Category: Uncategorized

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Predictions about China.

2. The smartest person that Garett Jones has ever met (short video).

3. “Because increasing the capital-intensity of R&D accelerates the investments that make scientists and engineers more productive, our work suggests that AI-augmented R&D has the potential to speed up technological change and economic growth.”  Link here.

4. Predictions from 1923 about 2023.

5. GPT takes the bar exam.  And how well do GPTs write scientific abstracts?

6 “The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars.”  The article has other interesting points about the political economy of funding a Mars program.  Recommended, and it will make you a space skeptic.

7. Hydropower problems in Zambia.

Lead and violence: all the evidence

by  Tyler Cowen in

Kevin Drum offers a response to a recent meta-study on the link between lead and violence, blogged by me here.

I’ll take this moment to explain why the lead-violence connection never has sat that well with me.

Let’s say we are trying to explain why 2022 America is richer than the Stone Age.  We could cite “incentives, policy, and culture,” noting that any accumulated stock of wealth also came from these (and possibly other) factors.  You might disagree about which policies, or which cultural features of modernity, and so on, but the answer to the question pretty clearly lies in that direction.

Now let us say we are trying to explain why America today is richer than Albania today.  You would do just fine to start with “incentives, policy, and culture.”  You could add in some additional factors, such as superior natural resources, but you would be on the same track as with the Stone Age comparison.  You would not have to summon up an entirely new theory.

Why is Nashville richer than Chattanooga?  Again, start with “incentives, policy, and culture,” noting you might need again supplementary factors.

Broadly the same theory is applying to all of these different comparisons.  Across time, across space, across countries, and across cities.  There is something about this broad unity that is methodologically satisfying, and it helps confirm our view that we are on the right track in our inquiries.

Now consider the lead-crime connection.  Insofar as you elevate the connection as very strong, you are tossing out the chance of achieving that kind of unity.

Why was violent crime so often more frequent in earlier periods of human history?  It wasn’t lead, at least not for most periods, perhaps not for any of the much earlier periods.

Why was there more peace in Ethiopia five years ago than in the last few years?  Again, whatever the reasons it wasn’t a change in lead exposure.

Why is the murder rate in Haiti today much higher than during the Duvaliers?  Again, no one thinks the answer has much to do with changes in lead exposure.  Mainly it is because political order has collapsed, and the country is ruled by gangs rather than by an autocratic tyranny.

How about the violence rate in the very peaceful parts of Africa compared to the very violent parts?  Again, lead is rarely if ever going to be the answer to that one.

So we know in the true, overall model big changes in violence can happen without lead exposure being the driving force.  Very big changes.  In fact those big changes in violence rates, without lead being a major factor, happen all the time.

And many of those big changes are mysterious in their causes.  It really isn’t so simple to explain why different parts of Africa have different murder rates, often by very significant amounts.  You can hack away at the problem (e.g, Kenya and Tanzania have very different histories), but there is no simple “go to” theory.  Furthermore, since both violence and peace often feed upon themselves, in a “broken windows” increasing returns sort of way, the initial causes behind big differences in violence outcomes might sometimes be fairly slight and hard to find.

That to my mind makes “the true model” somewhat biased against lead being a major factor in changes in violence rates.  In the broader scheme of things, lead exposure seems to be a supplementary factor rather than a major factor.  It doesn’t rule out lead as a major factor, either logically or statistically, if you wish to explain why U.S. violence fell from the 1960s to today.  But the true model has a lot of non-lead, major shifts in violence, often unexplained or hard to explain.

Addendum: I am also surprised by Kevin’s comment that there isn’t likely to be much publication bias in lead-violence studies.  I take publication bias to be a default assumption, namely the desire to show a positive result to get published.  That hardly seems unlikely to me at all.  And in this particular case there is even a particular political reason to wish to pin a lot of the blame on lead exposure.  Correctly or not, people on the Left are much more likely to elevate lead exposure as a cause of social problems.

And to repeat myself, just to be perfectly clear, it strikes me as unlikely that the effect of lead exposure on violence in zero is the last seventy years of the United States.

A new paper on the Industrial Revolution

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have not yet read it, but surely it seems of importance:

Although there are many competing explanations for the Industrial Revolution, there has been no effort to evaluate them econometrically. This paper analyzes how the very different patterns of growth across the counties of England between the 1760s and 1830s can be explained by a wide range of potential variables. We find that industrialization occurred in areas that began with low wages but high mechanical skills, whereas other variables, such as literacy, banks, and proximity to coal, have little explanatory power. Against the view that living standards were stagnant during the Industrial Revolution, we find that real wages rose sharply in the industrializing north and declined in the previously prosperous south.

That is by Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac Ó Gráda, forthcoming in the JPE.  Here are earlier versions of the paper.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Era.  A good book for sane centrists, and they claim to have been partly inspired by our subheading “Small Steps Toward a Much Better World.”  Did you know that putting in the “much” was Alex’s idea?  At first I resisted but clearly he was correct.

2. Jerry Saltz, Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night.  Art reviews from the New York magazine guy.  Fun to read, mostly sane, and helps the reader understand the ascent of Wokeism in the art world.  It is not that so many art buyers or curators are racist.  Rather, art is super-hierarchical in the first place (try telling the market that a great textile should go for as much as a famous painting), and that, in unintended cross-cutting fashion, that tends to produce apparent biases across both gender and race.  Black and women artists really have been undervalued, and many still are, though this is changing (yes Kara Walker sketches are overpriced right now).  A lot of people are just blind on this one, sorry people but I mean you.  As a side note, Saltz enjoys Rauschenberg more than I do, though I would not dispute the historical importance of his work.

3. Geoff Emerick, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Spent Recording the Music of the Beatles.  If you want a book sympathizing with Paul McCartney as the guy who made the Beatles tick, and portraying George Harrison as a suspicious, less than grateful whiner, this is for you.  And so it is.  By the way, contrary to some very recent accounts, Emerick affirms that “Yellow Submarine” is basically a McCartney composition.  He even notes that Lennon cut some demos of it, which has led some recent commentators to conclude it was Lennon’s composition.  The demos are quite raw, so maybe the song is joint?

4. Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.  A big and neglected piece of the puzzle for the breakthrough of the West, focusing on Elizabethan times, skill in symbolic manipulation, and the origins of the scientific revolution.  Recommended.

Philip Kitcher, On John Stuart Mill, is a nice short introduction.

And John T. Cunningham, This is New Jersey, from High Point to Cape May, dates from 1953 and thus is intrinsically interesting.  Hudson County really is remarkably densely populated, and back then it was a big deal that baseball was invented in Hoboken.

I appear on the Jolly Swagman podcast

by  Tyler Cowen

From the Jolly Swagman himself:

“Hey Tyler – we’ve just published our podcast on Talent – thanks again for a fun chat.

Link here in case you want to share it on Marginal Revolution:

https://josephnoelwalker.com/142-talent-is-that-which-is-scarce-tyler-cowen/

Topics / questions we discussed include:

  • whether you would have backed a 20-something year old John Keats
  • why putting ellipses in emails signals high status
  • your most irrational belief
  • what biographers can teach us about talent identification
  • what made the Henry George seminar you ran with Peter Thiel so good
  • how Sarah Ruden furnishes herself with massive context to gain an edge over other translators
  • What should Obi-Wan have told Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader
  • the Sumerian bar joke
  • whether countries can be both highly capable of solving collective action problems and extremely innovative
  • your view of Australian talent and what makes it unique

Thanks and happy new year!”

Happy New Year everyone!

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Looking for work, they stumbled upon an audition call at Dive Bar, and emerged into the world of professional mermaidhood.”  Those new (old?) service sector jobs…

2. Timeline of the Sober Curious movement.

3. Various short essays on Adam Smith.

4. Andrew Batson best music of 2022.

5. The Economist on The Repugnant Conclusion.

6. Okie-Dokie.

7. “For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.”  WSJ link.

8. Agentic simulation for GPT?

The EU’s carbon tariffs

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt, starting with the basic idea:

Importers would have to register to receive authorization to import goods, and they would pay a tax per ton of carbon dioxide produced. These fees are intended to match those already applied within the EU, which are currently about 90 euros per ton. The policy is also intended to place EU industry on a more competitive footing and encourage foreign countries to adopt greener energy policies.

But will it work?:

But would it? Economic changes take place at the margin, and currently the EU is engaged in substitution toward coal, a very dirty energy source.

In light of that reality, consider the proposed tariffs as having (at least) two effects. First, they will push some production out of foreign nations and into the EU. Second, they will induce some foreign nations to move to greener energy sources over time, to avoid the tax.

In the short run, the first effect dominates: The tariffs will lead to more coal use and a dirtier energy supply.

Be suspicious of green energy policies which at first make the problem worse. However promising the longer-run promises may sound, there is always the risk that bureaucratic inertia will intervene and the short-run policy effects will dominate.

The rationale for the beneficial long-run effects of the tariffs is that foreign nations, including some relatively poor nations such as India, will move toward greener energy at a more rapid pace. That might happen. But look at the EU itself over the past year. Its energy prices went up, due to the Russian attack on Ukraine, but the EU did not move toward greener energy, such as more nuclear or wind power. It moved toward dirtier energy, in part because domestic interest groups opposed the more beneficial adjustments.

So, despite about as strong an incentive as possible — a war — the EU made the harmful rather than the beneficial adjustment. Now it is expecting that much poorer nations, often with worse governance structures, to do better. Not only is this naïve, but it is also protectionist.

And this:

Even the positive long-run effects are up for grabs. On one hand, the tariff hike provides an incentive to move toward greener energy. On the other, it makes the exporting nations poorer than they otherwise would be. Poorer nations tend to be less interested in improving their environments, as clean environments are largely a luxury good. And extreme poverty worsens other global problems, including issues stemming from migration. Should EU policy make it more difficult for Africa to industrialize?

One also has to wonder whether the promise of lower tariffs in return for greener energy is credible. Once protectionist measures are in place, they are hard to reverse. The EU would be reaping tariff revenue, and domestic EU industries would be receiving trade protection. Any reclassification of the imports as fundamentally “greener” would require an investigation across borders and clearance through multiple levels of bureaucracy. Such changes will not be easy to accomplish, especially in an era increasingly enamored of trade restrictions.

Worth a ponder.  EU coal consumption has been up over the last two years.  And what is relevant here is energy supply at the margin.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Marc Thiessen on the best things Biden did in 2022.  Not all will approve, but a perspective you don’t usually hear.

2. The famous pupils of Hawick High School in Scotland.

3. How easy is it to convert office space into apartments? (NYT, can’t say I am convinced by the pessimism but interesting).

4. New Mark Calabria book on mortgage policy during the pandemic.

5. My most liked tweets of 2022.

6. A weird essay about Captain Kirk, link now fixed.  Too weird, as it should be.

7. Magnus shows up 2.5 minutes late for a 3-minute blitz games against a strong GM.  And wins (video).

Year summary CWT episode, Jeff Holmes interviews Tyler

by  Tyler Cowen

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

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes talk about the past year on the show, including which guests he’d like to have on in 2023, what stands out to him now about his conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried in light of the collapse of FTX, the most popular and most underrated episodes of the year, what makes a guest authentic, why he hasn’t asked the “production function” question much this year, his essay on Marginal Revolution on the New Right, and what he’s working on next. They also evaluate Tyler’s pop culture picks from 2012 and answer listener questions from Twitter.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Vaughn Smith, the polyglot and carpet cleaner, probably is an underrated episode. The people who listened to it seemed to quite like it. I already mentioned Roy Foster. Ireland just doesn’t have that large a population, but that was a great take on Irish history. I liked most of them, I have to say. I think a lot of them are properly rated.

HOLMES: I had Roy Foster and Vaughn Smith. I would throw in, if you look at download counts, maybe Lydia Davis a little underperformed, but she still performed well. I personally really enjoyed Walter Russell Mead.

COWEN: Absolutely.

HOLMES: It was just a great back-and-forth.

COWEN: You could have him on an endless number of times, and he would always have something to say.

HOLMES: Absolutely.

COWEN: He’s one of those kinds of guests.

Recommended.

Does reducing lead exposure limit crime?

by  Tyler Cowen in

These results seem a bit underwhelming, and furthermore there seems to be publication bias, this is all from a recent meta-study on lead and crime.  Here goes:

Does lead pollution increase crime? We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests. This publication bias means that the effect of lead is overstated in the literature. We perform over 1 million meta-regression specifications, controlling for this bias, and conditioning on observable between-study heterogeneity. When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero. When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample. We calculate a plausible elasticity range of 0.22-0.02 for the full sample and 0.03-0.00 for the high-quality sample. Back-ofenvelope calculations suggest that the fall in lead over recent decades is responsible for between 36%-0% of the fall in homicide in the US. Our results suggest lead does not explain the majority of the large fall in crime observed in some countries, and additional explanations are needed.

Here is one image from the paper:

Image

The authors on the paper are Anthony Higney, Nick Hanley, and Mirko Moroa.  I have long been agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, simply because I never had the time to look into it, rather than for any particular substantive reason.  (I suppose I did have some worries that the time series and cross-national estimates seemed strongly at variance.)  I can report that my belief in it is weakening…

Are Progressives in Denial About Progress?

by  Tyler Cowen

That is the title of a new paper by Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock, here is the abstract:

Scott Lilienfeld warned that psychology’s ideological uniformity would lead to premature closure on sensitive topics. He encouraged psychologists to question politically convenient results and did so himself in numerous areas. We follow Lilienfeld’s example and examine the empirical foundation beneath claims that positive illusions about societal change sustain inequalities by inducing apathy and opposition to reform. Drawing on data from a large-scale survey, we find almost the opposite: a pervasive tendency, across ideological and demographic categories, to see things as getting worse than they really are. These results cast doubt on functionalist claims that people mobilize beliefs about societal trends to support political positions and suggest a simpler explanation: Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric.

This argument is also a theme in my much earlier In Praise of Commercial Culture.

Does more construction raise rents?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Matt Yglesias has a long post on that question, recommended albeit gated.  Matt’s take is hard to summarize, so I will provide a somewhat different view, though one that is still pro-YIMBY though with a different slant.

Without loss of generality, we can assume that sometimes “more building” raises rents and other times lowers them, or rents stay the same.

Let’s say there are no big “ideas externalities” from a new NYC apartment building, and as we put more of those buildings in, the rents fall somewhat. Furthermore, say we keep on building until those rents in NYC equal those in Nashville. There is gain on the inframarginal units of construction, but at the final margin the new building in NYC has about the same social value as the new building in Nashville.  The inframarginal gains are the relevant ones.

Now who gets those inframarginal gains?  If land is the truly scarce factor, as NIMBY critics suggest, landlords get a lot of them!  Nothing against that, I love landlords.  Still, that is a slightly different story from what you hear from the YIMBYs.  Landlords don’t get all of those gains, because the land scarcity constraint is precisely what is being relaxed.  But the available evidence seems to indicate you need to build a lot before rents fall much.  So landlords probably receive a healthy share of those new gains.  Rents may fall, but not by that much.  And so the gains for new urban entrants (who did not wish to migrate at the old rent levels) are correspondingly meh.

Again, let me repeat I love YIMBY and I love landlords.  You should too.

Alternatively, say you keep on building and the new residents bring lots of information externalities to the urban area — ever been to Seoul?  They have built like crazy and it is still quite expensive, all the more so in fact.  By building more, they made the land more valuable.  Good for them.  (NB: The biggest beneficiaries may be the rest of Korea, and K-Pop consumers around the world, not Seoul residents.)

Now who do you think reaps most of those gains?  Under standard NIMBY assumptions, I would think it is mainly the landlords.  Which is not to deny the residents receive some gains from increased product diversity in Seoul (good Thai food there now, etc.), and other non-primary effects.

It’s not all the landlords.  But still, the knowledge externalities make land in Seoul, in economic terms, more scarce.  The landlords will do really well.

When I read or hear YIMBYs, I often feel they have a public choice model of politics, slanted toward recognizing the influence of the landlords and homeowners, but not a comparable model of factor price incidence to boot.  They somehow want the lower rents and the positive information externalities both at the same time.  That to me seems unlikely.  And so it is harder to redistribute income away from landlords than you might think.

I again would stress that all the YIMBY changes are Pareto improvements here.  But the extreme remedies suggested by the Georgists, which to be clear I do not favor, are quite explicable to me.