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Sunday assorted links
1. Being on Twitter boosts legal citations.
2. Sadly, there may be some truth to this: “I have a theory that the core of right-groyper and left-groyper trends is that the Internet is kind of culturally fascist and economically trends towards producing micro doses of race war propaganda.”
3. Interview with Hanno Lustig.
4. Tanzania on the wane, not long ago it was (supposedly) on a very good path.
5. Fra Angelico (NYT).
6. What happens when you try to have more than thirteen kids? (NYT)
7. Derya: “Earlier this year, I also said we should reduce PhD positions by at least half & shorten completion time. Only the most passionate should pursue a PhD. In the age of AI, steering many others toward this path does them a disservice given the significant opportunity costs.”
Go see Alexandre Kantorow (piano) live if you ever have the chance. Of all the pianists I have seen in concert, dating back to Vladimir Horowitz and further, he is the one who best captures what I imagine Franz Liszt might have been like.
The business of the culture war
We show that American cable television news emphasizes race, crime, gender, and other “culture war” issues. These issues are less prominent in broadcast news and appear in only a small fraction of politicians’ campaign advertisements, which overwhelmingly focus on jobs, healthcare, and the economy. We interpret these differences through a parallel tradeoff facing cable outlets, broadcast outlets, and politicians: choosing content best for “poaching” people who would otherwise choose competitors vs. “mobilizing” people who would otherwise not watch news/not vote. Using household-by-second smart TV data, we link cable news’ cultural focus to a distinctive business strategy emphasizing mobilization: we show that cultural coverage mobilizes (many) viewers who would otherwise watch entertainment programming, while economic coverage instead poaches (fewer) viewers who would otherwise watch competing news channels. Cable news outlets, maximizing audience size, therefore prefer cultural coverage. Politicians, instead maximizing vote share , value poaching an opponent’s voter twice as much as mobilizing a nonvoter; giving news outlets the same objective would close 40% of the observed content gap between news and politicians. Cable outlets’ incentives to center cultural conflict influence politics: constituencies exogenously more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads. Our results suggest that the economic incentives of cable news played a significant role in the growth of cultural conflict.
That is from the job market paper of Aakaash Rao of Harvard, here are Rao’s other papers.
Observations on browsing economics job market candidates
The number of people on the market seems much lower this year, perhaps because of the lag with Covid, as well as more general demographic trends. Even adjusting for the lower number of candidates, I found fewer interesting papers this year than usual, as research interests continue to narrow. There is too much emphasis on showing quality technique by answering a small question well, rather than addressing more important questions more imperfectly. Harvard had by far the most interesting students, as most of them were considering questions I cared about. LSE looked pretty good too. In terms of topics, I saw a lot of papers on educational testing, urban economics and mobility, and AI. Theory seems to be permanently on the wane. The number of co-authors continues to rise.
Overall I came away with a bad feeling from this year’s perusal, noting there are some departments I have not looked at yet. In the aggregate it did not seem vital enough or exciting enough to me?
I still will be putting up some more of the papers I found of interest.
Saturday assorted links
1. Who is most worried about AI threats to jobs?
2.. Anna Gát on mentorship and related matters.
4. Frank Dikötter, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity is due out in February.
5. The effectiveness of mental health treatment guidelines.
“Gender without Children”
What would the lives of women look like if they knew from an early age that they would not have children? Would they make different choices about human capital or early career investments? Would they behave differently in the marriage market? Would they fare better in the labor market? In this paper, we follow 152 women diagnosed with the Mayer-Rokitanski-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) type I syndrome. This congenital condition, diagnosed at puberty, is characterised by the absence of the uterus in otherwise phenotypically normal 46, XX females. Using granular health registries matched with administrative data from Sweden, we confirm that MRKH is not associated with worse health, nor with differential pre-diagnosis characteristics, and that it has a large negative impact on the probability to ever live with a child. Relative to women from the general population, women with the condition have better educational outcomes, tend to marry and divorce at the same rate, but mate with older men, and hold significantly more progressive beliefs regarding gender roles. The condition has also very large positive effects on earnings and employment. Dynamics reveal that most of this positive effect emerges around the arrival of children in women in the general population, with little difference before. We also find that women with MRKH perform as well as men in the labor market in the long run. Results confirm that “child penalties” on the labor market trajectories of women are large and persistent and that they explain the bulk of the remaining gender gap.
That is from recent work by Tatiana Pazem, with co-authors Camille Landais, Peter Lundberg, Erik Plug & Johan Vikstrom. Tatiana is on the job market from LSE, with her main job market paper being “Pension Reforms and Consumption in Retirement: Evidence from French Transactions and Bank Data.”
Does economics make you more sexist?
We provide direct evidence on explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduates in Chile, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above, combining a wide battery of measures to create an index of gender bias. Economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics students are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to economics classes. The gap becomes more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, especially for male students.
That is from a newly published paper by Valentina Paredes, M. Daniele Paserman, and Francisco J. Pino.
Friday assorted links
Why did we think wages are rigid for all those years?
Thelarge spike at zero in the distribution of year-to-year nominal wage changes in household surveys is often seen as evidence of nominal wage rigidity. But measurement error—especially from workers rounding their reported wages—can exaggerate this spike. Using U.S. Current Population Survey data, we adjust for potential rounding behavior and find that the zero-change spike falls from 15–20 percent to 7–12 percent, aligning closely with recent estimates from administrative data.
That is from See-Yu Chan, Stephan Hobler, and Thijs van Rens. Note that Hobler, from LSE, is on the job market this year (with a different job market paper).
*The Master of Contradictions*
The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions. Here is one excerpt:
It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind. And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.
…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters. One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage. It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.
Recommended.
Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550
Abstract: This paper considers how movable-type printing’s economic features shaped the early modern book market using product-level data. Building on a lively medieval tradition of manuscript production, Gutenberg’s innovation did not simply reduce costs; it introduced new incentives and constraints that altered both the product’s nature and the market’s structure. First, printing’s business model encouraged the production of shorter and simpler books targeting a poorer and less literate audience. Second, its cost structure led to product differentiation and prolific trade rather than direct competition and localized production, making available a greater variety of products offering diverse information and perspectives. Rather than simply making medieval books cheaper and more abundant, these changes may represent printing technology’s true contribution to European economic development.
That is from the job market paper of Qiyi Charlotte Zhao, who is on the market this year from Stanford. Excellent topic.
Thursday assorted links
1. J.D. Vance models the UAP world.
2. “…wages at 50 are better predicted by cognitive skills at 16 than by cognitive skills at 50.”
3. Mississippi River fact of the day.
4. NYT profile of Helen DeWitt.
5. Do food stamps increase spending on food?
6. “More than 100 people have been injured by bears in Japan this year, and 11 have died, a record. Now the government is preparing to dispatch the military to one hard-hit area to help deal with the problem.” (NYT)
The microfoundations of the baby boom?
Between 1936 and 1957, fertility rates in the U.S. increased 62 percent and the maternal mortality rate declined by 93 percent. We explore the effects of changes in maternal mortality rates on white and nonwhite fertility rates during this period, exploiting contemporaneous or lagged changes in maternal mortality at the state-by-year level. We estimate that declines in maternal mortality explain 47-73 percent of the increase in fertility between 1939 and 1957 among white women and 64-88 percent of the increase in fertility among nonwhite women during our sample period.
Here is the full article by Christopher Handy and Katharine Shester, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Overall, I take this as a negative for the prospect of another, future baby boom? We just cannot make maternity all that much safer, starting from current margins.
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
Noah Smith has economic ideas for Japan
Excerpt from the opening:
Fortunately, Japan is in an OK macroeconomic situation right now. Government debt, the country’s thorniest problem, is actually falling as a percent of GDP, thanks in part to higher inflation and in part to rising corporate profits and tax revenues…
The deflation problem that bedeviled Japan for decades has finally been defeated. And at the same time, unemployment in Japan remains very low…
This means that Takaichi and her cabinet don’t need to focus as much energy and attention on macroeconomics, as Abe did. There is no need for further stimulus, monetary or fiscal. Instead, Takaichi is free to concentrate on improving Japan’s underlying economic model, in order to promote productivity and growth.
Noah has six specific ideas of note, starting with improving capital markets. Here is the whole post.