Category: Uncategorized

1. Profile of Mariana Mazzucato (NYT).

2. The incidence of the sex recession.

3. One list of the best sports books ever.

4. Vitalik Buterin: hard problems in cryptocurrency.

5. Not your grandpa’s ACLU.

6. TLS books of the year.

Also on Monday, Nevada said it would withdraw from the lawsuit in exchange for early deployment of the next generation of wireless in the state, creation of 450 jobs for six years and a $30 million donation to be distributed by Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and aimed at helping women and minorities, Ford’s office said.

Here is the story, via Bekir.

1. Arizona pizzeria organist dies, make us realize more restaurants need organists.

2. Jiro sushi no longer open to the public.

3. Swiss asylum-seeker results: “Our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict/mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort.”

4. Will AI be a disaster for authoritarianism?

5. Deludedly deeming deregulation a disaster.

6. Splitting up the World Series pie.

Does identity—one’s concept of self—influence economic behavior in the labor market? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In a field experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers’ average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes other than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers’ own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers’ choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. This paper’s findings indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy.

The bold emphasis is added by me.  That is from a job market paper by Suanna Oh, who is on the job market from Columbia.

Via Shruti.

1. “Ancient coin designs encoded increasing amounts of economic information over centuries.“

2. “Powell will serve 10 years in prison, Davies will do 8½ years and Wicks will spend five years behind bars for failing to report Viking treasure.”  Also coins!

3. Ed Conard on Philippon and monopoly.

4. When are women willing to lead?

5. Telepresence.

6. Suite Judy Blue Eyes (NYT).

1. Scientific grants combined with random selection.

2. Michael Nielsen on carbon capture.

3. “Four Life Lessons from My Hero” (video).  With gusto: “Fashion, qualitative research, mentorship, & debate!”

4. Do women say “please” more to their speakers?

1. Sarah Skwire five favorite novels with economic themes.

2. The NBA seems to be opposing the Spencer Dinwiddie token contract.

3. Did Prohibition and the shutting down of bars temporarily stifle social networks and innovation?

4. “Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician.”

5. Best of the 2010s lists.

1. Is flying and tourism good for the environment? (NYT)

2. Eww…(is that the right spelling?)…”People Are Having Sex With 3D Avatars of Their Exes and Celebrities.”

3. macrohive.com.

4. More brands are becoming perceived as politically partisan (WSJ).

5. New papers on Smith and Hume, with themes of liberalism and esotericism.

Here is another excerpt from “Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?”:

First, many scientific advances work through enabling a greater supply of labor, capital, and land, and those advances will be undervalued by a TFP metric. Let’s say someone invents a useful painkiller, and that makes it easier for many people to show up to work and be productive. Output will rise, yet that advance will show up as an increase in labor supply, rather than as an increase in technology or scientific knowledge. Similarly, a new method for discovering oil may boost output, but that will be classified as an increase in oil supply, even though it does properly represent a form of scientific progress. TFP is best at measuring scientific and technological advances that are superimposed on top of an existing supply of the other factors of production. If, for instance, you imagine a series of capital and labor resources at a factory, and someone develops a new formula for combining those resources more effectively, this will be picked up very effectively by standard TFP measures.

The more general problem is that many scientific and technological advances are embodied in concrete capital goods. Again, the TFP measure does best when the supply and nature of capital is fixed, and a new idea makes that capital (and associated labor) more effective. But what happens when the new idea is itself embodied in a concrete capital good? If a hospital equips its surgeons with iPads, or with Augmented Reality glasses, to make them more effective in the operating room, as a first order effect that measures as an increase of capital expenditures by the hospitals rather than as an innovation. Health and later output will increase, but will we really know if it is due to better ideas or just more investment? It will appear to measure as new investment. Capital expenditures and TFP are not so easily separated, whether at the conceptual or the practical measurement level.

Similarly, separating TFP from labor expenditure is not always so simple either. If a worker generates and carries forward a new scientific idea for producing more with a given amount of labor, that measures the same way as the worker being taught greater conscientiousness and producing more. Yet the former is (ideally) TFP and the latter is not, but both will count as an increase in the quality of labor input in the same way.

Here is my original post on the paper.  Here is the paper.