Category: Uncategorized
What I’ve been reading
1. Gregory M. Collins, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Burke is underrated as an economist, and also more generally. This very thorough and thoughtful book goes a long way toward setting the record straight. In the meantime, it is not sufficiently well known just how much Keynes was influenced by Burke.
2. Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Perhaps if one needs to read this book, one is also under-qualified to comment on it. Still it seemed very good to me and providing one of the better introductions. I hadn’t know for instance that Abraham and even Adam to some extent were “in on” the covenant all along.
3. R.F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney. A very good “short book essay” on one of my favorite poets. That is a UK link, here is what you get when you search U.S. Amazon. How can that be? These days you can search Amazon better using Google than using Amazon itself.
4. Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics. It makes sense that a biography of Veblen should be…somewhat verbose. Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution for anyone interested in the topic. To me the main question is why the libertarian right takes Veblen more seriously these days than does the Left, perhaps it is because they read Veblen and immediately think of Wokeism?
5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology. From the 1830s, this remains one of the great scientific classics. I had never known how well-reasoned or beautifully written it was, a big positive surprise for me. Not just a bunch of crusty old rocks, though it is also about…a bunch of crusty old rocks.
There is Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.
John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to Covid-19 is a short but useful treatment of what its title promises. I had not known that both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were opposed to compulsory vaccination.
Not disappearing after November 3rd
Via Scott Gottlieb. And how about North Dakota? It is a low population state, but if all of the United States were putting in a comparable Covid performance we would be having about 12,500 Covid deaths a day. That is certainly not my prediction, but it is one way to think about what could happen from a very bad policy and social norms response. Is that the road we wish to be veering towards?
Sunday assorted links
1. They wouldn’t let Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle do this in the U.S. today (ten minute music video).
2. What the Chinese say. If you are really for diversity, why don’t we give that writer a NYT column? Why not a CCP columnist for every major outlet? Isn’t that the alternative perspective we should care about the most?
3. The public sector wrestling culture that is Uzbekistan.
Secularization and the Tribulations of the American Working-Class
That is a work in progress by Brian Wheaton, job market candidate from Harvard University. Here is the abstract:
Over the past several decades, working-class America has been plagued by multiple adverse trends: a sharp increase in social isolation, an even sharper increase in single parenthood, a decline in male labor force participation rates, and a decline in generational economic mobility – amongst other things. Material economic factors have been unable to fully explain these phenomena, often yielding mixed results or – in some cases, such as that of single parenthood – lacking explanatory power altogether. I study the decline in religiosity and, using a shift-share instrument leveraging the fact that different religious denominations are declining at different rates, I find that religious decline has a strong adverse effect on the aforementioned variables. The effects are not weakened by including other potential explanatory factors (such as China trade shocks and variation in public assistance). I present evidence that, to the extent reverse causality exists, it creates bias in the opposite direction of my estimates. These findings are also robust to several alternative instruments, including the repeal of the state blue laws banning retail activity on Sundays and the Catholic church scandals of the 2000s. Two instruments – the blue laws and the state anti-evolution laws mandating teaching of creationism in school – allow me to ascertain whether the effect proceeds through religious attendance or beliefs. I find that, for most outcomes, the bulk of the effect is driven by religious attendance.
To be clear, that is not Brian’s job market paper, which covers “Laws, Beliefs, and Backlash.” Or you might wish to try these results on corporal punishment in schools (with Maria Petrova and Gautam Rao):
We find that the presence of corporal punishment in schools increases educational attainment, increases later-life social trust and trust in institutions, and leads to less authoritarian attitudes toward child-rearing, and greater tolerance of free speech. Additionally, exposure to corporal punishment in school decreases later-life crime. We find no effects on mental or physical health.
Here is his paper about flat tax reform in Eastern Europe:
Using static and dynamic difference-in-differences approaches, I find that the flat tax reforms increase annual GDP growth by 1.36 percentage points for a transitionary period of approximately one decade.
I praise the scholarship and courage of Brian N. Wheaton.
Saturday assorted links
1. Scholars of civilizational collapse (NYT).
2. Paying people to get vaccinated.
3. Harvard’s Stephanie D. Cheng: another job candidate focused on the economics of science.
4. Yang You, Harvard job market candidate.
5. From the Korean War: ” I show that a one standard deviation increase in wartime racial integration caused white veterans to live in more racially diverse neighborhoods and marry spouses with less distinctively white names.” That is from Daniel Indacochea, job candidate at the University of Toronto.
San Diego on the mind
Arthur Johnston emails me:
Back in 2013 you wrote a post “What has San Diego Contributed to American Culture” I published an answer that I hope you find satisfactory.
Here is an excerpt from that interesting post:
In the Cities and Ambition model this means that San Diego ‘discourages’ you from producing cultural artifacts. Which means San Diego has fewer cultural artifacts that are legible to people not living here. Its contribution to the wider American culture is instead encouraging people to be more active and social.
A concrete example, a few weeks ago on a Monday I asked what everyone did over the weekend and the answers were:
- sailing lessons
- jumping from an airplane with a parachute I packed myself
- surfing
- brewing beer [to share with friends]
- “just” hiking [with family]
Some things to note, first that four of those five things involve interacting with other human beings for enjoyment, which is a fundamental part of what we define as culture. “surfing” the lone solitary activity was mine the person who created a cultural artifact you’re currently consuming.
Secondly those activities are all ephemeral.
For one thing, I would think this means well-being during the pandemic declined less in San Diego.
Are body cameras effective for constraining police after all?
Controversial police use of force incidents have spurred protests across the nation and calls for reform. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have received extensive attention as a potential key solution. I conduct the first nationwide study of the effects of BWCs in more than 1,000 agencies. I identify the causal effects by using idiosyncratic variation in adoption timing attributable to administrative hurdles and the lengthy process to the eventual adoption at different agencies. This empirical strategy addresses limitations of previous studies that evaluated BWCs within a single agency; in a single-agency setting, the control group officers are also indirectly affected by BWCs because they interact with the treatment group officers (spillover), and agencies that give researchers access may fundamentally differ from other agencies (site-selection bias). Overcoming these limitations, my multi-agency study finds that BWCs have led to a substantial drop in the use of force, both among whites and minorities. Nationwide, they reduce police-involved homicides by 43%. Surprisingly, I do not find evidence that BWCs are associated with de-policing. Examining social media usage data from Twitter as well as data on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, I find that after BWC adoption, public opinion toward the police improves. These findings imply that BWCs can be an important tool for improving police accountability without sacrificing policing capabilities.
That is from a new paper by Taeho Kim, on the job market from the University of Chicago, a Steve Levitt student. The piece has a revise and resubmit from ReStat.
Is research productivity declining in China and Germany?
In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that diminishing returns in idea production are a global phenomenon, not just confined to the U.S.
Here is the full paper by Phillip Boeing and Paul Hünermund. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. All the good news in one place. And my March column on the Progressive Left having peaked.
3. My 2016 post on the male nature of current populism, recommended. And Peloton is now worth more than Ford.
4. “The movement [#MeToo] increased reporting of sexual crimes by 10% during its first six months.” From Martin Mattsson, job market candidate from Yale.
5. Zeynep Tufekci on masks (NYT). Very good piece.
6. “AR 70-28 required that Army aircraft had to be named after “Indian terms and names of American Indian tribes and chiefs.” It also directed that tanks would be named after American generals, infantry weapons “would receive names for famous early American pioneers,” and assault weapons would have “fearsome reptile and insect names,” according to the press release.” Link here.
Our regulatory state is failing us, FAA edition
The Federal Aviation Administration has for months been weighing whether to allow the nation’s more than 500 federally subsidized airports to spend their money on screening passengers for the coronavirus, an issue teed up by a plan developed by a fairly small airport in Iowa.
Lenss worked with a local hospital to craft a plan to quickly screen travelers before they passed through security. He figured he could cover the $800,000 cost by using some of the $23 million the airport received under the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package known as the Cares Act.
The local airport commission signed off on the plan in July, agreeing to make the screening mandatory. At a public meeting shortly before the vote, Lenss predicted he would have the program up and running by September.
But months after Lenss started work, no passengers have been screened. Airport funds are tightly controlled by federal rules, so Lenss started asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in May if his plan qualified. He’s still waiting for an answer.
“We would have started the FAA conversation much earlier if we’d anticipated the time it’s been taking,” Lenss said. “At this point, I really don’t have a timeline when we might hear. We’re in limbo.”
Here is the full story, outrages throughout.
Optimizing the tie-breaker regression discontinuity design
Also known as “how to approve a vaccine and still continue with stage III trials.” From Art B. Owen and Hal Varian:
Motivated by customer loyalty plans and scholarship programs, we study tie-breaker designs which are hybrids of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and regression discontinuity designs (RDDs). We quantify the statistical efficiency of a tie-breaker design in which a proportion Δ of observed subjects are in the RCT. In a two line regression, statistical efficiency increases monotonically with Δ, so efficiency is maximized by an RCT. We point to additional advantages of tie-breakers versus RDD: for a nonparametric regression the boundary bias is much less severe and for quadratic regression, the variance is greatly reduced. For a two line model we can quantify the short term value of the treatment allocation and this comparison favors smaller Δ with the RDD being best. We solve for the optimal tradeoff between these exploration and exploitation goals. The usual tie-breaker design applies an RCT on the middle Δ subjects as ranked by the assignment variable. We quantify the efficiency of other designs such as experimenting only in the second decile from the top. We also show that in some general parametric models a Monte Carlo evaluation can be replaced by matrix algebra.
Published version here. Whether or not you agree with that particular approach, you can view 2020 in the following terms. Public health experts have told us that:
1. We citizens have to lock down many of our schools and sometimes jobs.
2. We citizens have to significantly change many of our commercial and retail and travel habits.
3. We citizens have to significantly limit or cut off many of our contacts with other human beings.
At the same time, they also are saying that:
4. “We public health experts do not have to come up with a way of approving a vaccine and simultaneously continuing to conduct our other clinical trials.”
And they wonder why people do not have greater faith in science.
The local amenities effect of Prohibition
Comparing same-state early and late adopters of county dry laws in a difference-in-differences design, we find that early Prohibition adoption increased population and farm real estate values. Moreover, we find strong effects on farm productivity consistent with increased investment due to a land price channel. In equilibrium, the amenity change disproportionately attracted immigrants and African-Americans.
That is from a new paper by Greg Howard and Arianna Ornaghi, revise and resubmit at Journal of Economic History. Arianna is on the job market from MIT, here is her job market paper and broader portfolio. Here is her paper on civil service reforms for U.S. police departments.
Thursday assorted links
1. Novovax: did you have moth cells and Gaithersburg on your 2020 bingo card?
2. And here is one version of the Danish mink news. Its import remains unclear.
3. Mongolian heavy metal video with 60 million views, good visuals and lyrics too.
4. Carolyn Stein papers on the economics of science and the biosciences. She is an economics job market candidate from MIT.
5. Married vs. unmarried women. And how Stanford voted.
6. Why electoral fraud is difficult (NYT).
Efficiency wages for warehouse workers
The firm gains $1.10 from increased productivity for a $1 increase in wages.
And:
…we estimate that over half of the turnover reductions and productivity increases arise from behavioral responses as opposed to compositional differences. These aggregate patterns mask considerable heterogeneity by gender: women’s productivity responds more and their turnover responds less to wage changes than men’s, which can lead to occupational pay gaps.
That is from a new paper by Natalia Emanuel, a job market candidate from Harvard University. The paper is co-authored with Emma Harrington (also on the job market), here is their other paper on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of working from home.
I had previously reported on Natalia’s very good paper, with Valentin Bolotnyy, on why women are paid less.
She has work in progress on school closures and family violence: “After three-day weekends and snow-days, reports of family violence increase. I further show that these effects are concentrated in counties with low median income.”
Social Media Usage and the Level of Depressive Symptoms in the United States
I find that using Twitter decreases the level of depressive symptoms by 27%.
That is from the job market paper of Qin Jiang from USC. Via Jennifer Doleac.