Category: Uncategorized

What does a Twitter-driven politics look like?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the final bit:

But what does this new, more intense celebrity culture mean for actual outcomes? The more power and influence that individual communicators wield over public opinion, the harder it will be for a sitting president to get things done. (The best option, see above, will be to make your case and engage your adversaries on social media.) The harder it will be for an aspirant party to put forward a coherent, predictable and actionable political program.

Finally, the issues that are easier to express on social media will become the more important ones. Technocratic dreams will fade, and fiery rhetoric and identity politics will rule the day. And if you think this is the political world we’re already living in, rest assured: It’s just barely gotten started.

Will insects go extinct?

by  Tyler Cowen in

No, probably not, no matter what you might have read or seen on Twitter.  The underlying paper is “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers.”  Here is a tweet thread by Alex Wild on the paper, here is one bit:

They make a great deal of local extinctions as a sort of proxy for global extinctions. That’s pretty dicey. I mean, bison are locally extinct here in my Austin neighborhood. But their numbers are recovering elsewhere.

They used 73 studies done on different taxa in different places. Those studies must represent tens of thousands of person-hours. Gargantuan. But the input studies weren’t designed for global assessment.

The paper itself has strong evidence on the severe pressure on butterflies and bees, and furthermore the general encroachment of humans on the natural environment probably is going to diminish species numbers and biodiversity, for insects too.  At the same time, the remaining species will adapt and evolve to meet the new potential habitats, with many kinds of insects having an easier time adapting than say gorillas.

The paper has some quite non-dramatic sentences such as: “Studies on ant populations and trends are lacking except for a few invasive species.”  And: “A single long-term study on grasshoppers and crickets is available…”

So I don’t quite see how the authors arrive at: “The conclusion is clear: unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.”  Bryan Caplan, bet away!

The policing culture that is China

by  Tyler Cowen in

Short-video app TikTok has a reputation for being beloved by young people the world over, but it’s also surprisingly popular with Chinese police officers.

In early January, China Police Network, a news portal run by the Ministry of Public Security, announced that 175 new TikTok channels had been created by police stations, SWAT teams, traffic police, and prisons in the month of December, bringing the country’s grand total to nearly 1,200 such accounts. That month, they churned out over 13,000 videos attracting a combined 4.8 billion views.

Since June of last year, China Police Network has kept a monthly tally of the most popular law enforcement accounts and videos on TikTok — or Douyin, as it’s known in China. While police in other countries have plugged into social media and cultivated fan followings on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, their Douyin-loving counterparts in China stand out in terms of scale and the wide range in both quality and content of their videos.

The January post mentions a comedic clip made by an account called Shishou Public Security that received over 800,000 likes. The video depicts a middle-aged woman tearfully describing her myriad contributions to the economic empowerment of women as mournful music plays in the background — before the camera flips to police officers unmasking her as the madame of a brothel.

The article also congratulates Siping Police Affairs for becoming the first police account in China to eclipse 10 million followers and praises the success of police hashtag campaigns such as #SayNoToDrunkDriving.

Since its launch in China in September 2016 and its expansion to international markets as TikTok a year later, Douyin boasts around 800 million downloads worldwide. The platform’s premise is simple: Users create and share 15-second videos, some of which wind up going viral. The police presence on Douyin has yielded a manic mix of content, from humdrum notices of arrests and other official business to reposts of pandas at play to original comic sketches with didactic denouements.

Here is more from Kenrick Davis at Sixth Tone.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “…the relatively recent increasing gender parity in association presidents of ASA and PAA but not AEA.”  and “…socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance…”

2. Scott Sumner thinks about economic growth.

3. Cities reading list.

4. “Mr. [Robert] Ryman was perhaps peculiarly American in being an autodidact who never took a single art course. His art education consisted of seven years as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.” (NYT, and RIP)

5. Alzheimer’s and portfolio decisions.

6. Intergenerational mobility in Africa.

The meaning of death, from an economist’s point of view

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few days ago Garett Jones came to my office door and asked “what do we really know about labor supply?”  I said we might as well extend the query to labor demand.  In any case, here was part of my answer, paraphrased of course:

I’ve been much influenced by having kept a dining guide blog/website for almost thirty years, and seeing so many places come and go.  On one hand, I see the stickiness of plans.  A restaurant opens up, and the proprietor has the intent to be a certain thing.  They’re not going to take the pupusas off the menu, just because the price of corn has gone up.  Similarly, increases in the minimum wage might not much alter the hiring plans of the restaurant.  The very act of starting a business selects, to some extent, for people who stick to their plans.  The dishes still need to be washed, and many owners are not at the margins of considering serious automation.

That said, sooner or later these restaurants pass from the scene.  And when the El Salvadoran place closes, there is a real competition across competing food visions.  Will it be pupusas, roast chicken, or kebab?  Once again, relative prices will exert their influence, on both the supply and demand sides of the market.  In fact, pupusa places are slightly in retreat, as they cannot always bid for their higher area rents — it is hard to sell a pupusa for more than a few dollars and at the same time the requisite labor is harder not easier to come by and demand seems stagnant at best.

Similarly, if the minimum wage is high, the new restaurant, if indeed it is even a restaurant, will economize on the number of laborers required to make the food.  The plan for a true Bengali sweets shop will not get off the ground.  You might see storage space or a less labor intensive means of food preparation.

We thus come to a truth that is both happy and sad: death and turnover are how relative prices imprint their impact on the world.

And that, to an economist, is the meaning of death.

Do land use restrictions increase restaurant quality and diversity?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Daniel Shoag and Stan Veuger say yes, but I am not so convinced.

It turns out that metrics of land use restrictions are correlated with restaurant quality, across cities.  To cut to the chase, Los Angeles ranks number one on this index, and I can agree with that assessment in terms of food quality and also diversity.  (Other good food cities, such as Miami, also rank high on the index.)  Yet for the metropolitan area near L.A., food is generally best where the land use restrictions are least binding.  Beverly Hills and Santa Monica have some decent fancy restaurants, but the real gems are to be found elsewhere, in fringes such as northeast Hollywood, Silverlake (gentrifying a bit too much these days, however), north Orange County, Monterey Park, and so on.  Pasadena has hardly anywhere excellent to eat.

I would suggest an alternative channel of influence: urban areas with high inequality have both better food (see An Economist Gets Lunch, but basically imagine the wealthier people generating demand and the poorer people supplying cheap labor) and more building restrictions.  The wealthier people decide to do something to keep the poorer people out of their neighborhoods.

I hate to say “correlation does not prove causation,” but…correlation does not prove causation.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

What should I ask Emily R. Wilson?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will be doing a Conversation with her, no associated public event.  She is the translator of a splendid and highly readable Homer’s Odyssey, which I named as the very best book of the year for last year.  She is also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a classicist, a Seneca scholar, and an all-around very smart person.  Here is her Wikipedia page.

So what should I ask her?

Further new results on the marginal rate of income taxation

by  Tyler Cowen in

I study optimal income taxation when human capital investment is imperfectly observable by employers. In my model, Bayesian employer inference about worker productivity drives a wedge between the private and social returns to human capital investment by compressing the wage distribution. The resulting positive externality from worker investment implies lower optimal marginal tax rates, all else being equal. To quantify the significance of this externality for optimal taxation, I calibrate the model to match empirical moments from the United States, including new evidence on how the speed of employer learning about new labor market entrants varies over the worker productivity distribution. Taking into account the spillover from human capital investment introduced by employer inference reduces optimal marginal tax rates by 13 percentage points at around 100,000 dollars of income, with little change in the tails of the income distribution. The welfare gain from this adjustment is equivalent to raising every worker’s consumption by one percent.

That is from the Harvard job market paper of Ashley C. Craig, via Steven Hamilton.

If the gdp deflator is off, which financial investments should you make?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many people suggest that we are under-measuring the benefits of innovation, and thus real rates of economic growth are much higher than we think.  That in turn means the gdp deflator is off and real rates of interest are considerably higher than we think.  Someday we will all realize the truth and asset prices will adjust.

Let’s say that view is correct (not my view, by the way), how should that change your investment decisions?

One implication, it seems to me, is that you should short the goods and services which are being produced so rapidly under this regime.  If that is hard to do, short their substitutes.  Say the new innovative growth is coming from the internet sector, and internet activity is a good substitute for collecting stamps (which seems to be true), well short stamps if you can.  At least get them out of your diversified portfolio.

Similarly, you may wish to invest in companies which produce goods not easily substituted for over the internet.  One observer has mentioned “perfume” to me in this connection, though I do not have the expertise to render a judgment.

More generally, if real rates of return are high, but not perceived as high by most investors (who are still victims of fallacious “great stagnation” arguments and the like), at some point those investors will learn.  With more rapid growth enriching the future, and with the realization of such, there will be a sudden demand to shift funds into the present, so as to equalize marginal utilities.  So bond prices will fall and that means you should short bonds and buy puts on bonds.

Don’t load up on land and public utilities.  Incumbent firms also may fall in value.

You also might fear this new technological progress will bring some fantastic but hard-to-afford new goods and services.  How about life extension or immortality but priced at $10 million?  The way to hedge that risk is to invest in life extension companies, but even more than their earnings prospects might dictate.  That is the best way to insure against life extension being too costly to afford.  Note that poorer investors should do this, but the very wealthy do not need to.

What else?

I thank B. and S. and Alex T. for relevant discussions connected to this post.

Stop demeaning billionaires and you were unfair to Howard Schultz

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my Bloomberg column on that point.  Furthermore, that tape of Schultz is much better than what many media sources reported, here is the excerpt on that:

In an interview, Schultz was asked whether billionaires have too much power. He responded by noting that the moniker “billionaire” has become a “catchphrase” and proceeded to reframe the question: “I would rephrase that and I would say that people of means have been able to leverage their wealth and their interest in ways that are unfair.” So he didn’t necessarily disagree with the premise of the question. Nor did he say that other people shouldn’t use the term “billionaires.”

For the record, he also noted that such people have “unbelievable influence,” and that speaks to the problem of inequality. And he included corporations (not just people) and the political ideologies of the two major parties as part of the problem.

Is that such a terrible answer? Not only on the merits, but also in explaining why Schultz might want to move away from the term “billionaire” as the sole locus of blame? Then again, maybe that’s just what you would expect a billionaire to say.

You can watch the interview here, and note the rest of the column is making more general points about how we should talk about people and their wealth:

My parents taught me never to ask a person how much he or she earns. I was told that it was rude, and I still believe that. It follows that we also should not ask people about their net wealth. And, out of politeness, perhaps it is also inappropriate to openly discuss the range of their net wealth.