Category: History
How has human DNA evolved?
The full title of this paper is “Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.” It truly has an all-star cast of authors, including David Reich and Eric S. Lander, and also numerous others at top schools. I did read through this paper, but understood it only in part. In any case, here is the abstract:
We present a method for detecting evidence of natural selection in ancient DNA time-series data that leverages an opportunity not utilized in previous scans: testing for a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14000 years and 6510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection. Previous work showed that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution, but in the last ten millennia, many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. Discoveries include an increase from ∼0% to ∼20% in 4000 years for the major risk factor for celiac disease at HLA-DQB1; a rise from ∼0% to ∼8% in 6000 years of blood type B; and fluctuating selection at the TYK2 tuberculosis risk allele rising from ∼2% to ∼9% from ∼5500 to ∼3000 years ago before dropping to ∼3%. We identify instances of coordinated selection on alleles affecting the same trait, with the polygenic score today predictive of body fat percentage decreasing by around a standard deviation over ten millennia, consistent with the “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis that a genetic predisposition to store energy during food scarcity became disadvantageous after farming. We also identify selection for combinations of alleles that are today associated with lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance (scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling). These traits are measured in modern industrialized societies, so what phenotypes were adaptive in the past is unclear. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.9 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
I can report that nothing in their exposition seemed unreasonable or unsupported to me. But also the paper didn’t much change my worldview? There is the usual Twitter speculation about how this might apply to different groups, but note the data aggregation methods of the paper in fact require that various human groups (Europe only in the dataset) evolved in tandem and in similar ways over time. Without that assumption, the entire piece of work collapses.
*Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success*
An excellent book, stressing Rand’s Jewish heritage and its ongoing influence over her work, in spite of her self-professed atheism. The author is Alexandra Popoff, who wrote the wonderful biography of Vassily Grossman as well.
Here is one bit from the preface:
I believe that writers cannot hide themselves in a literary text, even when they later go back to revise it, as Rand had done. She had claimed that being Jewish did not matter to her, but her Jewishness was about the text, crrammed full of ideas, parables, paradoxes, questions, and arguments. Her fictional stories are moral and legal at the same time.
Rand was at one point slated to write the screenplay for a movie about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, though the project never realized. Here is an excerpt from the latter part of the book:
In her declining years Rand pursued her passion of stamp collecting. She attended stamp shows and auctions with fellow collectors, one of whom was her surgeon Dr. Cranston Holman. She shopped at Gimbels, her favorite store, played Scrabble with visitors, read Agatha Christie, watched TV cops and robbers, and in her mid-seventies, studied algebra.
The Burns and Heller biographies of Rand are excellent, but this one has plenty of fresh material and insight.
Civil War
I knew Civil War (now streaming on HBO/Max) was going to be good when just a minute or so in you see an explosion in the distance and only later do you hear the sound wave. [Mild spoilers may follow.] Shortly after, we meet war journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst in a standout performance). I thought, “She looks like Lee Miller,” and seconds later, the name is dropped. In the next shot, Lee is in a bathtub—a clear sign you’re in the hands of a master. It is not without import that Lee Miller photographed Dachau or a little less obviously that she was a pioneer of the surreal. Both will reappear in Civil War.
In a scene where the journalists need to buy gas, they offer $300. The armed attendant scoffs, “$300 will get you a ham sandwich.” “$300 Canadian,” comes the reply, telling you everything you need to know about the state of the economy.
Civil War was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also made Annihilation, Ex Machina, and the underrated Dredd (the 2012 reboot not the Stallone movie). Many viewers expected Civil War to serve some lectures about red state/blue state politics, but it doesn’t. Tyler makes astute comments about the hidden politics (and reviews the movie here).
My interest was more on how the film portrays war—war is hell but it’s also fucking amazing. The photojournalists at the heart of the story justify their actions as serving a higher purpose, but in reality, they have become addicted to the adrenaline. Civil War shares themes with Nightcrawler. The journalists also share more than they think with the sick fucks who also love war because it gives them a chance to torture and kill.
A great scene at the climax incarnates the “when one dies, another is born” trope. The lead character starts to feel and gain a moral code, only to be killed for it, while the apprentice simultaneously sheds hers, emerging as a new, amoral hero. And it’s all caught on film. Karma is a bitch. The transition isn’t surprising given the logic of the setup but it is handled with originality and grace.
Recommended, given the obvious strictures about violence and serious themes.
*Religious Influences on Economic Thinking*
The subtitle is The Origins of Modern Economics, and the author is Benjamin M. Friedman. Here is the book’s home page, you can order here. I very much look forward to reading this one. Here is my earlier CWT with Ben Friedman.
From the comments, on moving to the suburbs
With Russ Roberts, on Vassily Grossman
Russ tweets:
In about two months I will be discussing Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman with @tylercowen on our respective podcasts. Read along with us if you’d like. 872 pages so start soon. It starts slowly. Just gets better and better.
So what should Russ and I talk about, and here I am asking for Grossman-related queries and content only?
How much did land reform help Taiwan?
We study Taiwan’s landmark 1950s land reform, long seen as central to its growth miracle. Phase II of reform—which redistributed formerly Japanese public lands—reduced tenancy, boosted rice yields, and increased the share of labor in agriculture. By contrast, phase III— which reduced tenancy by breaking up larger estates—did not increase agricultural productivity and pushed labor (in particular, female labor) out of agriculture into manufacturing. Phase II likely increased yields by lifting crop choice constraints, while phase III may have created farms too small to be economically viable. However, phase II can still explain at most one-sixth of observed 1950s rice yield growth. These results challenge the longstanding view that land reform was a major factor behind Taiwan’s economic takeoff, and highlight the varying effects of different forms of land redistribution.
Here is the full paper by Oliver Kim and Jen-Kuan Wang. Here is Oliver’s very useful Twitter thread.
Prescriptive versus Performance Codes
A great piece in the NYTimes on the history and future of factory produced buildings:
But the most remarkable difference between the United States and Sweden is regulatory. Building codes in the U.S. try to make buildings safe by prescribing exactly what materials must be used and how (a prescriptive code). In Sweden, the government does this by setting goals and letting builders come up with a way to achieve them (a performance code).
So, for instance, U.S. building codes dictate the thickness of drywall that must be used for fire resistance, how many layers are needed and how many nails are required to attach it. In Sweden, the code requires that a wall must resist burning for two hours, say, and lets engineers and manufacturers figure out how to accomplish that. The regulator’s job is to check the engineer’s work.
The result of both is fire resistance and structural safety, but in the United States, each residential building needs to be granted a permit. During construction, work often halts for inspectors to make periodic visual inspections. That contributes to a stop-and-go pace that frustrates pretty much everybody except lenders, who get interest on financing. Sweden’s codes require more work on the front end when builders have to demonstrate that their methods are up to snuff, but factory processes that comply with the performance code can be certified. This encourages innovative solutions and results in less waste.
As an example of how a performance code leads to innovation:
..Before Sweden adopted its performance-based code in 1995, wood buildings had been limited to two stories; almost overnight, wooden buildings could be as tall as engineers could prove safe.
Addendum: See the comments for useful argument that the US code is more performance based than the NYTimes article suggests. What would be very useful is to hear from someone with experience in both systems.
Was the Great Stagnation originally a problem of human capital?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one key part of the argument:
There are numerous theories as to why [the Great Stagnation started in the early 1970s]: oil price shocks, more stringent government regulations, an increased emphasis on environmental protection over economic growth, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary order. In my 2011 book The Great Stagnation, I blame the disappearance of the low-hanging fruit that resulted from powerful machines and plentiful fossil fuels.
Some of those likely are factors. Now an economist, Nicholas Reynolds of the University of Essex, claims to have found a new villain in this economic story: a negative shock to the quality of human capital in America.
Americans born after 1947 and before the mid-1960s — the first of whom were just entering their prime working years in 1971 — did not see economic gains comparable to those of their predecessors. But the problems of this cohort are more far-reaching. They had more problems as young children, and they did worse in school in the 1960s, accounting for the educational declines of that era, such as lower test scores and higher dropout rates.
Birthweights also declined in the 1980s, a sign that the post-1947 cohort was less healthy, most of all when it comes to maternal health. You might think that development is due to intervening economic factors. But the post-1947 world is still wealthier than what came before, so it is not obvious why an economic slowdown, but not absolute decline, should have created such significant health problems.
It’s not just that Americans born after 1955 stopped getting taller, whereas Europeans didn’t. There are deeper problems, such as the alarming rise in the midlife mortality rate since 1999. These “deaths of despair” may also be a legacy from this 1947 break in Americans’ quality of health.
I am not sure that is all true, but if so it is very important and would constitute a significant revision in our understanding of 20th century economic history. And what happened in the late 1940s? There it gets tricky:
The obvious question is what exactly happened in about 1947 to put the US on this less constructive path. There is no obvious smoking gun, but the cohort decline seems to start in adolescence, prior to entering labor markets. So perhaps it is something in the structure of American society, or in US public health practices, rather than stemming from traditional macroeconomic factors.
One possible cause is an increase in postwar automobile usage, and thus higher levels of lead exposure, given the lead additives in gasoline at the time. There is no direct evidence for this claim, but lead has been shown to have significant negative impacts on human development, and some researchers blame it for the later higher US crime rates.
Still, it is not obvious why lead should lead to such a sharp break in the data. And if lead is the main culprit, then there should be major improvements forthcoming, as lead additives were fully banned from American gasoline in 1996, with a phase-out starting in the 1970s.
A second possibility is that the baby boom generation was so large that there was a decline in quality of care given to each child.
Very much worth a ponder, and then some.
Obama’s space legacy?
Bucking his central planning instincts, Obama embraced a surprisingly laissez-faire approach to space flight that angered political allies and opponents alike.
In doing so, however, he tapped a reservoir of ingenuity and innovation that has ushered in a new age of space flight and exploration…
In her forthcoming book Bureaucrats and Billionaires, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and reporter Michael Sheetz trace the origins of NASA’s commercial crew program, a revolutionary human spaceflight program that joins private aerospace manufacturers such SpaceX and Boeing with NASA’s astronauts.
Garver writes that this hybrid allows space flight “at a fraction of the cost of previous government owned and operated systems.” A decade ago, however, the program faced opposition seemingly from every side.
The saga began early in 2010 when President Obama announced his intention to abort NASA’s Constellation program—NASA’s crew spaceflight program—correctly pointing out it was “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation.”
The decision angered almost everyone. As Garver and Sheetz write, the program was “extremely popular with Congress, and the contractors who were benefiting from the tax dollars coming their way.” An impressive array of stakeholders from aerospace companies, trade associations, and astronauts to lobbyists, Congressional delegations, and NASA pushed back.
The resistance was immense.
NASA chief Charles Bolden, while choking back tears, compared the decision to “a death in the family.” Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer ominously noted the move would give the Russians “a monopoly on rides into space.” Congressman Pete Olson (R-Texas) called the decision “a crippling blow to America’s human spaceflight program.”
Few commentators seemed to even notice the $6 billion in spending over five years to support commercially built spacecraft to launch NASA’s astronauts into outer space…
By pulling the plug on Constellation, Obama had unleashed the power of markets and competition. While many associate competition with dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest tropes, competition is a healthy and productive force.
Here is the full story, by John Miltimore at FEE (!). Via Matt Yglesias.
Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery
This paper studies the long-run effects of slavery and restrictive Jim Crow institutions on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. We track individual-level census records of each Black family from 1850 to 1940, and extend our analysis to neighborhood-level outcomes in 2000 and surname-based outcomes in 2023. We show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families whose ancestors were free before the Civil War. The disparities between the two groups have persisted substantially because most families enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery ended. In a regression discontinuity design based on ancestors’ enslavement locations, we show that Jim Crow institutions sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress in the long run.
That paper, by Lukas Althoff and Hugh Reichardt, will be coming out in the QJE, was it Florian Ederer who mentioned this on Twitter?
Mobility vs. density in American history
American history is much more about rapid and cheap transport than about extremes of population density. Even New York, our densest major city by far, became dense relatively late in American history. To this day, the United States is not extremely dense, not say by European or East Asian standards.
But in American history, themes of horses, faster ships, safer ships, turnpikes, canals, our incredible river network, railroads, cars, and planes have been absolutely central to our development. America has put in a very strong performance in all those areas. When it comes to density, we have a smaller number of victories. The moon landing was mobility, but not density.
Many of our Founding Fathers were in fact a bit suspicious of density. So why not play to your own cultural and also geographic strengths? After all, the United States is arguably the most successful country.
American SMSAs are so often more impressive than are American cities per se.
These days I see an urbanist movement that is more obsessed with density than with mobility. I favor relaxing or eliminating many restrictions on urban density, and American cities would be better as a result. Upward economic mobility would rise, and Oakland would blossom. But still I am more interested in mobility, which I see as having a greater upside.
One issue is simply that urban density seems to lower fertility. It is not obvious the same can be said for mobility.
And do you really want to spread and replicate the politics of our most dense areas?
Is not mobility rather than density better for raising a class of young men who will fight to defend their country?
Do not mobile, scattered immigrants assimilate better than densely packed ones?
The density crowd is very interested in high-speed rail, which I (strongly) favor for the Northeast corridor, but otherwise am not excited about, at least not for America. Otherwise, the density crowd works to raise the status of a lot of low-speed means of transport, for instance bicycles. Bicycles are also precarious, and their riders break the traffic laws at a very high frequency. I do not wish to ban bicycles, but I do wish we could program them not to run red lights. (I wonder how much the demand for them would then fall.)
I prefer to look to a better future where higher-speed transport is both affordable and green. Ultimately, low-speed transport is a poor country thing. It is also a poor country thing to have a lot of different speeds on your roads at the same time (I will never forget my first India visit in 2004). High variance of speed also can prove dangerous, as evidenced by the research of Charles Lave.
I do not want to see the United States moving in poor country directions.
If you are obsessed with mobility, you will attach great importance to Uber, Waymo, self-driving vehicles more generally, and better aviation. To me these are major advances, and they all can get much, much better yet.
I do not know if current plans for Neom, in Saudi Arabia, can prove workable or affordable. Nonetheless, the idea of rapid transport along “The Line” at least represents an attractive mode of thought. A better direction for future exploration than bicycles.
These points were obvious to many people in the 1960s. The Jetsons had their (safe) flying cars. The ultimate innovation in Star Trek was the transporter.
Jane Jacobs was obsessed with the West Village, an amazing part of America. Yet, as far as I can tell (I haven’t read all her work), she didn’t write much about how to get more people visiting, and learning from, the West Village. Hers was the perspective of the insider who already lives there. That is one valid perspective, but not the only one.
Robert Moses was obsessed with building the Cross-Bronx Expressway. That was a mixed blessing (see Robert Caro), but it did reflect his interest in mobility rather than density per se.
Today the world is full of anti-tourist movements, opposed to at least some kinds of mobility. I prefer to push back on most of those, using Pigouvian fees to protect Venice and other locales when needed.
Ireland strikes me as the one country today that truly should be obsessed with density, not mobility. Before 1840, the country had many more people than it does today. And it could once again, easily. In the meantime, there are far too few structures and the cost of living is very high. Dublin and Belfast also need more cultural infrastructure (requiring higher populations) to be bigger draws for talented foreign workers.
The correct answers here really are going to depend on the countries and regions under consideration.
Switzerland, a highly successful country, also pays great heed to mobility. The Swiss tunnels through the Alps are some of Europe’s greatest achievements, though today we take them for granted. And the Swiss are trying to do road upgrades without slowing traffic. You don’t have to put more people in Bern if it is easier to get to Bern, and away from Bern.
Mobility often gives you more algorithmic freedom than does density.
So, at least amongst the urbanists, perhaps density is these days a wee bit overrated? After all, the net flow of American citizens still is to the suburbs.
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).
*Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation*
By Yaroslav Hrytsak, I found this to be one of the very best overviews of Ukrainian history and certainly the most conceptual. This passage concerns the 1914-1945 period and the frequency of change:
In Lviv — eight [the nature of the regime changed eight times]. In Kyiv, the government changed hands eleven times and at one railway station in Donbas up to twenty-seven times during the first half of 1919 alone…
In just fifteen years (1932-1947) there were multiple genocides on Ukrainian lands. (I use genocide here in the broad sense proposed by the creator of the term, Raphael Lemkin: acts of mass violence that threatened the existence of entire groups…) Such genocidal acts included: the liquidation of the ‘kulaks’ as a class in 1930-31; the Holodomor of 1932-33; the ‘Polish’ and ‘Greek’ operations of the NKVD; the Holocaust against the Jews; the elimination of the Roma; the Nazi destruction of Soviet prisoners of war (1941-44); attacks against the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists (the Volyn massacre of 1943); attacks on Ukrainians by the Polish underground. Also three mass deportations: of Crimean Tatars from Crimea (1944); of the Polish population from the western lands of the Ukrainian SSR and of the Ukrainian population from the southeastern lands of communist Poland.
…How can we explain the intensity of violence on Ukrainian lands in 1914-45?
Recommended, but of course this is not in every way a happy story.
*Vertigo*
The author is Harald Jähner, and the subtitle is The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918-1933. I quite enjoyed this book, which focuses on elements such as the dance, or the growing prominence of the automobile, as essential elements of Weimar. Here is one good passage:
In the early 1920s most people didn’t go to see a particular film, they just went to the cinema. For that reason, many cinema owners didn’t think it necessary to set a particular time for the screening to start. Films were just shown one after the other, ini any order. People came and went, they pushed their way along the rows of seats in the middle of the film and watched for as long as they flet like it. If the projectionist wanted to go home early he just played the film speeded up, silent films can take that. More importantly, there was no need for the audience to listen, so they made any amount of noise, chattted, applauded or commented bawdily on the action.
Recommended, and the author stresses just how rampant sexual harassment was in Weimar employment relations, even relative to other, earlier periods of time.
Here is the link.