Category: Uncategorized
Monday assorted links
1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).
2. Is space the most underrated policy area?
3. On the USAID and deaths debate. Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate. Here is commentary from GPT Pro. In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.
4. Using LLMs in economic history.
5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.
6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.
AI cheating on math econ at Brown
The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost?
Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs. Another pill can be printed almost for free.
That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services. They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination. After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.
Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you. Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.
In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well. It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.
“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.
Typewriters and fertility
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid. Via Kris Gulati.
Sunday assorted links
1. Why were the Covid vaccine trials so quick?
2. Sumner on Greenspan, Giannis, and more.
3. 100 best books of the 21st century? (NYT).
4. AI and the crisis of classical liberalism.
5. The memory tax, good thing supply is elastic.
6. Is Teortaxes solving for the political equilibrium?
7. Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale in TN for $1.6 million.
Renationalising British utilities
There is talk of this with the pending change in PM, but I would not do it. I am quite aware that a) not all of the privatisations went well, and b) American data indicate that state-owned utilities do not seem very economically different than, or less efficient than, privately-owned utilities. Especially for water, where the natural monopoly elements are especially strong.
Nonetheless massive restructuring will be needed to make all of these companies, no matter who owns them, “AI companies.” That will require capital raises and pay scales that will be difficult for the public sector to pull off. So right now renationalisation would be a mistake.
Most generally, I would say the returns to resource mobility will be rising significantly.
Blackpool fact of the day, observations on northern England
Blackpool Central was the world’s busiest station in 1911. It was the station with the most platforms to close in UK in the Beeching cuts of 1964.
That is from the recent fun book Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World, by Chris Moss. And I enjoyed this paragraph:
I’ve never felt or fully understood the alleged tension between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The latter’s residents have good reason to boast, as they do with gusto, even if the ‘God’s own count(r)y’ schtick is wearisome nonsense. Yorkshire is the UK’s largest county. It has three national parks, two national landscapes (the new name for AONBs) and some of the most dramatic stretches of thePennine range. Like Lancashire, it reaches from the hills to the coast. There are fundamental differences. Lancashire is Irish and Atlantic. East Yorkshire is European and North Sea-facing. Yorkshire is Anglican and past tense. Lancashire is Catholic and forward-looking. Lancastrians go in sideways; Yorkshire men, at least, barge in frontally.
I consider this book to be properly subjective.
Saturday assorted links
1. Can we create more prodigies in the empirical sciences?
3. How did Europe become the world champion of heat deaths?
4. New, The Journal of Economic Freedom.
5. Siena (Houston) fact of the day.
6. John Burn-Murdoch on economic growth (FT). And a chart from the piece.
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
Friday assorted links
1. Can we make respiratory infections a thing of the past?
2. The new balance of power across companies and governments.
3. Using AI to find Brazil’s next soccer star? (NYT)
4. Token resale markets in everything.
5. A music critic reviews himself at age 93.
6. A claim that the World Cup is damaging market liquidity.
7. Soumaya Keynes on whether ideas are getting harder to find (FT).
Aaron Levie on current implicit AI regulation
We now have de facto AI regulation. It’s not obvious why from here on out models that have certain levels of capability or are trained on certain compute sizes won’t have to be reviewed by the government before release.
Realistically, as AI models became more and more powerful this was going to be inevitable (I think it’s too early, but here we are). So now it’s mostly just interesting to think about the implications and scenarios from here. A few would be:
* America gets to control who gets access to frontier intelligence and when. This generally works as long as we remain at the frontier at all times and don’t have a risk of being surpassed. At the moment we have a clear lead in frontier intelligence so this is a good bet, but lots of motivated parties would love to change that.
* This likely creates backlog of AI releases which means that we will see less rapid fire back and forth jumps in model progress. Bull/fine case is that we just get bigger step functions per release at a slower rate and we end up at the same point we would have. Bear case is those incremental smaller jumps were necessary for the continued flywheel of innovation.
* Other countries likely have even more incentive to at least hedge their bets with sovereign AI strategies so aren’t dependent on access to US AI all times. Previously this was relatively moot because the alternative wasn’t good enough, but that could change out of necessity and what we’re seeing in China.
* Open weights obviously a big winner here as it becomes what likely sovereign AI gets built out on, and what (for now) can still be released to the market without the same controls. One interesting question would be how regulation eventually extends to open models, which would have its own set of long term consequences.
Anyway some big updates to everyone’s mental models of AI regulation as a result of the capabilities we’re now seeing in AI. Wild times.
Here is the link. I would say I have long thought something like this was coming, but am pleased we got in so much early progress “under the wire” up until now. And here is more from Aaron.
Does fasting harm cognitive performance?
More than 2 billion people participate annually in Ramadan fasting, making its potential effects on cognitive performance important for workplaces, education and high-stakes decision-making. We study these effects in tournament chess, an incentivised, real-world cognitive task in which move quality can be evaluated objectively by a strong chess engine. We analyse nearly 300,000 games and more than 25 million moves played by almost 10,000 expert players from 178 countries over 10 years. Two validation exercises support our Muslim-status classification, covering almost 11% of the sample and survey evidence indicates substantial Ramadan fasting compliance among Muslim chess players. In the preferred intention-to-treat specification, using pre-game controls, player fixed effects and year-month fixed effects, we find no impact of Ramadan fasting on Muslim players’ overall move quality or shares of optimal and nearly optimal moves, with tightly bounded estimates around zero. Muslim players make 0.13 additional percentage points of large errors during Ramadan, but this small estimate is fragile across alternative measures, samples, Muslim-status definitions, fasting-compliance adjustments and event-study diagnostics, with no evidence of heterogeneous effects, selection bias, or compensatory behavioural adjustments. We conclude there is little robust evidence that Ramadan fasting broadly impairs cognitive performance among expert chess players.
That is from a recently published paper by Samuel Buckland and David Smerdon. Some claim that people think best when they are just a wee bit hungry?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Cricket and the railways
Railways are a golden thread in the history of cricket, making national competition possible in every current Test-playing nation (with the exceptino of the West Indies and Afghanistan). In later years, we will see railway workers as exporters of cricket to Scotland and Wales and beyond to Britain’s formal and informal commercial empires. We will see enduring railway-based teams, including in Pakistan the winners of cricket’s most comprehensive first-class victory.
That is from Richard Heller and Peter Oborne, Full Circle: A History of Cricket. And I had not realized this: “As recently as 1945, 98 percent of Australians had their family origins in Great Britain or Ireland.”
Thursday assorted links
Translated from the Chinese
I think this is the Cursor moment for academia.
The Stanford REAP team has made their move, CoPaper.AI is mass-terminating the manual labor of traditional empirical papers. Link: copaper.ai/landing
If using large models to write papers before was just about polishing and compiling references for you, then this Project from Professor Ross Griebenow’s team at Stanford is like dropping a nuclear bomb in the empirical circles of social sciences and economics.
The greatest truth is the simplest; the heaviest sword has no edge. Its functions are straightforward. Feed in the raw dataset, and within 30 minutes, it can generate a complete DOCX paper complete with full Stata/R code and publication-quality charts.
It chains together EDA, variable definition, econometric model building (from OLS to advanced DID, regression discontinuity, causal forests) all using an Agent workflow.
Every chart it produces comes with 100% reproducible Stata, R, EViews source code underneath. How many low-quality paper mills and data drones’ jobs will this smash?
Data drones and paper ghostwriters are collectively facing unemployment countdown. Because from now on, for social science papers, AI handles all the entropy-increasing drudgery—humans only need to define the problem.
Here is the link. Mostly that is not true, so perhaps the Chinese are trying to demoralize us. But will it never ever be true? In two years be true? Less?