Category: Uncategorized

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Indeed the Turner watercolor went for 165k, well above the estimate.  The Hubert Robert for 53k.

2. Reason and Rationality program for middle school students.  High school program here.

3. In defense of hallucinations? Note that Princeton Law Review does not exist.

4. Economics of a Super Bowl ad.

5. Searchable database of every book mentioned on Conversations with Tyler.

6. Prophets of the Leopold Aschenbrenner.

7. David Pilling reviews Joe Studwell’s new Africa book (FT).

8. Are there just as many female autistics?

9. Brazil is still in better fiscal shape than is Argentina.

Can government coerce women into having more babies?

by  Tyler Cowen in

To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.

But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.

Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.

That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future.  By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.

How much is childlessness the fertility problem?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The average decline in fertility among these recent cohorts relative to the cohorts preceding them by 20 years was 0.25 births. Of this decline, 0.09 births, or 37 percent of the gap, is statistically accounted for by increased childlessness in the later cohort. The remaining 0.16 births, or 63 percent of the gap, is accounted for by declines in fertility among the parous.

A similar analysis can be used to decompose differences across districts in India, where the difference to be decomposed is across districts for women born in the same set of years, with two groups of districts defined by having the lowest and highest cohort fertility rates. Unsurprisingly, given panel B of Figure 5, almost all of this difference—94 percent—is accounted for by the difference in fertility among the parous. Differing patterns of childlessness account for only 6 percent of the gap between high-fertility and low-fertility districts.

That is from a new and useful JEP survey article by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears.  The main concern of the authors is whether we can ever expect a fertility rebound.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. A good tweet about art collections.

2. Banknote bouquets could land you in jail, Kenya’s central bank warns.

3. Cass Sunstein on the aesthetics of liberalism.  And Becca Rothfeld on similar issues.

4. How will low fertility rates affect economies?  One estimate given has U.S. per capita consumption falling by over eight percent, which I consider “large,” though it seems the author (David N. Weil) does not?

5. Survey on the economics of noncompete clauses.

6. Is Bluey the most conservative show on TV? (WSJ)

7. Someone likes the new Wuthering Heights movie.

8. Covid has now become what some people claimed it was all along.

The polity that is Bolivia?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bolivia’s new president is planning major reforms to unleash a mining and oil exploration boom, burying nearly 20 years of socialism in the Andean nation with a new policy — “capitalism for all”.

Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatic centrist former senator, said his team was working on a package of laws to boost foreign investment in natural resources that would be presented to congress for approval “in the coming days or months”.

“We need a new oil and gas law,” Paz told the Financial Times in an interview while attending an economic forum in Panama.

“Bolivia should go for 50-50 [risk-sharing with foreign investors]. I give you the space. You come in with technology and investment . . . I think it’s the basis for business in future.”

Bolivia has a fifth of the world’s reserves of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, but with its state-owned company YLB lacking technical expertise and investment, it has struggled for years to produce commercial quantities of the battery metal and exports are currently dominated by neighbouring Chile.

Bolivia also has big reserves of silver, tin and antimony. Paz said the Bolivian people, who have a history of protesting against mining, would support fresh investment if they were shown they would benefit financially. He compared his country to its neighbours: “Peru last year had mining revenues of around $50bn. Chile had revenues with state and private companies of $65bn. And we . . . had just $6bn,” he said.

Here is more from Michael Stott at the FT.  We will see, as they say.  I am cautiously hopeful.

Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023

by  Tyler Cowen in

We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard K. Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth.

Now we are getting serious…

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is about time:

US tech stocks fell sharply on Tuesday as fresh concerns about the impact of AI on software businesses swept across Wall Street.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.4 per cent, while the broader S&P 500 was down 0.8 per cent. Markets were dragged lower by large declines for a host of analytics groups following AI company Anthropic’s launch of productivity tools for its Claude Cowork platform that can help automate legal work.

Analytics groups Gartner and S&P Global fell 21 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, while Intuit and Equifax both declined more than 10 per cent. Moody’s fell 9 per cent and FactSet lost 11 per cent.

A JPMorgan index tracking US software stocks fell 7 per cent, taking its loss this year to 18 per cent.

Here is more from the FT.

The economics of hip hop

by  Tyler Cowen in

In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.

We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…

Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?

To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.

That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.

Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.

The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.

Here is more from Roland Fryer, from the WSJ.  Here is the TED talk.