Category: Education
How to persuade to YIMBY?
Recent research finds that most people want lower housing prices but, contrary to expert consensus, do not believe that more supply would lower prices. This study tests the effects of four informational interventions on Americans’ beliefs about housing markets and associated policy preferences and political actions (writing to state lawmakers). Several of the interventions significantly and positively affected economic understanding and support for land-use liberalization, with standardized effect sizes of 0.15 − 0.3. The most impactful treatment—an educational video from an advocacy group—had effects 2-3 times larger than typical economics-information or political-messaging treatments. Learning about housing markets increased support for development among homeowners as much as renters, contrary to the “homevoter hypothesis.” The treatments did not significantly affect the probability of writing to lawmakers, but an off-plan analysis suggests that the advocacy video increased the number of messages asking for more market-rate housing.
Here is more from Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija. Here is the video.
Elite Human Capital Is Not Just IQ
Here is a very good response to readers’ questions essay by Richard Hanania, excerpt:
Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.
Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.
The piece covers other issues as well.
The Affordable Rent Act
Bloomberg: Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on factors such as condition, size and energy efficiency. The Affordable Rent Act introduced rent controls on 300,000 units, moving them out of the unregulated market.
The Affordable Rent Act is like anything named the Democratic People’s Republic, you just know it ain’t so.
Addendum: Yes, the Einstein quote is fake. Today, I am in a mood and don’t care.
Emergent Ventures, 37th cohort
Nicholas Kruus, 17, Highlands Ranch, CO, poverty alleviation, general career support.
Tobi Shevlane, Oxford, AI and prediction of real world events.
John Gross-Whitaker, Stanford, writing and thinking and career development.
Benjamin Manning, MIT, AI as a tool for doing economic research.
Arden Berg, Western Massachusetts, incoming student at the University of Chicago, philosophy and economics.
Sean Cai and associates, Cornell, using AI to improve the information content of musical notation.
Nicholas Decker, George Mason University, economics Ph.D student, to write his Substack and general career development.
Tim Mak, Kyiv, originally McGill, developing a periodical to cover business and defense developments in Ukraine.
Jack Wiseman, London, “A workspace for life sciences, hardware/robotics, and AI research in London for young scientists/technologists.”
Zeaus Koh, 17, Singapore, general career support, bio and AI.
Nathan J. Zhao, Stanford, general career support.
Naila Moloo, 18, Ottawa and Chapel Hill, turning duckweed into bioplastics.
Marina Lin, McLean, VA, high school, biological approaches to hard-NP problems, t cover possible publication costs.
Pablo Cobo Pérez, Córdoba, Spain, 16, programming and AI, to finance a trip to San Francisco.
Jon Hartley, Hoover and Stanford, gather data on how LLMs are used in workplaces.
Sean Keyes, Progress Ireland, to study Irish policy issues, and for travel and fact-finding missions.
Luke Marks, Australia, general career support and AI, to visit the Bay Area.
Janet Guo, MIT and New Zealand, longevity research.
Tejas Chakrapani, 16, Basking Ridge, NJ, general career support for efforts in tech.
Rohit Kulkarni, 17, Chantilly, VA, AI and biology.
Ricardo López Cordero, Mexico City, podcast on Mexican intellectual life.
Ekaterina Leksina, University of Warwick, mathematical biology.
*Self-Help is Like a Vaccine*, by Bryan Caplan
This is one of the best and most correct self-help books. Bryan describes it as follows:
I’ve been writing economically-inspired self-help essays for almost two decades, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine compiles the most helpful 5-7% of my advice.
Of Bryan’s recent string of books, this is the one I agree with the most. Bryan offers some further description:
Like my other books of essays, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine is divided into four parts.
- The first, “Unilateral Action,” argues that despite popular nay-saying and “Can’t-Do” mentalities, you have a vast menu of unexplored choices. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. While most “minorities of one” are fools, cautious experimentation and appreciation of good track records, not conformism, is the wise response.
- The next section, “Life Hacks,” offers a bunch of specific suggestions for improving your life. Only one hack has to work out to instantly justify your purchase of the book.
- “Professor Homeschool” brings together all of my best pieces on teaching my own kids. I have over a decade’s experience: I taught the twins for grades 7-12, all four kids for Covid, and my 10th-grader is working one room away from me as I write. Except during Covid, homeschooling is a fair bit of extra work, but if you’re still curious, I’ve got a pile of time-tested advice.
- I close the book with “How to Dale Carnegie.” As you may know, I’m a huge fan of his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Not because I’m naturally a people-pleaser; I’m not. But with Dale’s help, I have managed to make thousands of friends all over the planet. Few skills are more useful, both emotionally and materially.
You can buy the book here.
A simple theory of which thinkers support the elites, or not
I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes:
People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure. But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.
Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites. That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.
The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites. It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.
Most “heterodox” thinkers like to think they are encouraging a more nuanced understanding of when the elites are right and when they are wrong. And indeed that is what some of their more perceptive readers take away. But their overall important gross effect is typically to raise the status of elites. They make the public discussion of issues better and more vibrant (one hopes). And thus, if only in a longer run, the status of elites goes up. Sorry buddy, I know that wasn’t exactly your goal!
If you teach at a top or Ivy League school, your net effect is to raise the status of elites. With the exception of a few such people who make horrible blunders and end up disgraced. Or in fewer cases they may be accused of false charges. Otherwise, the simple fact of “a smart, accomplished person affiliating with elite institutions” is the main message you are sending.
In earlier media ecosystems, it was relatively difficult to act to permanently lower the status of elites. It is in fact quite impressive that Chomsky managed this, and without (earlier) the aid of the internet.
Today it is much easier to lower the status of elites, largely because of social media. But even with that aid it is not as easy as you might think. Very often you need the cooperation of elites themselves in showing their own blemishes to the public, whether they do this wittingly or not. They do it plenty in fact, a’ la Martin Gurri.
Libertarianism, as it has evolved at the institutional level, largely raises the status of elites. It keeps the idea of liberty in the public conversation. Libertarians, of course, may not intend this as their major effect, though of course they are glad to keep the liberty idea in circulation. Some of the “obsessed with Covid lockdowns” libertarians, however, probably lower the status of elites.
It is hard to lower the status of elites without lowering your own status as well. It is not just that the elites will not like you, or may treat you and your PR harshly. You also have to come across as quite negative, and furthermore some of the negativity you create for your targets will rub off on you, at least in the eyes of much of your audience. Plus being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider.
Just as many elections are in fact about “one thing,” so are very many intellectual discussions, namely whether elites should have higher or lower status.
Rather than classifying thinkers as left-wing or right-wing, in this (false) hypothesis we should have the taxonomy of “raising the status of elites” vs. “lowering the status of elites.” Can it be said that Richard Hanania is now in the former category? Matt Stoller, however, is mostly lowering the status of elites. So we can put them in opposite corners of the true political spectrum, though for reasons different from what you once might have expected.
Which kind of intellectual would you rather be? Which is more likely to contribute to a net gain in social trust? To improve social welfare?
If this post were in fact true, how should it induce you to change your behavior? How about as a consumer of intellectual products?
Jon Haidt on causality (from my email)
“Hi Tyler,
i have big news about the debate over social media harming teens.
So much of it hangs on the claim that the evidence is just correlational, not causal.
Zach Rausch and I show that this is not true; the experiments DO show causation, very clearly and consistently.
Here are my 2 tweets about the post:
https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1829163166066205168
https://x.com/JonHaidt/status/1829165292460859869
A lot of people heard our discussion, and enjoyed how spirited and yet civil it was.
Might you include the link to this post in your daily email:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1
We have 3 more coming. We think we can prove causality using just the existing experiments.
thanks for considering it.
jon”
TC again: I received this email this morning, and told Jon I would post it on MR without response from me, so here it is.
From Reed and Logchies
Introduction. Your analysis produces a statistically insignificant estimate. Is it because the effect is negligibly different from zero? Or because your research design does not have sufficient power to achieve statistical significance? Alternatively, you read that “The median statistical power [in empirical economics] is 18%, or less” (Ioannidis et al., 2017) and you wonder if the article you are reading also has low statistical power. By the end of this blog, you will be able to easily answer both questions. Without doing any programming.
An Online App. In this post, we show how to calculate statistical power post-estimation for those who are not familiar with R. To do that, we have created a Shiny App that does all the necessarily calculating for the researcher (CLICK HERE).
Here is the link and the full story.
What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed. Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio. Here is Musa on Twitter.
So what should I ask?
Claude Reviews You!
I asked Claude to read my post, Go for the Gold! on using inequality in the NFL and NBA to get a different perspective on income inequality. I then asked Claude, “Which are the best comments showing they understood the op-ed and responded in a productive and reasonable way either critically or positively?” And following that “Which are the least informed, least useful comments?” Here are Claude’s answers for the best comments and the original comments (no indent on Claude):
Jack of all disciplines (2024-08-19 09:26:51):
The NFL is a clever analogy, but were this not such a small part of the economy we’d surely have fights over value creation, opportunity, and fairness even if we could measure performance in other careers as well as we can in professional athletics. Genes matter a lot for economic outcomes, for example. Is this fair or unfair? We’d be fighting a lot about that question even if we could provide every reasonable opportunity for everyone to increase their human capital to their full potential and could measure one’s contribution to society perfectly.
This comment acknowledges the NFL analogy as clever while pointing out its limitations. It expands on the discussion by noting that genetics play a large role in economic outcomes beyond just athletics, raising thoughtful questions about fairness and opportunity that go beyond the original analogy.
Marginalist Cormac (2024-08-19 11:42:54):
The point that most of the comments here are unwilling to accept is a undeniable fact of reality:
Every equal society known to man in practice has been way, way poorer than the more unequal societies. Across the board: poorer economically, socially, with more poverty, more resentment, less freedom, less access to health and leisure, less optimistic and less dynamic.
Voila!
While brief, this comment shows understanding of the op-ed’s broader implications. It productively shifts the discussion to empirical outcomes, noting the historical correlation between inequality and overall societal prosperity. This adds a valuable perspective to consider alongside the ethical arguments presented in the original piece.
Saturn (2024-08-19 08:10:08):
The analogy makes me think that Alex is now sympathetic to strong government, unions and price controls/salary caps. Go Kamala!
This comment, while brief, cleverly turns the op-ed’s argument on its head in a thought-provoking way. By suggesting that the NFL analogy actually supports “strong government, unions and price controls/salary caps,” the commenter highlights potential inconsistencies in using the NFL as a model for free-market economics. This response shows a keen understanding of the op-ed’s premise and critically engages with it in a witty and insightful manner.
Alex again: Here are Claude’s answers for the worst comments. In this case I do not include the original comment but I checked and Claude is correct. EdR is usually much better!
It’s much easier to agree on the worst than the best comments. I would have no problem letting Claude delete the worst comments.
- Skeptical American (2024-08-19 08:37:25): This comment attacks Bernie Sanders personally rather than engaging with the content of the op-ed. It uses inflammatory language and makes accusations without providing evidence or constructive criticism. This type of comment doesn’t contribute to a reasoned debate about inequality.
- EdR (2024-08-19 14:26:49): This comment veers off-topic to make personal attacks against Kamala Harris, including unsubstantiated claims about her personal life. It doesn’t address the arguments in the op-ed and instead engages in inflammatory rhetoric that doesn’t contribute to a productive discussion about inequality.
Hat tip: Robin Hanson who suggested the experiment.
Emergent Ventures 36th cohort
Unmol Sharma, Ontario, for work on purple sulfur bacteria to make hydrogen.
Andrew Gau, Stanford, robotics for the science lab.
James Edward Dillard, Atlanta area, AI and local reporting.
Jim Larsen, Farmington, New Mexico, energy, geothermal energy, and Indonesia,
Mohit Deepak Agarwal, Stanford, LLMs and ancient texts, through Perseus.
Rohit Krishnan, San Francisco, to run mid-career sabbatical program for interesting doers and thinkers.
Yuan Sui, Toronto/Harvard, to work at Harvard on neurosystems and the brain.
Kevin Zhu, Palo Alto, AI and child protection.
Muhammad Hunain, NYC, 18, space shields to protect satellies.
Vaishnav Sunil, NYC, writing and podcasting, including on talent.
Andrew Wu and Holden Mui, MIT, to compose and play the piano music of Holden.
Alan Chen, Austin, high schooler, robotics, AI, and assembly.
Ishir Rao, Chatham, NJ, high school, bio and AI and neurodegeneraton.
Adam Cheairs, Boston, high school, general career support, issues of sustainable development.
Nicholas Reville and Alex Jutca, San Francisco, RCTs to study the ability of GLP-1 drugs to alleviate addictions.
Here are previous winners of Emergent Ventures. Here is Nabeel’s software for querying about EV winners.
Yes, strong talent is getting younger and younger
Except for the tank tops, this could be a bunch of professionals on a boisterous equity trading floor. In fact, it’s a cohort of 15- to 18-year-old students at a two-day free seminar getting a taste of high finance. The session ended with a simulation in which they each ran fictitious $20 million portfolios for more than an hour.
If the training seems intense, it is. From Morgan Stanley to Citadel, the titans of finance are spanning the globe to find ever-younger talent to eventually fill their ranks with the best and brightest. That’s creating opportunities for firms like AmplifyME Ltd., which for years has run seminars for university students, and is now extending them to high schoolers in places like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Here is the full Bloomberg story by Lulu Yilun Chen. The article has further points of interest. The winner is eighteen, and he started in on related activities at the age of fourteen. Via John De Palma.
The Intellectual Roots of YIMBYism
At the Democratic National Convention former President Obama came out strongly in favor of housing deregulation saying “we need to build more homes and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that make it harder to build homes”. Robert Kwasny asks on X, “What are the intellectual roots of present-day YIMBYism?”
Looking at MR I think the first truly YIMBY post was a 2005 guest post by Tim Harford, Red tape and housing prices, pointing to a Slate article by Steven Landsburg. Here’s Landsburg:
Instead of the traditional formula “housing price equals land price + construction costs + reasonable profit,” we seem to be seeing something more like “housing price equals land price + constructions costs + reasonable profit + mystery component.” And, most interestingly, the mystery component varies a lot from city to city.
Even in cities like San Francisco, where there’s little room to build and land is consequently dear (on the order of $85,000 per quarter acre, compared with $2,200 for Dallas), you can’t use land prices to explain away housing prices. The mystery component in San Francisco housing—that is, the amount left over when you subtract land prices and construction costs from house prices—is the highest in the country.
Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania have computed these mystery components for about two dozen American cities. They speculate that the mystery component is essentially a “zoning tax.” That is, zoning and other restrictions put a brake on competitive forces and keep housing prices up. (Read one of their papers here.)
Zoning’s Steep Price, the Glaeser and Gyourko paper is actually from 2002 (a popular version of their NBER piece presented that same year at the NYFed) so you can see back in the old days it took years for ideas to circulate even among the bloggers! Nevertheless, 22 years from NBER paper to Presidential campaign is a great accomplishment. I see Glaeser and Gyourko as the YIMBY fountainhead. All hail Glaeser and Gyourko!
MR continued to promote housing deregulation on and off for years but I think it picked up around 2017 which is when the first YIMBY reference I can find on MR appeared in an assorted link. Here’s Tyler in 2017 pointing to a job market paper on how regulation increases housing prices and here is me in early 2018 on Why Housing in California is Unaffordable. The increase in research on this topic gave us something to talk about which is an interesting model of how ideas are transmitted.
Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have picked up YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that deregulation, anti-zoning, pro-growth, pro-developers would seem more compatible with Republican rhetoric and political support. Indeed, Zoning’s Steep Price was published in Cato’s Regulation and the assorted link which introduced YIMBY to MR was to an article blaming YIMBY on libertarians, Peter Theil and tech bros! (Congratulations Jeremy Stoppelman for an extremely effective EA donation!)
While it might have started out as being coded libertarian, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias are to be credited with pushing YIMBY and housing growth among Democratic elites. (Jon Favreau, an Obama speech writer, says Obama sounds like Ezra Klein!) But it’s not too late for Republicans to come home. Can’t we all agree on building more? Read Bryan Caplan in the NYTimes and buy his book!
Addendum: Tyler traces the intellectual roots of YIMBY back much further to Nicolas Barbon’s An Apology for the Builder which is also recommended by Marc Andreessen. For Britain, Sam Bowman points Mark Pennington’s excellent 2002 monograph Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-Use Planning (pdf).
My excellent Conversation with Nate Silver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias, gambling’s origins in divination, what kinds of betting Nate would ban, why he’s been limited on several of the New York sports betting sites, how game theory changed poker tournaments, whether poker players make for good employees, running and leaving FiveThirtyEight, why funky batting stances have disappeared, AI’s impact on sports analytics, the most underrated NBA statistic, Sam Bankman-Fried’s place in “the River,” the trait effective altruists need to develop, the stupidest risks Tyler and Nate would take, prediction markets, how many monumental political decisions have been done under the influence of drugs, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why shouldn’t people gamble only in the positive sum game? Take the US stock market — that certainly seems to be one of them — and manufacture all the suspense you want. Learn about the companies, the CEO. Get your thrill that way and don’t do any other gambling. Why isn’t that just better for everyone?
SILVER: Look, I’m not necessarily a fan of gambling for gambling’s sake. Twice a year, I’ll be in casinos and in Las Vegas a lot. Twice a year, I’ll have a friend who is like, “Let’s just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks,” and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think, at least in principle, I have an edge, or at least can fool myself into thinking I have an edge.
Sometimes, with the sports stuff, you probably know deep down you’re roughly break-even or something like that. You’re doing some smart things, like looking at five different sites and finding a line that’s best, which wipes out some but not all of the house edge. But no, I’m not a huge fan of slot machines, certainly. I think they are very gnarly and addictive in various ways.
COWEN: They limit your sports betting, don’t they?
SILVER: Yes, I’ve been limited by six or seven of the nine New York retail sites.
COWEN: What’s the potential edge they think you might have?
SILVER: It’s just that. If you’re betting $2,000 on the Wizards-Hornets game the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, you’re clearly not a recreational bettor. Just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early because the line’s early and you don’t have price discovery yet. The early lines are often very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like “Will this player get X number of rebounds?” or things like that. If you have a knack for — if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it’s -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information . . .
It’s a very weird game. One thing I hope people are more aware of is that a lot of the sites — and some are better than others — but they really don’t want winning players. Their advertising has actually changed. It used to be, they would say for Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, “Hey, you’re a smart guy” — the ads are very cynical — “You’re a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don’t you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money, and literally, you’ll be sleeping with supermodels in two months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings.”
And:
COWEN: If we could enforce just an outright ban, what’s the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?
SILVER: I’m more of a libertarian than a strict utilitarian, I think.
COWEN: Sure, but what’s the utilitarian price of being a libertarian?
Recommended, interesting and engaging throughout. And yes, we talk about Luka too. Here is my first 2016 CWT with Nate, full of predictions I might add, and here is Nate’s very good new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
Moms Against Price Gouging
An excellent essay by John Cochrane:
Uber surge pricing was an important lesson to me. I loved it. I could always get a car if I really needed one, and I could see how much extra I was paying and decide if I didn’t need it. I was grateful that Uber let me pay other people to postpone their trip for a while, and send a loud signal that more drivers are needed. But drivers reported that everyone else hated it and felt cheated.
This cultural and moral disapproval came home to me strongly about 25 years ago. We were driving from Chicago to Boston in our minivan, with 4 young children, dog, and my mother. We got to upstate NY, and needed to stop for the night. This was before cell phones and the internet, so the common thing to do was just pull of at a big freeway intersection, marked food, phone, gas, lodging, and see what’s available. Nothing. We tried hotel after hotel. We asked them to call around. Nothing. It turns out this was the weekend of Woodstock II. As the evening wore on, the children were turning in to pumpkins. Finally we found a seedy Super-8 motel that had 2 rooms left, for $400. This was back when Super-8 motel rooms were about $50 at most. I said immediately “Thank you, we’ll take them!” My mom was furious. “How dare he charge so much!” I tried hard to explain. “If he charged $50, or $100, those rooms would have been gone long ago and we’d be sleeping in the car tonight. Thank him and be grateful! He’s a struggling immigrant, running a business. We don’t need presents from people who run Super-8s in upstate New York.” But, though an amazing, smart, wise, and well-traveled woman, she wasn’t having it. Nothing I could do would persuade her that the hotel owner wasn’t being terrible in “taking advantage of us.”
It is surely morally worthy to give what you have to your neighbors in time of need, especially the less fortunate. But we should not demand gifts. And appropriation of property by threat of force, turning off the best mechanism we know for alleviating scarcity, does not follow. Moral feelings are a terrible guide for laws.
If we can’t get the moms on board we are going to have a tough time. Still, I feel confident that the Cochranes are ensuring that the generational trauma stops with them.