Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
Gender and the confidence gap
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The first new study focuses on performance in high school, and the startling result is this: Girls with more exposure to high-achieving boys (as proxied by parental education) have a smaller chance of receiving a bachelor’s degree. Furthermore, they do worse in math and science, are less likely to join the labor force, and more likely to have more children, which in turn may limit their later career prospects.
Those are disturbing results. Exposure to high-achieving peers is normally expected to be a plus, not a minus. It is what parents are trying to do when they place their children into better schools, or when school systems work hard to attract better students.
And:
A second new study finds that even blind review does not avoid gender bias in the processing of grant proposal applications, drawn from data from the Gates Foundation. It turns out that women and men have different communications styles, with the women more likely to use narrow words, and the men more likely to use broader ones. And reviewers, it turns out, favor broad words, which are more commonly associated with more sweeping claims, and disfavor the use of too many narrow words.
The net result is that “even in an anonymous review process, there is a robust negative relationship between female applicants and the scores assigned by reviewers.” This discrepancy persists even after controlling for subject matter and other variables. Notably, however, it disappears when controlling for different rhetorical styles.
These two studies probably are connected to each other. While the two sets of researchers do not address each other’s claims, it is not a huge leap to think of broader, more sweeping language as reflecting a kind of confidence, whether merited or not. Narrow words, on the other hand, may reflect a lower level of confidence or a greater sense of rhetorical modesty. Not only might lower confidence hurt many women in life, but a greater unwillingness to signal confidence — regardless of whether it’s genuine — might hurt them too.
There is much more at the link, recommended.
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. Should there be price regulation of biologics? And more.
2. Ross Douthat on Christianity and Notre Dame (NYT).
3. Peter Beinart on how bad exactly are China’s trade practices (not exactly my view, but fyi…).
My Conversation with Margaret Atwood
She requires no introduction, this conversation involved a bit of slapstick, so unlike many of the others it is better heard than read. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the opening:
COWEN: Just to start with some basic questions about Canada, which you’ve written on for decades — what defines the Canadian sense of humor?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Wow. [laughs] What defines the Canadian sense of humor? I think it’s a bit Scottish.
COWEN: How so?
ATWOOD: Well, it’s kind of ironic. It depends on what part of Canada you’re in. I think the further west you go, the less of a sense of humor they have.
[laughter]
ATWOOD: But that’s just my own personal opinion. My family’s from Nova Scotia, so that’s as far east as you can get. And they go in for deadpan lying.
[laughter]
COWEN: In 1974, you wrote, “The Canadian sense of humor was often obsessed with the issue of being provincial versus being cosmopolitan.”
ATWOOD: Yeah.
COWEN: You think that’s still true?
ATWOOD: Depends again. You know, Canada’s really big. In fact, there’s a song called “Canada’s Really Big.” You can find it on the internet. It’s by a group called the Arrogant Worms. That kind of sums up Canada right there for you.
The burden of the song is that all of these other countries have got all of these other things, but what Canada has is, it’s really big. It is, in fact, very big. Therefore, it’s very hard to say what is particularly Canadian. It’s a bit like the US. Which part of the US is the US? What is the most US thing —
COWEN: Maybe it’s Knoxville, Tennessee, right now. Right? The Southeast.
ATWOOD: You think?
COWEN: But it used to be Cleveland, Ohio.
ATWOOD: Did it?
COWEN: Center of manufacturing.
ATWOOD: When was that? [laughs] When was that?
COWEN: If you look at where the baseball teams are, you see what the US —
And from her:
ATWOOD: Yeah, so what is the most Canadian thing about Canada? The most Canadian thing about Canada is that when they ran a contest that went “Finish this sentence. As American as apple pie. As Canadian as blank,” the winning answer was “As Canadian as plausible under the circumstances.”
And a question from me:
COWEN: But you’ve spoken out in favor of the cultural exception being part of the NAFTA treaty that protects Canadian cultural industries. Is it strange to think that having more than half the [Toronto] population being foreign born is not a threat to Canadian culture, but that being able to buy a copy of the New York Times in Canada is a threat?
In addition to Canada, we talk about the Bible, Shakespeare, ghosts, her work habits, Afghanistan, academia, Peter the Great, writing for the future, H.G. Wells, her heretical feminism, and much much more.
Who should Trump pick for the Fed Board of Governors?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opener:
First, we should not forget that the Federal Reserve system is actually a private corporation of sorts, albeit one with a unique government-backed charter. So if you are on the board of the Fed, you are not just a figurehead — you are responsible for parts of the company. You could be in charge of the Fed’s pension and benefit plans, for instance, or its payments system.
To be sure, running monetary policy for the entire nation, and to some extent the entire world, is more important than the smooth internal workings of the Fed. Still, those managerial responsibilities will impinge on a board member on a regular basis. If he or she screws them up, it will be harder to have high status within the Fed, and harder to keep one’s confidence and emotional equilibrium. Alternatively, a governor might become completely dependent on aides to perform those internal practical functions. That is not conducive toward broader autonomy on monetary policy front, either.
The bottom line is this: A good candidate for the Fed should have at least some practical managerial experience. You don’t have to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but you should be just competent enough to forestall internal crises of bad management and to avoid losing face. For a lot of potential candidates, that is actually a pretty tall order, especially if they come from academia or have unorthodox backgrounds unrelated to finance.
And:
Of course the next board member will also be expected to have well-informed views, however you might define them, on monetary policy and regulation. But it would be a mistake to start with a set of agreeable or required views, and then use it to build a short list of advocates. It bears repeating: For a board member to be effective, political and bureaucratic skills are paramount. Without them, a board member may well end up as counterproductive, even when correct.
Recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Facial recognition without your consent.
3. Verifying identity as a social intersection.
4. A guy complaining about social media.
5. A polemic against podcasts.
6. Interview with Claire Denis, and yes “High Life” is much smarter and better than the reviews indicate (NYT).
Monday assorted links
1. Francis Hutcheson speaks to veganism.
2. “The Jamaican Stock Exchange sits on the waterfront in Kingston and has surged more than 300% over the last five years. Last year, the main index tracking the country’s stock exchange rose 29%.” And the resurrection of Buju Banton.
3. Robin Hanson on *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*. For purposes of context, I see Robin as leading a sustained mood affiliation crusade against hypocrisy, rather than performing comparative analysis of hypocrisy vs. the relevant alternatives.
4. Claims about brain evolution, and Lamarck, speculative, arguably unfounded.
6. New development is called “IMBY.”
7. Aaron Carroll on what we can learn from the Singaporean health care system (NYT).
Counterfactuals about social media
Let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that basically all of the complaints about social media are correct. Then let’s also imagine, as Matt Yglesias periodically suggests on Twitter, that Facebook is shut down altogether, toss in Twitter and the others as well.
What would happen?
One possibility is that America would move toward a Chinese-style solution, with heavy censorship of the internet. Still, I think both public opinion and the First Amendment make that outcome unlikely. Furthermore, while the Chinese solution has been relatively practicable (as opposed to desirable) to date, there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.
Alternatively, without tight censorship substitutes for Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter will arise, possibly based in other countries if regulation so dictates. They might be less ad-funded, less profitable, and less easy to use, but the basic technologies for “putting every single idea out there” are already out of the box. Furthermore, it won’t be that hard to find and circulate those ideas, including the very bad ones, through a mix of aggregation and search and focused spread and redistribution.
The first question is whether anyone actually thinks that such a world of less heavily capitalized communications entities would lead to greater responsibility. The first cut answer, drawing on basic economics, would seem to be no.
The broader point is the relative popularities of various ideas and sources still will be upended, just as the printing press and radio also had some fairly radical (and not entirely positive) effects in their times. In essence, various intellectual and ideological debates will need to be re-litigated and re-fought over the internet, just as they were redone over television and radio, or earlier through papyrus and also clay tablets, of course with somewhat different results each time.
Many people hate that reality, but a reality it is. Let’s even say you are right to hate that reality (NB: not exactly my view).
Should you:
a) Go after the companies that make the clay tablets?
b) Go after the clay tablets and try to smash them?
c) Equip yourself to try to win the new intellectual and ideological battles for hearts and minds?
And what should we infer about the spiritual vigor of a society that might so heavily promote options a) and b)?
Sunday assorted links
1. Analysis of candidate websites, fonts, typography, etc.
2. Roger Lowenstein reviews *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*. He also offers some criticisms.
3. Peter Thiel debates William Hurtbut on whether death is an enemy.
4. “Eskom is the greatest systemic risk to the South African economy.” (The Economist)
5. The economics of Renaissance Italian art (pdf).
Tooth extraction markets in everything
Dozens of medical professionals in seven states were charged Wednesday with participating in the illegal prescribing of more than 32 million pain pills, including doctors who prosecutors said traded sex for prescriptions and a dentist who unnecessarily pulled teeth from patients to justify giving them opioids…
Another Alabama doctor allegedly prescribed opioids in high doses and charged a “concierge fee” of $600 per year to be one of his patients.
By Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham, there is more of interest at the link. For the pointer I thank Harrison Brown.
Our three new hires at George Mason economics
Northwestern Ph.D, Brown post doc, Joel Mokyr student. Here is her job market paper:
Job Market Paper
The Political Economy of Famine: the Ukrainian Famine of 1933 Download Job Market Paper (pdf)
Abstract: The famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine killed as many as 2.6 million people out of a population of approximately 30 million. Three main explanations have been offered: negative weather shock, poor economic policies, and genocide. This paper uses variation in exposure to poor government policies and in ethnic composition within Ukraine to study the impact of policies on mortality, and the relationship between ethnic composition and mortality. It documents that (1) the data do not support the negative weather shock explanation: 1931 and 1932 weather predicts harvest roughly equal to the 1925 — 1929 average; (2) bad government policies (collectivization and the lack of favored industries) significantly increased mortality; (3) collectivization increased mortality due to drop in production on collective farms and not due to overextraction from collectives (although the evidence is indirect); (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations show that collectivization explains at least 31\% of excess deaths; (5) ethnic Ukrainians seem more likely to die, even after controlling for exposure to poor Soviet economic policies; (6) Ukrainians were more exposed to policies that later led to mortality (collectivization and the lack of favored industries); (7) enforcement of government policies did not vary with ethnic composition (e.g., there is no evidence that collectivization was enforced more harshly on Ukrainians). These results provide several important takeaways. Most importantly, the evidence is consistent with both sides of the debate (economic policies vs genocide). (1) backs those arguing that the famine was man-made. (2) — (4) support those who argue that mortality was due to bad policy. (5) is consistent with those who argue that ethnic Ukrainians were targeted. For (6) and (7) to support genocide, it has to be the case that Stalin had the foresight that his policies would fail and lead to famine mortality years after they were introduced (and therefore disproportionately exposed Ukrainians to them).
Cultural economics and economic history, St. Gallen Ph.D, Harvard post doc, co-author with Joe Henrich.
Job market paper, “Catholic Church, Kin Networks, and Institutional Development“:
Political institutions vary widely around the world, yet the origin of this variation is not well understood. This study tests the hypothesis that the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage policies dissolved extended kin networks and thereby fostered inclusive institutions. In a difference-in-difference setting, I demonstrate that exposure to the Church predicts the formation of inclusive, self-governed commune cities before the year 1500CE. Moreover, within medieval Christian Europe, stricter regional and temporal cousin marriage prohibitions are likewise positively associated with communes. Strengthening this finding, I show that longer Church exposure predicts lower cousin marriage rates; in turn, lower cousin marriage rates predict higher civicness and more inclusive institutions today. These associations hold at the regional, ethnicity and country level. Twentieth-century cousin marriage rates explain more than 50 percent of variation in democracy across countries today.
Harvard Ph.D, assistant professor of economics at University of Toronto, he works in the new field genonomics and has co-authored with David Cesarini. Here is his presentation on GWAS of risk tolerance:
Here is his paper (with co-authors) “Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over one million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences.”
I am very much looking forward to their arrival, they all seem like great colleagues, and I am honored to have played a role on the recruiting committee.
Saturday assorted links
*An Economist Walks into a Brothel*
That is the new Allison Schraeger book, the subtitle is And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk, and here is one excerpt:
In many ways, the brothel is like any other workplace. There are weekly staff meetings (in a departure from the tradition at most companies, the women often wear outlandish hats and drink tea), access to financial advisers, performance bonuses, and even corporate housing…
But where Hof [the owner-manager] provided value was by reducing risk for both buyers and sellers of sex.
The top-earning woman at that brothel pulls in about $600,000 a year, and about half of that goes to Hof. And to audition for the brothel, women have to invest about $1500 in upfront costs (travel, clothing), with no guarantee of a job at the end of the process.
Here is an NPR interview with Allison.
What should I ask Russ Roberts?
I will be doing a Conversations with Tyler with Russ, the master podcaster himself, but of course also a prolific author in multiple fields. So what should I ask him? Here is Russ on Wikipedia, here is Russ’s home page.