Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
The polity that is Sikkim
High in the Himalayas, Sikkim is one of the tiniest states in India. But it is about to embark on an experiment of global interest.
Sikkim’s ruling party has announced an ambitious plan to implement a universal basic income for every one of its 610,577 citizens.
If successful, the scheme would represent the largest trial run anywhere in the world…
Here is the WaPo article, overall I am most bullish about the UBI idea for very poor countries, where the humanitarian upside is greater and the incentive to work still remains. Elsewhere, Buddhist poker player donates $600,000 to charity.
I don’t actually favor the “citizen dividend” side of a carbon tax
The carbon tax idea makes perfect sense to me, and I have endorsed the proposal for some time, but why return the revenue to citizens in the form of dividends? It strikes me as economists thinking they know what makes good politics, something which economists are rarely good at. Arguably it makes the policy seem less important, and mainly about the dividend, in a slightly cynical, Chavez-like sort of way. Furthermore, it tries to make a carbon tax a free lunch, which it is not, no matter how great the longer-term gains. I don’t believe in economists tricking people, even though I will admit tricking people can be useful. The tricking is somebody else’s job! Finally, if the carbon tax is revenue-neutral, just sending money to everyone (in what proportions?) doesn’t give them anything in return as measured by real resources. Maybe it would give Jay Powell a slight headache, however, since he and others at the Fed would have to decide whether and how to do an offset, or not.
We economists are in any case not in charge, so let’s push for what is actually best. I would suggest using the revenue to either help solve the problem at hand (climate change, or whatever connected problems might be relevant), or simply to pay down the debt.
A Behavioral Interpretation of the Origins of African American Family Structure
That is a new paper by Gerald D. Jaynes, Department of Economics, Yale University. The abstract is difficult to read, so here is an excerpt from the paper:
The hypothesis underlying my reinterpretation of the origins of contemporary black family structure is, through the late 20th Century, throughout American history, structural differences in the race relations and economic discrimination confronting blacks in rural versus urban locations produced distinct childhood socialization experiences. These distinct socialization experiences exposed urbanized black children (north and south) to large numbers of recusant adults — men and women socially alienated by urban job ceilings and truculently refusing to acquiesce to race relations based in white supremacy. Observation of and interaction with recusant adults and discriminatory economic institutions put urbanized black children at great risk of early projection of a failure to achieve self-verification of an acceptable social identity. The developmental outcome was early adoption of recusant identities and oppositional agencies leading to a polarized choice: either seek self-verification elsewhere by avoiding institutions such as schools, labor markets, and marriage (causing high rates of single parent families), or (attempting to alter one’s reception in such institutions) intensely engage them leading to civil rights activism and a rising black middle class. In contrast, rural black children were more likely exposed to adults seeking self-verification by striving to climb the agricultural tenure ladder a life goal requiring conforming to behavioral norms based in the era’s white supremacist race relations. Failure to self-verify a positive self-image by achieving land ownership or rental tenancy occurred later in life when the adoption of oppositional agencies was greatly mitigated.
Speculative and uneven, but nonetheless of interest.
Thursday assorted links
Who again has the power to end the government shutdown?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The real power here is held by government employees, especially those in critical jobs. Let’s say that more TSA screeners decided to walk off the job. It’s already the case that the TSA absentee rate has gone up to 7.6 percent, from 3.2 percent a year ago. It is possible to imagine screeners staying home in much greater numbers, thus crippling the entire nation. That could either force President Donald Trump’s hand or lead to a congressional override of a potential presidential veto.
Yet:
As a rationale for showing up to work, “I’m helping both the TSA and my colleagues” can work for a while, because of both cooperative norms and peer pressure. But I don’t think it can hold things together for more than a few months. They may not have the right to strike, but federal employees can still gum up the works with high absenteeism and poor performance.
I really don’t expect anything good to come of this entire episode.
Wednesday assorted links
My Conversation with Larissa MacFarquhar
This was a really good one, here is the text and audio. The opening:
TYLER COWEN: I’m here today with the great Larissa MacFarquhar. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker, considered by many to write the very best and most interesting profiles of anyone in the business. She has a very well-known book called Strangers Drowning. The subtitle is Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. It’s about extreme altruists. And she’s now working on a book on people’s decisions whether or not to leave their hometown.
Here is one excerpt proper:
COWEN: If you’re an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated?
MACFARQUHAR It’s funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don’t want to call them extreme altruists. I think they’re people with a very strong sense of duty.
The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways.
COWEN: They didn’t care at all what people thought about anything they did like how they dressed or . . . ?
MACFARQUHAR: Things like that. I don’t mean they didn’t care about anything about what people thought because obviously —
COWEN: In this context they didn’t care.
MACFARQUHAR: Obviously they cared about making other people’s lives better. But yes, in terms of opinions of themselves, they were much less sensitive to that than most of us.
And:
COWEN: Your view on how much you should be lied to if you have dementia — is that the same as what you would propose for a sibling or a child, someone you loved and knew?
MACFARQUHAR: With dementia?
COWEN: Right. Would you be consistent and apply the same standard to them that you would want for yourself?
MACFARQUHAR: Ohhh, I don’t know.
COWEN: I would say don’t lie to me, but, in fact, for others, I would be more willing to lie to them than I would wish to be lied to myself.
Try this part too:
COWEN: If during a profile, when you describe people’s looks, are you worried that you are reinforcing stereotypes?
MACFARQUHAR: No. But I have —
COWEN: But isn’t there a thing, looksism?
MACFARQUHAR: Well, of course.
COWEN: There’s sexism, there’s racism, and looksism — people who look a certain way, you should make certain inferences. Is there any way we can describe people’s looks that doesn’t run that danger?
MACFARQUHAR: Probably not. But I’ll say two things about this.
First is, I think there is far too much emphasis on describing people’s looks. Because the thing about humans is that their faces are unique, so you can describe somebody, but you’re never going to be able to call up an exact picture in a reader’s mind about what the person looks like. So what you’re doing is not really describing what they look like — what you’re doing is evoking something which, I guess, the malign form of that is looksism.
But I’ve started avoiding describing what people look like, not because it results in looksism — though I’m sure that’s true — but because, unconsciously or not, it puts the reader in a position of being outside the person, looking at them.
And also, from me:
COWEN: Could the same person be both, say, a Rwandan killer in the 1990s and an extreme altruist? Or is that a contradiction?
Definitely recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
2. “A row has broken out between the mayor of Rome and the Roman Catholic Church over what should happen to coins retrieved from the Trevi fountain. Every year nearly €1.5m (£1.3m) is fished out of the famous landmark. It is traditionally given to a Catholic charity to help the destitute. But now Mayor Virginia Raggi wants the money spent on the city’s crumbling infrastructure instead.” Link here.
3. The Sex Raft no IRB for that one.
4. Agnes Callard Cato Unbound comment on Stubborn Attachments. And Callard in The New Yorker.
5. Friday, January 25 I speak in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, and January 31 at the University of Chicago.
6. Many attitudes are becoming more neutral, except toward the overweight.
Noah Smith debates the 70 percent marginal tax rate with a bunch of us
Here is the Bloomberg link, here is a sentence from Noah on AOC:
Her proposal, which would make the tax structure similar to the one the U.S. had in 1921, is pretty much symbolic — a way of expressing disapproval of inequality, while kicking off a lively discussion of income taxes and redistribution.
We do not all agree.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jackie Chan, with Zhu Mo, Never Grow Up. “My ankle joint pops out of its socket all the time, even when I’m just walking around, and I’ll have to pop it back in. My leg sometimes gets dislocated when I’m showering. For that one, I need my assistant to help me click it back in…I can’t lift heavy objects.” He needed brain surgery after filming Armour of God, and he sustained permanent hearing loss in his left ear. Recommended, if you like the movies. And: “That was how I pursued girls, I overwhelmed them.”
2. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: the Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844. “…the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can only be understood if it is placed in the context of the hermetic tradition. The distinctive doctrines of the church — preexistent spirits, material spirit, human divinization, celestial marriage — are opaque unless we explore their relationship to the evolving fusion of hermetic perfectionism and radical sectarianism occupying the extreme edge of the Christian tradition from the late Middle Ages into the early modern age.”
3. Guy Arnold, Africa A Modern History: 1945-2015, second edition. It is hard to image that a 1077 pp. doorstop kind of a book on “Africa” might be very good, but in fact this one is. It is the best book on contemporary Africa and its (recent) historical roots that I know. I am reading this book all the way through.
4. Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens. How does social change happen, organized around Cass’s favorite topics, such as nudge and polarization and cascades. This book doesn’t cover everything, but it is one of the essential introductions to a topic that is very difficult to handle. And I am happy there is no subtitle.
Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist, A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, is a good and correct “green” take on the case for nuclear energy.
The Cato Institute has put out Michael D. Tanner, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor, and Randal O’Toole Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love are Not the Transportation We Need.
Dreyer’s *Day of Wrath* (this post is full of spoilers)
Yes this movie dates from 1943 but I don’t think it is (mainly) about the Nazi persecutions, and every review I have seen on-line seems to misunderstand the film rather badly. First, it is a #MeToo film. Anne is abused and in essence raped (repeatedly) by her much older husband Absalon, who is a powerful figure in the local community. He saved her mother from being burnt as a witch, and in return took her body and matrimonial hand, never asking if she wanted this. She ends up wishing for his death “hundreds of times,” and the movie focuses on how this marital experience hollows out her inner shell. Her illicit romance with Martin, Absalon’s son, was never emotionally real and was mainly intended as an escape from her servitude and perhaps also as a bit of revenge.
The second theme of the movie, related to the first, concerns the equilibria of belief in witchcraft. If some of the citizens believe in witches, some of the otherwise powerless women will pretend to be witches, to win some power. Anne does this, as she knows that powerlessness is the worst thing in this society. (The older Herlofs Marthe also left some uncertainty about her powers to reach demons and the like.) Of course this strategy has potential downsides, especially when some women are burnt as witches, but ex ante it can make sense to parade as a witch with some probability. For Anne, powerlessness is perceived as so bad she is even willing to be a witch ex post. Of course she killed Absalon by poisoning his beer, not by placing a hex on him. Even when facing death, she can’t give up the one source of perceived power she might aspire to have.
Monday assorted links
1. “Costco is selling a $90 tub of mac-and-cheese that weighs 27 pounds and lasts 20 years.” Though it is sold out.
2. Good interview with Dana Gioia, including about his Catholicism.
3. Scott Sumner films and books of 2018 these are always among the best blog posts of the year.
4. Which famous aphorisms are false or unhelpful?
5. Gay supporters of Trump (NYT). And why are the Chinese supporting science fiction?
Ratio of <= 40 to >= 50 scientists funded by the NIH
The dotted line at the top is the Jones-implied ratio of productivity of <= 40 year olds to >= 50 year-olds, as drawn from Figure 1 in this source.
For the construction of this data source I am indebted to PseudoMontaigne. Does it not imply that NIH funding is vastly over-allocated according to the criterion of seniority? Or might this be the rise of the lab system, where the older people are the PIs, and they in turn dole this money out to younger researchers? More middlemen, so to speak. Opinions?
*The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis*
That is the new and highly comprehensive book by Sheilagh Ogilvie, and it is likely to stand as one of the more important works of economic history from the last decade. Here is one opening summary bit:
…my own reading of the evidence is that a common theme underlies guilds’ activities: guilds tended to do what is best for guild members. In some cases, what guilds did brought certain benefits for the broader public. But overall, the actions guilds took mainly had the effect of protecting and enriching their members at the expense of consumers and non-members; reducing threats from innovators, competitors, and audacious upstarts; and generating sufficient rents to pay off the political elites that enforced guilds’ privileges and might otherwise have interfered with them.
And yes she really does show this, with a remarkable assemblage of data. For instance:
…the 14 guilds in Table 2.4 devoted an average of 28 per cent of their expenditures to lobbying. However, the average was 45 per cent across the five poor guilds and just 14 per cent across the eight rich ones.
Or:
Guild mastership fees could not be paid off in a couple of weeks of work. Across these 1,102 observations, the average mastership fee consumed 276 days’ wages for a labourer, 215 days for a journeyman, and 1543 days for a guild master.
Operating licenses were expensive too (pp.125-126). There are more “Ands”:
Guild entry barriers pushed people into illicit production, as emerges from 14 per cent of observations in Table 3.15.
And:
Guild members whose trades stagnated could not legally diversify to other guilded work…
On top of that, guilds typically restricted the training of women and would not let them enter the relevant sectors. And:
The amount of attention guilds devoted to product quality in their ordinances does not suggest they regarded it as a major concern.
Ouch! Ogilivie also concludes, and demonstrates using data, that guilds did not promote human capital accumulation or innovation. The various revisionist defenses of guilds, as produced over the years, basically seem to be wrong.
You can pre-order the book here.