Category: Science

Uncelebrated biographies

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nathan Labenz asks:

This got me thinking: what are the most compelling and informative biographies that remain uncelebrated?

"Uncelebrated by whom?" is of course the follow-up question.  Nonetheless I will put forward a few names: Jeremy Bentham, Leo Kanner, Norman Borlaug, Brahms and Stravinsky, Antoine Oleyant, a wide variety of 19th century German chemists, engineers, and scientists (who led a second Industrial Revolution), Montaigne, Thomas Bernhard, various French mathematicians, Simon Newcomb, Ramon Llull, Norbert Wiener, Babbage, and I would even say David Hume.

What are we to make of James K. Polk these days?  I am not sure.

Relative to their importance, their lives and exploits don't seem to receive much attention. In general, there are few good books (or movies) about the lives of famous economists.  Both Hayek and Friedman still lack good biographies, same with Samuelson and Arrow.  Smith, Keynes, and Nash are covered, but how many others? Why aren't there more scintillating biographies of engineers and second-tier scientists? It is harder to find important painters, even of the lower tiers, who have not received adequate biographic attention.

“Age and Great Invention”

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is from Benjamin Jones:

Great achievements in knowledge are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Using data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors, I find that the mean age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by 6 years over the 20th Century. I estimate shifts in life-cycle productivity and show that innovators have become especially unproductive at younger ages. Meanwhile, the later start to the career is not compensated for by increasing productivity beyond early middle age. I further show that the early life-cycle dynamics are closely related to variation in the age at Ph.D. and discuss a theory where accumulations of knowledge across generations lead innovators to seek more education over time. More generally, the results show that individual innnovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life-cycle, a trend that reduces, other things equal, the aggregate output of innovators. This drop in productivity is particularly acute if innovators’ raw ability is greatest when young.

Hat tip goes to Mike Gibson, read his post.

Here is a Gideon Rachmann column from today, on a similar but not exactly the same question.  I agree with his penultimate remark on the division of labor.

*The Great Stagnation*, excerpt

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my new eBook, here is one bit:

I’m also persuaded by the median income numbers because they are supported by related measurements of other magnitudes. For example, another way to study economic growth is to look not at median income but at national income, gdp, or gross domestic product, the total production of goods and services.  Charles I. Jones, an economist at Stanford University, has “disassembled” American economic growth into component parts, such as increases in capital investment, increases in work hours, increases in research and development, and other factors. Looking at 1950–1993, he found that 80 percent of the growth from that period came from the application of previously discovered ideas, combined with heavy additional investment in education and research, in a manner that cannot be easily repeated for the future. In other words, we’ve been riding off the past. Even more worryingly, he finds that now that we are done exhausting this accumulated stock of benefits, we are discovering new ideas at a speed that will drive a future growth rate of less than one-third of a percent (that’s a rough estimate, not an exact one, but it is consistent with the basic message here). It could be worse yet if the idea-generating countries continue to lose population, as we are seeing in Western Europe and Japan.

I do not hold the view that relative stagnation will last forever, only that it has lasted for thirty-seven years and that it will not end immediately.  Oddly, it is the so-called "economic right" — which complains bitterly about decades of increasing taxes and regulation and litigation and government privilege — which finds such a claim hardest to accept.

You can pre-order the eBook; the Amazon link is here, Barnes&Noble here, $4.00.  I offer further information on the book here.

Stata Resources

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here are some Stata resources that I have found useful. Statistics with Stata by Hamilton is good for beginners although it is overpriced. For the basics I like German Rodriguez’s free Stata tutorial best, good material can also be found at UCLA’s Stata starter kit and UNC’s Stata Tutorial; two page Stata is good for getting started quickly.

Christopher Baum’s book An Introduction to Modern Econometrics using Stata is excellent and worth the price. The world is indebted to Baum for a number of Stata programs such as NBERCycles which shades in NBER recession dates on time series graphs–this was a big help in producing graphs for our textbook!–so buy Baum’s book and support a public good.

I have found it hugely useful to peruse the proceedings of Stata meetings where you can find professional guides to using Stata to do advanced econometrics. For example, here is Austin Nichols on Regression Discontinuity and related methods, Robert Guitierrez on Recent Developments in Multilevel Modeling, Colin Cameron on Panel Data Methods and David Drukker on Dynamic Panel Models.

I found A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics very useful and then I lent it to someone who never returned it. I suppose they found it very useful as well. I haven’t bought another copy, since it is fairly easy to edit graphs in the newer versions of Stata. You can probably get by with this online guide.

German Rodriguez, mentioned earlier, has an attractively presented class on generalized linear models with lots of material. The LSE has a PhD class on Stata, here are the class notes: Introduction to Stata and Advanced Stata Topics.

Creating a map in Stata is painful since there are a host of incompatible file formats that have to be converted (I spent several hours yesterday working to convert a dBase IV to dBase III file just so I could convert the latter to dta). Still, when it works, it works well. Friedrich Huebler has some of the details.

The reshape command is often critical but difficult, here is a good guide.

Here are many more sources of links: Stata resources, Stata Links, Resources for Learning Stata, and Gabriel Rossman’s blog Code and Culture.

*FIxing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control*

by  Tyler Cowen in

For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them.  Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise — perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm.  In 1896, Albert Stiger, a vine rower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of hagelschiessen (hail shooting)  — basically declaring "war on the clouds" by firing cannon when storms threatened.  Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the "calm before the storm," or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.

That is from the new and quite good book by James Rodger Fleming.  If you are wondering, Windisch-Feistritz is now in Slovenia and it is known as Slovenska Bistrica.  It looks like this.

Should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Treat this as a balanced budget question, so it's not about fiscal policy.  Alternatively, imagine yourself as a benevolent philanthropist: should you support this area of research if you can do so as a free lunch?  Or should you try to hinder it?

I believe no one understands the underlying science much at all.  But there is some chance that the old science fiction movies are correct and that by time-traveling you alter the course of history, thereby obliterating the universe we used to have.  I'll count that as a net negative, while noting there is some chance we end up with a better universe.

On the plus side, the human race will die out anyway.  Time travel seems to yield a fairly safe haven.  As disaster approaches, keep going back in time a few days, or decades, and that asteroid will never hit you.  This is especially appealing if you are transporting back a body (upload?) which is programmed to be more or less immortal and you can take the technology with you, so as to keep on going back as time progresses.

On one side: immortal life for many of the last humans and thus immortality for the human race.  And with time they may learn how to thwart the asteriod.  On the other side: some probability of swapping universes.

So should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?

Since I cannot reread Heinlein, I should not read a biography of Heinlein

by  Tyler Cowen in

But I can browse one.  William H. Patterson's Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Learning Curve 1907-1948, would appear to be definitive.  The very thick volume one — over six hundred pages with notes – stops at 1948.  It is very well written and engaging and connects Heinlein to broader American history.  There is plenty on Heinlein and free love, Heinlein and H.G. Wells, Heinlein in the Navy, Heinlein and Missouri, and many other topics.

Why all the dead animals?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here's a list of the major cases.  Here is a Google Map.  From National Geographic, here is a responsible account.  Loud noises, fireworks, crashes, and an availability cascade seem to be the major hypotheses under consideration.  Cold weather and poisoning and hypoxia have been cited as well.  Don't forget the dead fishes and crabs; the world seems slightly more sub-Malthusian than before.

Here is Twitter on #deadbirds.  In Germany and Schweiz they are talking about "Vogelsterben" and fog; Schweiz had some previous cases over the last few years.  Here is a 2009 report from Western Australia, no one seemed to pay heed at the time.  There was talk of poison pesticides.  Here are many other reports of group animal deaths.  

This guy thinks it is all a strategy to scare people.

I'll chalk it up to two or three different causes, combined with coincidental clustering.  Is there betting on how many more cases will surface?

We are less willing to help the victims of man-made disasters

by  Tyler Cowen in

People are more willing to donate money to help victims of natural, as opposed to man-made, disasters. Hanna Zagefka and her team found this is because people generally perceive victims caught up in man-made disasters to be more responsible for their predicament and to be less active in helping themselves, as compared with victims of natural disasters.

There is much more here.

*The World in 2050*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Laurence C. Smith and the subtitle is Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future. 

This book is excellent on at least two questions:

1. Which environmental problems remain real, even taking into account the dynamic adjustment properties of markets?

2. Why the northern countries will grow in economic and political importance over the next forty years.

Excerpt:

Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water.  Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea.  For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps surprising prospect I see is reduced human presence and their return to a wilder state.

My main criticism of this book is that it does not direct enough criticism at government water subsidies and their role in worsening this environmental problem. 

Here is the book's rather non-Hayekian close:

No doubt we humans will survive anything, even if polar bears and Arctic cod do not.  Perhaps we could support nine hundred billion if we choose a world with no large animals, pod apartments, genetically engineered to algae to eat, and desalinized toilet water to drink.  Or perhaps nine hundred million if we choose a wilder planet, generously restocked with the creatures of our design.  To be, the more important question is not of capacity but of desire: What kind of world do we want?

Definitely worth the read.  I don't agree with everything here, but this is a book (very well-written by the way) which should be making a splash.  For the pointer I thank a loyal MR commentator.

A sexual selection model of schizophrenia

by  Tyler Cowen in

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder marked by an evolutionarily puzzling combination of high heritability, reduced reproductive success, and a remarkably stable prevalence. Recently, it has been proposed that sexual selection may be crucially involved in the evolution of schizophrenia. In the sexual selection model (SSM) of schizophrenia and schizotypy, schizophrenia represents the negative extreme of a sexually selected indicator of genetic fitness and condition. Schizotypal personality traits are hypothesized to increase the sensitivity of the fitness indicator, thus conferring mating advantages on high-fitness individuals but increasing the risk of schizophrenia in low-fitness individuals; the advantages of successful schzotypy would be mediated by enhanced courtship-related traits such as verbal creativity. Thus, schizotypy-increasing alleles would be maintained by sexual selection, and could be selectively neutral or even beneficial, at least in some populations. However, most empirical studies find that the reduction in fertility experienced by schizophrenic patients is not compensated for by increased fertility in their unaffected relatives. This finding has been interpreted as indicating strong negative selection on schizotypy-increasing alleles, and providing evidence against sexual selection on schizotypy.

That is from Marco Del Giudice and for the pointer I thank Harpersnotes.