Category: Uncategorized
Has Covid ushered in a new era of U.S. regional decentralization?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and here is the opener:
The homogenization of America — through national TV and politics, cheap transportation and big online or nationwide businesses such as Walmart and Amazon — is a longstanding story. Regardless of how true it is, or ever was, a new truth is emerging from the pandemic: In the last year, the differences among the U.S.’s states and regions have become increasingly apparent — and they are more temperamental than political.
I recently spent two weeks in Miami Beach, and the mood was festive. On the street, many people wore masks, but once they entered the packed restaurants and clubs, the masks came off and the partying started. (Disclosure: I am vaccinated, and was an observer, not a participant.) The midnight curfew was by no means always respected.
That scene might make you recoil in horror, and many observers predicted catastrophe for Florida’s policies. But Florida’s death toll is close to the national average, and Governor Ron DeSantis is extremely popular. The state’s lockdowns were never very strict, its schools have been open since August, and Miami’s NBA team is welcoming fans, albeit with seating restrictions. The economy has been booming for some time, in part because people who wish to spend money or organize get-togethers have been drawn to Florida.
And my sense is that most Floridians feel vindicated. I spoke to several people who admitted they had had Covid earlier in the year and described the experience with a giggle or a smirk, as if it were nothing serious. Just last week DeSantis announced that Florida would have nothing to do with plans for vaccine passports…
San Francisco is one obvious point of contrast. The schools still have not reopened, with no clear date in sight, even though the teachers have been offered vaccines. (Meanwhile, the school board decided to rename many of its schools.) Large public gatherings are rare, and inside dining has been largely prohibited. Like Florida, the city can boast of very low death rates from Covid, and like Floridians, many San Franciscans seem proud of their course.
You might think this is all because Florida is a Republican-leaning state. But Donald Trump won only 51.2% of the vote there last year, and Joe Biden won Miami-Dade County by seven percentage points…
Overall the Southeast would seem to be a big winner, as the psychological effects of low rates of unemployment may prove more durable than the effects of high rates of casualties.
There is much more at the link, including a comparison of Virginia and Maryland.
Wohin economics?
Mammograms and Mortality: How has the Evidence Evolved?
Representation is Not Sufficient for Selecting Gender Diversity
Back to School: The Effect of School Visits During COVID-19 on COVID-19 Transmission
The Public Health Effects of Legalizing Marijuana
Those are all new NBER working papers, issued today. To be clear, I do not intend this list as criticism, either of these papers or of the NBER (for one thing, I have not read them). But surely it is worth pointing out that something has changed. If you think economists should be doing these papers, does that translate into a relatively low opinion of the quantitative standards in those fields proper? Or maybe the economists are better at spotting interesting questions and seeing the work through? Yes or no? How exactly should we imagine the (possible) comparative advantage of economists with these topics? I mean these as genuine questions, not snarky ones. I have never been a per se opponent of economic imperialism.
Monday assorted links
1. More on why monoclonal antibodies are not being used enough.
2. The world record for number of drones put in the sky.
3. Noted economist and painter Robert Mundell has passed away. And earlier Krugman on Mundell.
4. More Scott Sumner movie reviews, some of the best content on the internet, mostly because they are true.
5. On-line book on Girardian social theory.
6. Vaccination lags in Ivory Coast.
7. Naval on NFTs.
Russ Roberts and I revisit the pandemic, one year later, in an EconTalk podcast
Here goes, interesting throughout. Here was our original podcast, also done as a CWT.
How open and face to face will fall semester be?
I am pleased to see Cornell mandating vaccination for all of its students. Of course other colleges and universities can do the same. Even if they do not take that step, it still seems it will be “safe enough” to hold most classes in-person in the Fall, if not sooner.
And yet.
Here is what I think is the issue. Universities these days are not very good at “leaving people behind,” at least not as an act of open and deliberate commission. What about students or faculty who just had organ transplants and who thus might have compromised immune systems and also high vulnerability to Covid? Rather than the Coase theorem being applied, schools might make professors offer a hybrid option, namely that some students take the class face to face, and other students take it over Zoom, with a computer hooked up to cover the classroom.
Of course the mixed mode doesn’t work very well. I’ve learned from meetings that an all on-line meeting usually is (much) better than a mixed meeting where some people are present and others on-line, or in the old days on the phone.
So imagine universities giving every student the option to check a box: “I want this class on-line so please make it a hybrid option.”
Except they don’t make anyone prove that they just had an organ transplant.
And then ten percent of the students prefer to live in Pakistan, California, Florida — wherever. Those students check the box to make the class a hybrid option. What happens?
Many classes “might just suck.”
Another option is that the class evolves into mainly on-line as a least worst option.
Another option — #3 — is that the university forgets about the box-checking option but nonetheless uses this as a chance to evolve toward a larger and more sensible on-line presence.
#3 might happen, but I don’t think it will be in place by this fall. And thus you can see my worry about the pending fall semester in many institutions. Will they have the stones to say “No, we’re just going to offer this one face to face”?
Stay tuned.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Earn $1,000 Binge Watching All 24 James Bond Movies.”
2. “…since his film debut, Kong has grown from around 24 feet in 1933 to more than 300 feet today…” (NYT)
3. The police culture that is Canada (short video for Passover).
4. James Cahill on Chinese art.
5. Museums had relatively safe air filtration systems to begin with.
Claims about Earned Income Tax Credit
The EITC increases the labor supply of mothers, which leads to increases in payroll and sales taxes paid.
The EITC decreases dependence on government transfer spending.
Evaluated over a one-year period, the net EITC cost is only 17 percent of the $70 billion annual budgetary cost.
Evaluated over a longer-time horizon, the net EITC cost is lower and perhaps zero.
The 2009 EITC expansion continued to increase maternal labor supply and earnings.
Here is the forthcoming Journal of Public Economics paper, by Jacob E. Bastian and Maggie R. Jones, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. Mistaken Italian Jihadi kidnapping intersecting markets in everything.
2. Dog theft on the rise. By one measure, the price of a dog is up 5x, and (UK) dog thefts are up 250%.
3. SNL on NFTs.
4. Godzilla movies ranked (not always well).
5. Crypto guy buys world’s biggest painting for $62 million.
6. The Allen Lowe history of American music project, I just dropped $175 on it, has to be amazing, WSJ review here.
7. Journal of Financial Economics already has a submission fee of $1000.
The new Michela Wrong book
It is called Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, and so far it is very good. Here is one bit:
As a Rwandan psychologist once told me: “To show emotional reserve is considered a sign of high standing. You do not just pour out your heart in Rwanda. You do not cry. It’s the opposite of Western oversharing, a form of stoicism.
A culture that glories in its impenetrability, that sees virtue in misleading: to someone proposing to write a nonfiction account embracing many of the most controversial episodes in Rwandan history, it posed a bit of a challenge.
Recommended, I will continue reading, and this one is likely to make the “best non-fiction of the year” list.
$1000 submission fee to the AER?
I saw that circulating as an April Fool’s joke, but is it such a crazy idea? Here would be a few effects:
1. Submissions would decline, thus liberating some time for editors and referees. This is valuable in its own right, and furthermore remaining decisions might be made with greater care. And presumably the remaining submissions would be those with a higher chance of acceptance.
2. To some extent departments would pick up the submission fee. This would favor researchers in wealthier departments, though whether this is good or bad I am not sure. And even the most flush departments would find this pretty steep and I don’t think would offer carte blanche reimbursement.
3. It would favor senior and wealthier colleagues over junior colleagues. That sounds bad to most people, but is it? Favoring the wealthier senior colleagues might help limit the arms race for “here is my 90-page paper that has performed every possible cross-check of the results.” It also might lower the return to technique, as younger researchers tend to be more up on the latest math but they are also less broad and by definition less experienced.
4. Graduate students in particular would be less likely to submit, especially from lower-tier departments. It would be harder for job candidates from the non-top schools to prove themselves by publishing in the AER.
5. Papers would be “shopped around” more to seminars before being submitted.
6. Papers would become longer, which is probably a bad thing.
7. It might select for overconfident economists from wealthier families.
8. The AER would no longer “get all the best papers,” at least as such things are perceived. That could very well be good! Why should one journal have such a lock?
Would the AEA take in more revenue with this plan?
What else? What is in fact the optimal submission fee for a journal where publications can be worth tens of thousands of dollars (or sometimes much more) there? Why should the authors/submitters be charged so little?
Friday assorted links
Why don’t more people go to college?
This new piece in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics seems to be channeling some parts of Bryan Caplan’s argument:
Despite increases in the college earnings premium to persistently high levels, investment in college education remains low. We can understand this apparent puzzle by considering the risk of attending college and, in particular, the possibility of failing to graduate. Students with a reasonable probability of completing college already enroll, and for those who do not enroll, the low chance of completion blunts the impact of the rising college premium. In the absence of improved college readiness, our quantitative results suggest that continuing long-standing trends in skill-biased technological change can be expected primarily to increase earnings inequality rather than college attainment.
From Kartik Athreya and Janice Eberly. The implied discontinuity in the de facto talent distribution also echoes some themes from my own Average is Over.
Further estimates on the cost of climate change and global warming
Sea level rise will cause spatial shifts in economic activity over the next 200 years. Using a spatially disaggregated, dynamic model of the world economy, this paper estimates the consequences of probabilistic projections of local sea level changes. Under an intermediate scenario of greenhouse gas emissions, permanent flooding is projected to reduce global real GDP by 0.19 percent in present value terms. By the year 2200, a projected 1.46 percent of the population will be displaced. Losses in coastal localities are much larger. When ignoring the dynamic response of investment and migration, the loss in real GDP in 2200 increases from 0.11 percent to 4.5 percent.
That newly published paper is from Klaus Desmet, Robert E. Kopp, Scott A. Kulp, Dávid Krisztián Nagy, Michael Oppenheimer, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Benjamin H. Strauss in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Am I wrong to feel a little…underwhelmed by those estimates? Here is an earlier recent paper on other cost estimates.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2021
In this issue (.pdf):
Will you live longer if you move to a place where people live longer? Commenting on an American Economic Review article, Robert Kaestner examines the causality behind an association between Medicare enrollees’ longevity and their post-Katrina migration from New Orleans to various destinations. Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor reply to Kaestner.
Does machine learning improve corporate fraud detection? Commenting on a Journal of Accounting Research article, Stephen Walker investigates the findings for the effectiveness of machine learning in detecting accounting fraud. Yang Bao, Bin Ke, Bin Li, Y. Julia Yu, and Jie Zhang reply to Walker.
Is institutional quality impacted by immigration from poor or corrupt countries? Garett Jones and Ryan Fraser suggest overcontrol bias in works studying the issue, propose to investigate the matter using simpler evidence, and find indications of adverse impact on economic freedom. Jamie Bologna Pavlik, Estefania Lujan Padilla, and Benjamin Powell controvert the suggestion of overcontrol bias and provide new results finding against any such adverse impact.
Adam Smith in Love: Enrique Guerra-Pujol considers several pieces of evidence and concludes that Adam Smith very likely knew from personal experience what it meant to be in love with another person.
A final inning on colonial money: Ronald Michener has persistently challenged the scholarship of Farley Grubb on colonial money. Here, Professor Grubb replies to Michener’s last rejoinder, focused again on the experience of colonial New Jersey.
Against Standard Deviation as a Quality Control Maxim in Anthropometry: Austin Sandler discusses a pervasive practice in his field of anthropometry: Rejecting data sets in which standard deviations are ‘too big.’ He describes the origin and spread of this practice and its rationales, and argues against it.
Readworthy 2050: We complete the fielding of the question: What 21st-century works will merit a close reading in 2050? New responses are provided by Mitchell Langbert, Andrés Marroquín, Steven G. Medema, Alberto Mingardi, Paul D. Mueller, Stephen R. Munzer, Evan W. Osborne, Justin T. Pickett, Rupert Read and Frank M. Scavelli, Hugh Rockoff, Kurt Schuler, Daniel J. Schwekendiek, Per Skedinger, E. Frank Stephenson, Scott Sumner, Cass R. Sunstein, Slaviša Tasić, Clifford F. Thies, and Richard E. Wagner. (The first tranche is here.)
The History of Economic Thought as a Refined Liberal Art: Kevin Quinn reflects on intellectual history as a way of cultivating our humanity, with compliments for Don Lavoie.
EJW Audio:
Enrique Guerra-Pujol on Adam Smith’s Love Life
Lucas Berlanza on Liberalism in Brazil
Scott Drylie on Scholarship on Adam Smith on Schooling and Government
Call for papers:
Commentaries on Smith/Hume scholarship
Who should get the Nobel Prize in economics, and why?
EJW invites ‘journal watch’ submissions beyond Econ.
EJW fosters open exchange. We welcome proposals and submissions of diverse viewpoints.