Category: Uncategorized
Does reducing lead exposure limit crime?
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:
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…
Wednesday assorted links
1. Martin Ravallion has passed away.
2. Americans are far more likely to move to Mexico than to Canada.
3. Top science advances of 2022?
5. Do social media lead to an underinvestment in boredom?
6. Follow-up post by the guy who criticized peer review.
7. Djokovic back in Australia (that was then, this is now).
Are Progressives in Denial About Progress?
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?
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.
What should I ask Yasheng Huang?
I will be having a Conversation with him, the first but not last “China conversation” for the podcast. Here is part of his Wikipedia page:
Yasheng Huang (Chinese: 黄亚生) is an American professor in international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he founded and heads the China Lab and India Lab. His research areas include human capital formation in China and India.
He had previous appointments at the University of Michigan and Harvard Business School.
Huang is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, a history of economic reforms in China.
I am a fan of his forthcoming book The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability and Technology, reviewed by me here.
Here is Yasheng Huang on Twitter. So what should I ask him?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Stephen Carter best non-fiction of the year list.
2. Bahamas views on SBF (NYT).
3. Contemporary opera is now outselling classic opera at the Met (NYT).
4. You people are crazy those new service sector jobs $480 an hour.
5. Paul McCartney stops into New Jersey cafe.
6. Central Paris will ban non-essential car traffic for 2024 (Bloomberg).
7. The year in AI.
8. Why don’t people click on links? One hypothesis of mine is that people like scanning link titles (and not clicking), but from a credible source, simply so they can feel they didn’t miss anything big.
Monday assorted links
1. “With this shirt you are allowed to get 1 Everyday Value Slam everyday [at Denny’s] for until 12/31/23.” What should such a shirt cost?
3. Those new service sector jobs.
4. Jolly Swagman podcast with Andy Matuschak.
6. Crypto wash trading (lots of it).
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
Sunday assorted links
Why did China do such a flip-flop on Covid?
After the so-called “Zero Covid” experiment, China now reports that 37 million people are being infected each day. What ever happened to the Golden Mean? Why not move smoothly along a curve? Even after three years’ time, it seems they did little to prep their hospitals. What are some hypotheses for this sudden leap from one corner of the distribution to the other?
1. The Chinese people already were so scared of Covid, the extreme “no big deal” message was needed to bring them around to a sensible middle point. After all, plenty of parts of China still are seeing voluntary social distancing.
2. For Chinese social order, “agreement” is more important than “agreement on what.” And agreement is easiest to reach on extreme, easily stated and explained policies. Zero Covid is one such policy, “let it rip” is another. In the interests of social stability China, having realized its first extreme message was no longer tenable, has decided to move to the other available simple, extreme message. And so they are letting it rip.
3. The Chinese elite ceased to believe in the Zero Covid policy even before the protests spread to such an extreme. But it was not possible to make advance preparations for any alternative policy. Thus when Zero Covid fell away, there was a vacuum of sorts and that meant a very loose policy of “let it rip.”
4. After three years of Zero Covid hardship, the Chinese leadership feels the need to “get the whole thing over with” as quickly as possible.
To which extent might any of these be true? What else?
Merry Christmas!
We thank you all for reading!
Saturday assorted links
1. Using ChatGPT to scrape websites. And publicly announced ChatGPT variants and alternatives. And Alpa.
2. The culture that is Finland? Just don’t be proud of it!
3. Claims about Russia (speculative).
4. Under current U.S. patent law, including some 2022 cases, AI cannot count as an “inventor” and receive IP protection.
5. Ali Ahmed Aslam RIP, credited with inventing chicken tikka masala (NYT).
Emergent Ventures, 23rd cohort
Yudhister Kumar, Temecula, CA, high school student, “Changing the world with efficient, solid hydrogen storage, appeals to rationality, and cool physics.”
Anonymous winner, to investigate who is Satoshi. A serious effort.
Mike McCormick, San Francisco and venture capital, to see if the Emergent Ventures model can be scaled.
Michael Florea, from Estonia, currently in Cambridge, Mass., start-up for longevity research.
Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus, to pursue work in science policy and the economics of science.
Michael Slade, Dublin, to build an app for Marginal Revolution University.
Mike Gioia, Los Angeles, to pursue AI and film.
Oded Oren, Bronx, NYC, former public defender, a new non-profit — Scrutinize — to apply data-driven accountability to our criminal justice system, for instance by identifying overzealous prosecuting attorneys.
Sam Glover, London, 25 year old writer, focusing on social science, Effective Altruism, and forecasting.
Jonathan Schulz, Fairfax, George Mason University, to run RCTs in Benin and research gender inequality and for general career support
Nikolay Sobernius, from Russia currently in Istanbul, general career support, his eventual ambition is to build a new kind of GiveWell about which are the best charities.
Grazie Sophia Christie and Ginevra Lily Davis, Miami, to publish a new magazine The Miami Native, to express the spirit and culture of Miami.
Lydia Nottingham, 18 years old, Oxford University, general career development.
Ukraine tranche:
Mariia Serhiienko, from Cherkasy, Ukraine, currently living in Wroclaw, Poland. Studying Communication Design and working on the art of Ukraine and its relation to contemporary issues.
Alex Mikulenko, currently living and studying in the Netherlands, Leiden University. Theoretical physics, sound/acoustics project, particle physics, neutrinos, general career development.
Mykhailo Marynenko, from Ukraine, “I’m a software engineer with a passion for building modern, collaborative, performant, and scalable web applications and libraries. But also in my spare time I’m a doing live-streaming, security researches, open-source software development, IoT and R&D.”
Friday assorted links
1. Randall Kroszner appointed to the Financial Services Committee of the BOE. And CHIPs program looking to hire.
2. Rare albino baby porcupine rescued in northern B.C.
3. Black neighborhood choice and SES.
4. Assortative mating on blood type? Hard for me to believe, but…
5. Another attempt to understand how LLM work. And will work on LLMs and machine learning now become less open? What is the role of academia in all of this? And how is GPTChat on medical questions?
Thursday assorted links
1. Words from the Chinese translator of Sally Rooney, a good piece.
2. Updating your syllabus for the GPTs. I’ll be doing this myself for the spring.
4. Are toy prices falling? (short video)
5. Chrome browser add-on logs your ChatGPT history.
6. From a reader: “Project Relate is a Google app that allows users with speech impediments to create a customized voice model so they can interact with Google’s voice assistant. After the user trains the model it can pretty effectively parse what they are saying even when other humans can’t.” Link here.