Category: Science

The economics of dinosaur brand names

by  Tyler Cowen in

But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck.

The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a young T. rex who died before reaching maturity, or does it represent a different but related species of dinosaur known as a Nanotyrannus?

The dispute has produced reams of scientific research and decades of debate, polarizing paleontologists along the way. Now, with dinosaur fossils increasingly fetching eye-popping prices at auction, the once-esoteric dispute has begun to ripple through auction houses and galleries, where some see the T. rex name as a valuable brand that can more easily command high prices.

Here is more from the NYT.

Why Do Poor People Commit More Crime?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.

A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.

The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.

Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.

A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.

In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:

Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.

Moving to Opportunity?

by  Tyler Cowen in

But inside the lab, Chetty and his colleagues have not always practiced what their research preaches, several former employees say. When hiring for their prestigious “pre-doctoral fellowship” program, for instance, the lab uses a rubric that explicitly favors students from the very colleges that its own research has called out for reinforcing elitist systems. Opportunity Insights didn’t have its first Black pre-doc until 2021. Seven former employees who spoke to The Chronicle about their experiences were bothered by what they saw as contradictions between the lab’s practices and its stated values.

After landing the fellowship, some employees said they were also disturbed to find a culture of overwork that left them fried but feeling forced to impress in order to secure a letter of recommendation to a top Ph.D. program. For some employees, it took a toll on their health. Harvard even reviewed the lab following claims of unsustainable working hours.

That is excerpted from the (gated) Chronicle of Higher Education.

Of course I am with Chetty here, noting I have no idea how good their personnel selections are (though a priori I would be surprised if they were not very good).  In any case, once again you can see the tension between the meritocratic elements of the top schools and the rhetoric they claim to live by.  This is reaching an absurd point.  “Culture of overwork”?  C’mon people, no one has to join up.  You don’t think Chetty “overworks” very very hard?  Isn’t that exactly the opportunity on tap, admittedly not for everyone?

How about “feeling forced to impress in order to secure a letter of recommendation to a top Ph.D. program”?  I am in fact opposed to this whole pre-doc thing, but I don’t blame Chetty and co.  “Forced to impress”?  On what basis are good letters supposed to be handed out?   Are we not also “forced to impress” the people we want to date and marry?  Do start-ups with?

Someone needs to “go the full Ayn Rand” on this whole thing.  Part of the real shame is that Chetty and co. are in no real position to do that.

John Stuart Mill on empirical economics and causal inference

by  Tyler Cowen in

Written by me, here is a passage from GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Should We Care?

A System of Logic covers many different topics, but for our purposes the most important discussion is Mill’s treatment “Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry,” sometimes called “Mill’s Methods” and indeed receiving their own Wikipedia page. Mill outlines different manners in which causes and effects might be correlated, or not, and what we can infer from such patterns, and how difficult it can be to sort out actual cause and effect from the data. He refers to the “direct method of agreement,” the “method of difference,” “joint method of agreement difference,” the “method of residue,” and the “method of concomitant variations,” all as ways of trying to make correct or at least better inferences from the data.

I’ll spare you the details on the full argument, but in essence Mill was trying to figure out how to do causal inference econometrics, but with words only. That enterprise was doomed to fail, but it gives us insight into what Mill thought was by far the most important question in social science, namely causal inference when faced with complex underlying chains of cause and effect. For Mill, everything is what we would now call “an identification problem,” and this understanding is clearest in Mill’s chapters “Fallacies of Generalization” and “Fallacies of Ratiocination.” Mill also serves up a remarkably on-target discussion of how the different nature of social science problems, and their possibly greater complexity, can lead to identification problems that are not necessarily present in the natural sciences – see his chapter “Of the Chemical, or Experimental, Method in the Social Science.” That entire approach is remarkably 2020s in orientation, and you won’t find earlier history of thought books giving Mill much if any credit for this.

In a funny way, Mill was ahead of Milton Friedman in his understanding here. Friedman knew much more statistics, but in his economics he often presented causal inference as fairly straightforward. In his Monetary History of the United States, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, the reader does get the impression that the historical correlations, and ordinary least squares techniques, do in fact show that the money supply is a central driver of nominal income, given the relative stability of money demand. Later, the real business cycle theorists were to challenge that inference, and suggest that often it was income that was causing the money supply. That is a kind of complex challenge Mill seemed quite comfortable with in A System of Logic, whereas Friedman and Schwartz assigned higher power to common sense approaches to cause and effect.

Mill remains in my eyes one of the most underrated thinkers.

No Child Left Behind: Accelerate Malaria Vaccine Distribution!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My post What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination, galvanized the great team at 1DaySooner. Here is Zacharia Kafuko writing at Foreign Policy:

Right now, enough material to make 20 million doses of a lifesaving malaria vaccine is sitting on a shelf in India, expected to go unused until mid-2024. Extrapolating from estimates by researchers at Imperial College London, these doses—enough for 5 million children—could save more than 31,000 lives, at a cost of a little more than $3,000 per life. But current plans by the World Health Organization to distribute the vaccine are unclear and have been criticized as lacking urgency.

…Vaccine deployment and licensure is an incredibly complex scientific, legal, and logistical process involving numerous parties across international borders. Roughly speaking, after the WHO recommends vaccines (such as R21), it must also undertake a prequalification process and receive recommendations from its Strategic Advisory Group of Experts before UNICEF is allowed to purchase vaccines. Then Gavi—a public-private global health alliance—can facilitate delivery by national governments, which must propose their anticipated demand to Gavi and make plans to distribute the vaccines.

Prequalification can take as long as 270 days after approval. However, the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out within weeks of WHO’s approval, using the separate EUL process rather than the more standard prequalification process that R21 is now undergoing.

For COVID-19 vaccines, EUL was available because the pandemic was undeniably an emergency. Given the staggering scale of deaths of children in sub-Saharan Africa every year, shouldn’t we also be treating malaria vaccine deployment as an emergency?

The R21 malaria vaccine does not legally qualify for EUL because malaria already has a preventive and curative toolkit available. My concern is that this normalizes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year in Africa.

We can move more quickly and save more lives, if we have the will.

Space Tourism Revisited, Again

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:

The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?

Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.

Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.

The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D

by  Tyler Cowen in

We study the relationships between corporate R&D and three components of public science: knowledge, human capital, and invention. We identify the relationships through firm-specific exposure to changes in federal agency R\&D budgets that are driven by the political composition of congressional appropriations subcommittees. Our results indicate that R&D by established firms, which account for more than three-quarters of business R&D, is affected by scientific knowledge produced by universities only when the latter is embodied in inventions or PhD scientists. Human capital trained by universities fosters innovation in firms. However, inventions from universities and public research institutes substitute for corporate inventions and reduce the demand for internal research by corporations, perhaps reflecting downstream competition from startups that commercialize university inventions. Moreover, abstract knowledge advances per se elicit little or no response. Our findings question the belief that public science represents a non-rival public good that feeds into corporate R&D through knowledge spillovers.

Emphasis added by me.  That is a new NBER working paper by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer & Hansen Zhang.

Follow the science?

by  Tyler Cowen in

We report the results of a forecasting experiment about a randomized controlled trial that was conducted in the field. The experiment asks Ph.D. students, faculty, and policy practitioners to forecast (1) compliance rates for the RCT and (2) treatment effects of the intervention. The forecasting experiment randomizes the order of questions about compliance and treatment effects and the provision of information that a pilot experiment had been conducted which produced null results. Forecasters were excessively optimistic about treatment effects and unresponsive to item order as well as to information about a pilot. Those who declare themselves expert in the area relevant to the intervention are particularly resistant to new information that the treatment is ineffective. We interpret our results as suggesting that we should exercise caution when undertaking expert forecasting, since experts may have unrealistic expectations and may be inflexible in altering these even when provided new information.

Even at current margins, researcher fallibility remains an undertreated topic.  It should be at the center of any approach to method or philosophy of science, rather than the abstract principles we are usually fed.  In any case, that is from a new paper by Mats Ahrenshop, Miriam Golden, Saad Gulzar, and Luke Sonnet.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

A Genius Award for Airborne Transmission

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic was the early insistence by the WHO and the CDC that COVID was not airborne. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” the WHO tweeted on March 28, 2020, accompanied by a large graphic (at right). Even at that time, there was plenty of evidence that COVID was airborne. So why was the WHO so insistent that it wasn’t?

Ironically, some of the resistance to airborne transmission can be traced back to a significant achievement in epidemiology. Namely, John Snow’s groundbreaking arguments that cholera was spread through water and food, not bad air (miasma). Snow’s theory took time to be accepted but when the story of germ theory’s eventual triumph came to be told, the bad air proponents were painted as outdated and ignorant. This sentiment was so pervasive among physicians and health officials that anyone suggesting airborne transmission of disease was vaguely suspect and tainted. Hence, the WHOs and CDCs readiness to label airborne transmission as dangerous, unscientific “misinformation” promulgated on social media (see the graphic). In reality, of course, the two theories were not at odds as one could easily accept that some germs were airborne. Indeed, there were experts in the physics of aerosols who said just that but these experts were siloed in departments of physics and engineering and not in medicine, epidemiology and public health. 

As a result of this siloing, we lost time and lives by telling people that they were fine if they kept to the 6ft “rule” and washed their hands, when what we should have been telling them was open the windows, clean the air with UVC, and get outside. Windows not windex.

Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech was one of the aerosol experts who took a prominent role in publicly opposing the WHO guidance and making the case for aerosol transmission (Jose-Luis Jimenez was another important example). Thus, it’s nice to see that Marr is among this year’s MacArthur “genius” award winners. A good interview with Marr is here.

It didn’t take a genius to understand airborne transmission but it took courage to put one’s reputation on the line and go against what seemed like the scientific consensus. Marr’s award is thus an award to a scientist for speaking publicly in a time of crisis. I hope it encourages others, both to speak up when necessary but also to listen.

Addendum: I didn’t take part in the aerosol debates but my wife, who has done research in aerosols and germs, told me early on that “of course COVID is airborne!” Wisely, I chose to take the word of my wife over that of the WHO and CDC.

AI Worship

by  Alex Tabarrok in

i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.

Sam Altman on Twitter. Clearly true.

I predict AI driven religions. At first these will begin as apps like, what would Jesus say? But the apps will quickly morph into talk to Jesus/Mohammed/Ram. Personal Jesus. Personal Ram. Personal Tyler. Then the AIs will start to generate new views from old texts. The human religious authorities will be out debated by the AIs so many people will come to see the new views as not heretical but closer to God than the old views. Fusion and fission religions will be born. As the AIs explore the space of religious views at accelerated pace, evolution will push into weirder and weirder mind niches.

What strange outcomes do you predict?

What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Compare two otherwise similar towns. In Town A  there have always been 1000 deaths every month from disease X. In contrast, Town B has been free of disease X for as long as anyone can remember until very recently when disease X suddenly started to kill 1000 people per month. A vaccine for disease X is developed. Which town should receive expedited vaccinations? 

From a utilitarian perspective, both towns present equally compelling cases for immediate vaccination (1). Vaccination will avert 1,000 deaths per month in either location. The ethical imperative is thus to act swiftly in both instances. Lives are lives. However, given human psychology and societal norms, Town B is more likely to be perceived as facing an “emergency,” whereas Town A’s situation may be erroneously dismissed as less dire because deaths are the status quo.

A case in point. The WHO just approved a malaria vaccine for use in children, the R21/Matrix-M vaccine. Great! There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s not 1000 deaths a month but more than 1000 deaths of children every day. The WHO, however, is planning on rolling out the vaccine next year.

Adrian Hill, one of the key scientists behind the vaccine is dismayed by the lack of urgency:

“Why would you allow children to die instead of distributing the vaccine? There’s no sensible answer to that — of course you wouldn’t,” Hill told the Financial Times. The SII said it “already” had capacity to produce 100mn doses annually.

…“There’s plenty of vaccine, let’s get it out there this year. We’ve done our best to answer huge amounts of questions, none of which a mother with a child at risk of malaria would be interested in.”

Hill is correct: the case for urgency is strong. More than a thousand children are dying daily and the Serum Institute already has 20 million doses on ice and is capable of producing 100 million doses a year. Why not treat this as an emergency?! Implicitly, however, people think that the case for urgency in Africa is weak because “what will another few months matter?” The benefits of vaccination in Africa are treated as small because they are measured relative to the total deaths that have already occurred. In contrast, vaccination for say COVID in the developed world (Town B) ended the emergency and restored normality thus saving a large percent of the deaths that might have occurred. But the percentages are irrelevant. This is a base rate fallacy, albeit the opposite of the one usually considered. Lives are lives, irrespective of the historical context.

Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, compared the timeframe with the swift rollout of the first Covid vaccines, which were distributed “within weeks” of approval.

“We’d like to see the same importance given to the malaria vaccine for children in Africa. We don’t want them sitting in a fridge in India,” he said. “We don’t think this would be fair to rural African countries if they were not provided with the same rapidity of review and supply.”

The term “emergency” inherently embodies the conundrum I highlight. Emergency is defined as an unexpected set of events or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. When formulating a response to an emergency, however, the focus should not be on whether the events were unexpected but on the resulting state. The resulting state is what is important. The resulting state is the end that legitimizes the means. The unexpected draws our attention–our emotional systems, like our visual systems, alert on change and movement–but what matters is not what draws our attention but the situational reality.

Lives are lives and we should act with all justifiable speed to save lives. The WHO should accelerate malaria vaccination for children in Africa.

(1) You might argue that in Town B the 1000 deaths are more unusual and thus more disruptive but you might also argue that Town A has undergone the deaths for so much longer that the case for speed as matter of justice is even greater. These are quibbles.

Are domesticated animals dumber than their wild relatives?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Highlights

  • Domestication is often thought to have a negative impact on the cognition of animals.

  • Domesticated animals deemed less cognitively capable than their wild relatives.

  • We reviewed 88 studies comparing cognitive abilities in domesticated and wild animals.

  • No clear impact of domestication on cognition was found.

  • Need to consider some constraints when interpreting domestication-cognition links.

That is from a new paper by Vitor Hugo Bessa Ferreira et.al., via Michelle Dawson.

My Conversation with Ada Palmer

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.

Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?

PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.

But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.

The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.

De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?

I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.

Interesting throughout.