Category: Uncategorized

1. What influences people to go vegetarian?

2. The mystery of the Bloomfield bridge.

3. How tight was the ancient population bottleneck?

4. How do animals find their way back? (New Yorker)

5. Betting on me on AI.

6. AI eavesdrops on voice chat and bans toxic players.

7. James Brown and Gabon.

Are these the “animal spirits” they like to talk about?  And is this also evidence of the growing politicization of the U.S. economy?:

We document political sentiment effects on US inventors. Democratic inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after the 2008 election of Obama but less likely after the 2016 election of Trump. These effects are 2-3 times as strong among politically active partisans and are present even within firms over time. Patenting by immigrant inventors (relative to non-immigrants) also falls following Trump’s election. Finally, we show partisan concentration by technology class and firm. This concentration aggregates up to more patenting in Democrat-dominated technologies (e.g., Biotechnology) compared to Republican-dominated technologies (e.g., Weapons) following the 2008 election of Obama.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Joseph Engleberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard R. Townsend.

1. Scott Alexander defends the notion of automaticity.

2. Well, the Rolling Stones needed a bass player and a drummer… They have to cut “I Wanna’ Be Your Man,” right?

3. “Specifically, we show that men who post often on social media are seen as feminine, a phenomenon we refer to as the “frequent-posting femininity stereotype.””  Link here.

4. Caltech allows new, non-high school class admissions requirements.

5. Zvi on Gemini, and many other AI matters.

6. Brian Chau on pending EU regulation of AI.

7. Meta-survey on the effects of cannabis.

1. “We show that the gender wage gap [at public universities] is narrowing. It declined by more than 50% over the course of our data panel to the point where by 2021, it is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance.”

2. Jetelina and Wallace-Wells on the pandemic.

3. Do non-socially-connected research papers have to be of higher quality to get published in good journals?

4. The culture that is Fairfax County playground regulation.

5. Why Sweden had low excess mortality.

6. New newsletter — Statecraft — on how policymakers actually get things done.

1. What increases and decreases morale.

2. How might AI reshape government?

3. David Deming on the wage gains from migration.

4. Historic bird once thought extinct returns to New Zealand visibility.

5. Zvi links on dating.

6. Is the U.S. economy seeing an upsurge of new firms?

1. Good advice from the very smart Susan Athey, but it is exactly what has gone wrong.  (To be clear, Susan herself does a great deal to help out other people, including those who cannot plausibly benefit her in return.  In any case she describes the screwed-up incentives in the profession very well.)

2. California DMV intervenes.

3. “Contrary to popular wisdom, we find that most artists’ reputations peak just before their death, and then start to decline.”  I believe the same is true for economists.

4. Do high-pollen days make us stupider?: “…we demonstrate that high pollen days are associated with increased accidents and injuries—one of the most extreme consequences of cognitive impairment.”

5. Are only 22 people needed to colonize Mars? (seems quite wrong to me)

6. Fukuoka drunk driving school.

In Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building, Bazzi, Gaduh, Rothenberg, and Wong use a nation-wide natural experiment to test when diversity leads to unity and strength and when it leads to disunity and weakness.

Indonesia consists of 17,000 islands with thousands of distinct ethnic groups and hundreds of languages. The post-Colonial leaders understood the difficulty of creating a nation from such diversity and to try to birth a nation they implemented several bold policies. One such policy was creating a national language that was not the language of the majority or any large plurality. Indeed, the Indonesian national language was spoken as a mother tongue by only 5% of the native citizens but its use is required in schools and official communications. The second bold policy was the transmigration experiment. The transmigration experiment moved millions of people from the more densely populated islands to the less densely populated islands. The policy was big, between 1979 and 1984, for example, 2.5 million people were moved.

One goal of the program was to relieve population pressures and give more Indonesians their own plot of land but another goal was the creation of a unified nation.

[T]he Minister of Transmigration stated “By way of transmigration, we will try to . . . integrate all the ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation. The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration and there will be one kind of man, Indonesian” (Hoey, 2003).

The program was voluntary. Migrants received plots of lands assigned by lottery in new villages. The way the program worked was that people of many different ethnicities and languages volunteered and (more or less, see the paper for details) lined up haphazardly to be assigned to a new village on a new island. The migrants could not choose their new village. Thus, the new villages varied in diversity: some of them were highly fractionalized (a high probability of two randomly chosen people in the village having different mother tongues) but due to bunching in the entry line, some of the villages had less diversity.

The authors show that people who for random reasons ended up in villages with a high fractionalizatin adoped more “national” or “unifying” behaviours. For example, people in high fractionalization villages were more likely to adopt the national language as the language spoken in their home (as opposed to speaking their mother tongue at home). In addition, the people in high fractionalization villages were more likely to intermarry and to give their children less ethnic names. Measures of social capital such as trust, tolerance and public goods provision were also higher in high fractionalization villages.

A simple way of summarizing these results is that people in high fractionalization villages adopted behaviours similar to those of people in cities.

Now, you might think; of course people in fractionalized villages adopt the national language because that was the only common language! There is something to that although it doesn’t explain why people adopt the national language as their home language. More importantly, the authors make a distinction between fractionalized and polarized villages. Polarized villages also have significant diversity but instead of many small groups there are a few large groups. People in polarized villages are less likely to adopt the national language as the language spoken in their home, are less likely to intermarry, less likely to give their children less ethnic names and measures of social capital such as trust, tolerance and public goods provision tend to be lower in high polarization villages.

My interpretation, which goes beyond what the authors say, is that diversity is good when it promotes individualism. A highly diverse society lets people break free from traditional constraints and develop as unique individuals. City air sets you free was a principle of law but also a recognition that in a city with many groups none could impose their will on all and thus social freedom blossomed. As Milton Friedman once said freedom promotes diversity and diversity protects freedom.

In contrast, diversity in the form of polarization, two or three big groups, makes tribalism even worse because the presence of multiple large groups increases the salience of group identity and makes people conform more and enforce conformity to their own group more, both as a kind of reactive self-defense.

One surprise is that the authors argue that ethnic segregation in high fractionalization villages tends to reduce the good effects of diversity but segregation in high polarization villages tends to ameliorate the costs of diversity; in other words, segregation significantly dampens the effects of both fractionalization and polarization. That’s surprising because other work argues that geographic segregation increases the salience of groups and group differences–if blacks and whites live in different parts of town or different castes live in different parts of town, for example, that increases the salience of racial or caste differences which might diminish if races and castes were more evenly distributed, even absent other changes.

In any case, this is a great paper taking advantage of a novel experiment in social engineering that, unusually, may have worked.