 39:34 – The west would be better off with more religion 43:05 – What makes you a philosopher 45:25 – CEOs are becoming more generalists 49:06 – Traveling and eating 53:25 – Technology drives the growth of government? 56:08 – Blogging and writing 58:18 – Takes on @Aella_Girl, @slatestarcodex, @Noahpinion, @mattyglesias, , @tszzl, @razibkhan, @RichardHanania, @SamoBurja, @TheZvi and more 1:02:51 – The future of Portugal 1:06:27 – New aesthetics program with @patrickc.
Self-recommending, here is Salvador’s podcast and Substack more generally.
Tim Kane on my visit to University of Austin
Here is the link, I should add that in addition to my enthusiasm for the students, the faculty also seemed quite good, most of all knowledgeable and open. I know very little about how the school is run, you might try this short piece from Arnold Kling, who has been visiting there for a week.
Here is an excerpt from Tim:
Tyler made a remark that he didn’t think fighting grade inflation matters very much. I respect his opinion, but I think he’s wrong. And I hope I can change his mind. Here’s why I care so much about it, and why I think a GPA target is the only — literally the only — effective solution. A college cannot fight grade inflation with rhetoric and goals and hand-wringing. Genuine academic rigor requires strong limits on what faculty can do with grades.
Professors everywhere have a large incentive to give higher grades. The situation has inflated asymptotically to the ceiling for 8 decades, particularly at the Ivies…
At University of Austin, all professors have to give an average grade of B. Here is more from Tim:
Consequences?
- More learning. UATX students are focused on learning, not grades.
- Less squabbling. Faculty are seeing way fewer ticky-tack arguments over a single point on homework and exams because the students aren’t obsessed with the 4.0 or 3.0 threshholds.
- More studying, especially increased follow-through. The incentives for students to care about final exams are stronger (none of this late-term “that grade is already settled, so I am blowing off that final exam” nonsense.)
- Less anxiety. I skimmed the grades data for our fall semester and am pretty sure I did not see a single “perfect” grade of 100/100 for any student in any class.
Some of you have asked me what I think of the recent Politico article on University of Austin. First, I have not been involved in any of the cited disputes, so I cannot speak to their details. Second, I do not not not speak for the University at all (while I am on the Advisory Board, it is an unpaid position with no authority or fiduciary responsibility and my advice/consultation has been on the AI topic). But I would make these more general points:
a. If a university decided to be based explicitly on classical liberal perspectives and principles, I would think that is great (not saying what is the best way to describe U. Austin, this is a general observation). I would however worry that the decision is not sustainable over time at much scale, given the career incentives of so many of the people who will be hired.
b. If that decision to be “classically liberal in orientation” required the administration to set some general principles to try to assure that the faculty at said school did not evolve into being like the faculty almost everywhere else, I would be fine with that.
c. I think such a school, over time, if it stuck to its principles, would end up with more de facto free speech than most other institutions of higher education.
d. I am glad that Notre Dame and Georgetown are Catholic schools, that UC Santa Cruz was founded as a kind of hippie school, that there is Yeshiva, the New School, HBCUs, and so on. I favor schools being “more different” ideologically in a variety of directions, including those I do not agree with, which of course will cover the majority of cases. My main objection is that many of the “Catholic” schools for instance are not very Catholic anymore, having been taken over by a kind of rampant general professionalism. I hope University of Austin avoids that fate. I should add that I am well aware that the general rise in fixed costs makes such endeavors much harder to sustain these days. I would like to reverse that general trend, and that is one reason for my interest in online and AI-oriented methods in education.
e. To innovate, more and more schools will have to move away from the old “faculty control” model. This change is already substantially underway, sans the innovation however.
f. Failure to contextualize is often the greatest “sin” of media articles offering coverage of disputes.
Returning to the University of Austin, right now their entering class is about 100 students, and they offer 35 classes a semester. It is one floor in an office building, and it is not costing any taxpayer dollars. It is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. GMU alone has about 40,000 students, and is basically a city. My Principles class this last fall alone had about 3.5x more students than are in the entire U. Austin.
If you are very upset by whatever is going on at U. Austin, or not going on, or whatever…I would say that is the real story.
Childhood neighbors matter
We explore the role of immediate next door neighbors in affecting children’s later life occupation choice. Using linked historical census records for over 6 million boys and 4 million girls, we reconstruct neighborhood microgeography to estimate how growing up next door to someone in a particular occupation affects a child’s probability of working in that occupation as an adult, relative to other children who grew up farther away on the same street. Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent. As an additional source of exogenous variation in exposure to next door neighbors, we exploit untimely neighbor deaths and find smaller and insignificant exposure effects for children who grew up next to a neighbor with an untimely death. We find larger exposure effects when intensity of exposure is expected to be higher, and document larger occupational transmission in more connected neighborhoods and when next door neighbors are the same race or ethnicity or have children of similar ages. Childhood exposure to next door neighbors has real economic consequences: children who grow up next to neighbors in high income or education occupations see significant gains in adult income and education, even relative to other children living on the same street, suggesting that neighborhood networks significantly contribute to economic mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Andrews, Ryan Hill, Joseph Price, and Riley Wilson. Via Kris Gulati.