Category: Uncategorized
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
In a nation where people lead ever more busy lives and increasingly view their dogs as family members, professional dog walking is flourishing. And along with it is what might be viewed as the unusual art of dog walker communication. Many of today’s walkers do not simply stroll — not if they want to be rehired, anyway. Over text and email, they craft fine-grained, delightful narratives tracing the journey from arrival at the residence to drop-off. They report the number of bathroom stops. They take artistic photos, and lots of them.
“For an hour-long walk, I send six or eight, depending,” said Griffin, 44, who holds a treat in her hand when shooting to ensure her charge is looking at the camera. “Then I give a full report that includes not only peeing and pooping but also kind of general well-being, and if the dog socialized with other dogs.”
After walking a dog named Stevie Nicks earlier this year, Griffin’s blow-by-blow mentioned that the dog had collected a chicken bone from under a bush, then “crunched down on it and broke into 3 pieces.” At the end of another walk, Griffin related that she “picked the foxtails out of her little beard and mustache,” and explained precisely where the foxtails had come from — “the fence around the yard at the corner.”
Dog walkers’ notes are often more exhaustive than those parents get from the caregivers of their human children.
The article is interesting throughout:
“Ongoing, two-way communication is actually one of the most important components to a successful walk,” White said. “What we’ve heard from owners is the more details, the better. You can’t have too many details.”…
“All of our dog walkers have been really good communicators, but Perry wins the prize,” said Tucci, a nonprofit executive. His texts “are really are more logistical and poop-oriented than anything else. But they’re always so enthusiastic.”
Saturday assorted links
1. The next generation of Indian intellectuals? Is the list maybe a bit too high-falutin’?
2. How some of China’s spies operate. And update on Chinese CRISPR patients, lots is going on here and we are seeing just the tip of it.
3. “Libraries are incredibly risk averse…” And this bit: “We will err very much on this side of caution. We would rather not gather the information in the first place, then run the risk of holding it and losing it. And we do have to have information. With one exception, we get rid of it the moment we can. The only one exception is fines information.”
5. More skepticism about carbon taxes, from Justin Gillis (NYT).
6. Scott Sumner on how to teach economics (recommended, there is much truth and wisdom in this post).
7. Top economists pick the best research papers of the year.
Demographics matters more and explains more than you think
The US economy has undergone a number of puzzling changes in recent decades. Large firms now account for a greater share of economic activity, new firms are being created at a slower rate, and workers are getting paid a smaller share of GDP. This paper shows that changes in population growth provide a unified quantitative explanation for these long-term changes. The mechanism goes through firm entry rates. A decrease in population growth lowers firm entry rates, shifting the firm-age distribution towards older firms. Heterogeneity across firm age groups combined with an aging firm distribution replicates the observed trends. Micro data show that an aging firm distribution fully explains i) the concentration of employment in large firms, ii) and trends in average firm size and exit rates, key determinants of the firm entry rate. An aging firm distribution also explains the decline in labor’s share of GDP. In our model, older firms have lower labor shares because of lower overhead labor to employment ratios. Consistent with our mechanism, we find that the ratio of nonproduction workers to total employment has declined in the US.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Hugo Hopenhayn, Julian Neira, and Rish Singhania, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Yonas thanks you all for buying *Stubborn Attachments*
I went to see him and his family in Lalibela over Thanksgiving holiday (they cook amazing lentils), and they are doing fine and making good progress on their activities:
Friday assorted links
1. Anonymous and pseudonymous inventions other than Bitcoin.
2. Bhaven N. Sampat long NBER survey paper on evidence on patents and copyright. I won’t get to read this soon, but it looks very useful.
3. “When young sailors need a minor course correction, he said, instead of ordering a spell in the brig, he often orders them to write reports on works by authors like Patrick Henry or Ayn Rand.” (NYT)
4. Data on founders of billion-dollar start-ups.
5. Why is Serbia a nation but Karnataka not? Recommended.
What were the questions I thought about most this year?
As for background context, I’ve for years wondered why people get so bugged by each other on Twitter. A second question is why political correctness — even if you think it is fully bad — occasions so much opposition compared to many other maladies.
Those paths of inquiry have led me to think more about socially neurotic people, and yes that is a pretty big percentage of humans. By that designation I mean people who likely would score high on neuroticism on a five-factor personality test. Here is one definition, useful but maybe not the most precise one:
Neuroticism can lead an individual to focus on, and to dwell on, the negative aspects of a situation, rather than the positives. They experience jealousy and become envious of other people when they feel that they are in an advantaged position over themselves. They may be prone to becoming frustrated, irate or angry as they struggle to cope with life stressors.
Is this kind of neuroticism even well-defined, or is it indirectly bundled with other positive traits, including positive affect toward some other set of external circumstances? Or, to be blunt, are we ever justified in thinking that neurotic people are — ceteris paribus — simply worse than others? Maybe neuroticism is a holdover from earlier times when life was more precarious and nowadays lingering neurotic traits are largely unjustified. Alternatively, is neuroticism simply “another way of being”, deserving of respect the way we might treat another culture, even in the presence of some negative externalities?
How much are five-factor personality traits context-dependent rather than absolute? Is anti-neuroticism neurotic, a kind of negative affect of its own? Or is it a way of standing up for truth, justice, and the American way?
Are there positive social externalities from neuroticism, such as indirectly subsidizing movements for social justice?
Overall, I am coming to the conclusion that, even (especially?) if we are personally annoyed by neuroticism, it is more useful to view it in a broader and less negative context.
Most concretely, when should you seek out or at least not mind neurotic trading partners? It’s that kind of question where the rubber hits the road.
These were perhaps my top questions for mental space, I may soon present you with some others.
52 things learned by Kent Hendricks
Here are a few:
Contrary to the beliefs of roughly 33% of Americans, Kansas is not the flattest state. In fact, it’s the 9th flattest state, and it’s one of only two Great Plains states to make the top ten (the other is North Dakota). The flattest state is actually Florida, the second flattest state is Illinois, and the least flattest is West Virginia. (Disruptive Geo)
…The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9. (Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
…Dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time. Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus. (Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions)
…Pepperoni pizza is subject to more government regulation than plain cheese pizza. That’s because cheese pizzas are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while pepperoni pizzas—which have meat—are regulated by the Department of Agriculture. (Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany, Risk: A Very Short Introduction)
Here is the full list, interesting throughout.
Thursday assorted links
1. Leather tanners of Ecuador.
2. Science stories from 2018 — are these the important ones?
3. Bach’s most popular works, broader rankings here. Based on YouTube data, not what is played in concert. If there is any composer who in terms of intrinsic quality should not have such a Power Law, it is Bach, yet he does.
What I’ve been reading
1. Elaine Dundy, Life Itself. She as a teen taught Mondrian how to jitterbug, married Kenneth Tynan and moved into London high society, became an important writer in her own right, and got tired of him wanting to whip her. I was never inclined to stop reading.
2. Amina M. Derbi, The Storyteller and the Terrorist in Our Newsfeeds. In this novella a Muslim girl in Northern Virginia posts stories of murders on-line and those murders start coming true. I finished this one too. Unusual in its approach.
3. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. On the surface this is an account of various famous British anthropologists and their views toward Christianity. At a deeper level it contrasts the anthropological and religious approaches to understanding society. Why do so many anthropologists have more tolerant attitudes toward the religions they study than to Christianity? Do the Christian beliefs of an anthropologist help or hurt that individual’s understanding of other religions in the field? Once you’ve seen another religion “from the outside” as an anthropologist, and observed its apparently arbitrary features, can you still be religious yourself? Definitely recommended, here is my previous review of Larsen on John Start Mill.
4. Colin M. Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Genocide and the Rwandan Patriotic Front. This is perhaps the most conceptual book I know on the Rwandan genocide, most of all because it ties the killings to both prior and posterior events very well. Recommended, but (for better or worse) note the author is relatively sympathetic to Kagame in the post-conflict period. I did just buy Waugh’s book on Charles Taylor and Liberia, which you can take as a credible endorsement of this one.
Noteworthy is Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. I have not read it, but had positive impressions from my paw-through.
Day after Christmas assorted links
1. Lu Zhang on indexing and factor analysis.
2. Why has progress against malaria stalled? (NYT) I would suggest it is the dysfunctional governance at the remaining margins.
3. The fight to save the Mexican tortilla (NYT).
4. FDA obstacles to the green-friendly, animal-friendly Impossible Burger.
5. The case against SESTA/FOSTA, plus other observations on the tech world.
At what ages do children stop believing in Santa Claus?
Research in the Journal of Cognition and Development in 2011 shows that 83% of 5-year-olds think that Santa Claus is real, the study’s lead author, Jacqueline Woolley, wrote in The Conversation last year.
“We have found in more recent studies that that number of 85% sounds about right,” said Thalia Goldstein, assistant professor of applied developmental psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
“Children’s belief in Santa starts when they’re between 3 and 4 years old. It’s very strong when they’re between about 4 and 8,” she said. “Then, at 8 years old is when we start to see the drop-off in belief, when children start to understand the reality of Santa Claus.”
What about across the pond? They seem to be asleep over there:
Of 161 parents in the United Kingdom, 92.5% thought Father Christmas was real for their children up to the age of 8, according to a research paper presented at the annual meeting of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association in Finland in 1999.
And here is a study vulnerable to the replication crisis:
The interviews revealed that 39.2% of the children believed that the man they visited was the same Santa who came down their chimneys…1.3% had a somewhat “adult belief,” Goldstein said, in which they said that the man was not Santa and did not live at the North Pole but could communicate with the real Santa.
That is a CNN article from last year. Why is the word “marginal” declining in popularity? How many seven year olds know what “marginal” means? How many know not to believe everything the President says? How many understand hedging?
Guayaquil notes
An ideal city for a day trip, fly in and back out in the evening. It is much nicer and safer than its longstanding icky reputation, and by this point it is probably safer than pickpocket laden, iPhone-snatching Quito (NB: I strap everything to my inner body). The seafood is first-rate, the city is the future of Ecuador, and I saw more Afro-Ecuadorians than I was expecting to. Guayaquil overrates its own Malecón, but at some point it will all end up looking good. Just not yet. In the meantime, I recommend the Park of the Iguanas.
Christmas assorted links
1. 99 good news stories from 2018. p.s. not all of them are good, though most of them are. But prices going to zero for normal market goods and services usually is a mistake.
2. The seasonal business cycle in camel rentals.
3. David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, part I (NYT).
4. Should credit card companies be required to monitor or limit weapons purchases? (NYT, I say no and view this as a dangerous trend).
5. Should the EU enforce content regulations on streaming services? (I say no and view this as a dangerous trend).
Life at the margin?
With Seamus Heaney:
Poetry isn’t important in one sense — it’s more important to live your life and be a good person. Who cares about poetry, there’s plenty already around. Life is more important than art.
Under what conditions is that true? Under what conditions is it actually believed by Heaney? Here is the rest of the interview, interesting throughout. I enjoyed this bit:
MB: What do you like to discuss in terms of literature in your classes?
SH: I’m radical about this, but it seems strange to have discussions with people who don’t know anything and who overreact. They usually don’t have much to say. Maybe discuss literature with them the following year — after the class — when they’ve had time to have the material enter their memory. Until it’s entered their personality they can’t say much.
Via Anecdotal.
Monday assorted links
1. Does culture mainly change by people dying off?
2. Profile of the Chinese gene-editing scientist, slow to start but picks up.
3. Will Compernolle reviews Stubborn Attachments.
5. Mexican historical legacies date back to pre-colonial times.
6. For the first time in more than twenty years, some works will be entering the public domain.