Category: Uncategorized
Science is getting less bang for its buck
By Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen in The Atlantic:
…we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades…
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn’t survey those prizes.
However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don’t look so good, that’s bad news for physics…
Why has science gotten so much more expensive, without producing commensurate gains in our understanding?
There is much more evidence and argument at the link. This appendix provides more detail on their empirical work. Self-recommending, if there ever was such a thing.
Do we need a Journal of Controversial Ideas?
That is the topic of my latest column for Bloomberg, here is one excerpt:
Now enter a newly announced project, called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. It will publish one issue per year, devoted to ideas that otherwise may not receive a fair hearing, and it will allow for anonymous or pseudonymous publication. Princeton philosopher Peter Singer is one of the names associated with the journal, which does not yet have an agreement with a publisher.
I am skeptical though not hostile toward this enterprise. It is sad that such a journal is seen as necessary. But I would suggest instead putting forth your ideas on a blog, on Twitter or on YouTube. Many politically incorrect figures have done just that. A Jordan Peterson YouTube lecture might range from the Bible to Jung to a critique of contemporary feminism, none of it refereed, but he has attracted millions of viewers. At the end of it all you get the Jordan Peterson worldview, which I suspect has more resonance than any particular empirical claim Peterson might make along the way.
In an internet-centered intellectual world, what persuades people is reading or hearing a charismatic personality, year in year out, promoting a particular view of the world. A lot of controversial ideas will have to ride that roller coaster, for better or worse.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is intended to be open access, though without a publishing contract we can’t know if it will have an open online comments section. It would be odd if not (would we have to create a companion Journal of Controversial Comments?), but with open comments you have to wonder whether a prestige publisher will take on the associated libel and reputational risks, and how high status the journal actually will be. It would not be practical to referee the comments, but that may mean the truly open internet, with its free-for-all atmosphere, will remain the dominant source for controversial ideas. “Controversial for me but not for thee” hardly seems like a winning slogan for such a revisionist enterprise.
Overall, I think controversial ideas will do best on the non-refereed internet, but I am not opposed to giving this venture a try. Refereeing is supposed to boost status, but will anyone put a publication here on their tenure vita? And:
To make a controversial idea stick through the academic process, maybe you do have conquer the biases and beat the odds against you, as Harvey Mansfield, Robert P. George and Oded Galor have done (to name just three). You also might pursue a “Straussian” approach, embedding subversive messages in your paper and covering them up with flowery rhetoric, hoping that some but not too many people notice what you are really saying.
Do read the whole thing.
Thursday assorted links
How much did the housing shock drive political polarization?
From Henry van Straehlen, a job market candidate from Northwestern:
This paper studies the effect of economic conditions on political polarization using micro-data on house prices, mortgages, and individual political contributions. I argue that shocks to housing wealth — the largest asset for most households in the U.S. — lead to political polarization. Using the housing market bust of 2007-2011 as an empirical laboratory, I show that negative shocks to housing wealth increase political polarization. The richness of the data enables me to use individual heterogeneity in housing location and timing of home purchase to disentangle changes in personal wealth from other factors that might be at play in determining political polarization. The effect of housing shocks on polarization is stronger during the crisis, and cannot be attributed to reverse causality or changing neighborhood composition. Survey evidence comparing homeowners and renters shows that only homeowners polarize in response to house price shocks, while renters do not — suggesting that house price shocks are not merely a proxy for other economic shocks. Furthermore, extreme politicians benefit electorally from negative house price shocks to their contributor network, whereas moderate politicians are hurt by negative house price shocks. Financial crises destabilize politics, which then can feed back into the crisis. These results provide insight into the difficulty of adopting structural economic reforms following financial crises.
Work in progress by Henry argues: “I show that when the common ownership between two firms increases through mutual fund acquisition of their stock, the firms converge in political donation behavior and lobbying activity.”
Why aren’t millennials buying boats? (the boat recession)
“So, where are all the boaters your age?” asked a 60-something-year-old, at a patio bar on Gabriola Island in British Columbia. “When I was your age, we all had boats and had great big raft-ups out on the water.”
Our group of under-40 sailors was on a weekend cruise and digging into steaming plates of fish and chips. “I’m not sure,” I answered. “Are there fewer? Maybe it’s because they can’t afford it?”
“Nah,” he said. “It’s those iPads. My grown kids have no sense of adventure, happy to sit around ‘twitting’ all day.”
My husband, Robin, and I had often discussed this question. Having become first-time boat owners only five years before, at ages 24 and 29, we were often the only identifiable 20-somethings at our silver-haired yacht club.
…According to Ellis, boat ownership has seen a steep decline in the 20- to 39-year-old age category, with approximately 41 percent fewer 20- to 39-year-olds owning boats in 2015 than in 2005. In 2005, 4 percent of American males ages 20 to 39 owned a boat; but by 2015, that number dropped to only 2 percent.
Here is the full story, via Craig Richardson.
Twentieth-century cousin marriage rates explain more than 50 percent of variation in democracy across countries today.
That is the last sentence of the abstract in this job market paper, from Jonathan F. Schulz:
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.
Here is Jonathan’s (co-authored) working paper on “The origins of WEIRD psychology.“
Wednesday assorted links
1. “…the 2000s should be seen as an exceptional period in the global economy during which multinational firms benefitted from reduced labour costs through offshoring, while capitalising on existing firm-specific intangibles, such as brand names, at little marginal cost.” Link here.
2. What can we learn from Eric Schmidt about defense acquisition?
3. How podcasts work (New Yorker).
4. “Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.”
5. Douglas Vigliotti interviews me for his podcast.
6. “Jeff Bezos himself might weigh in on dining options.”
7. More of the Antikythera mechanism? Here is my earlier post on the mechanism.
Propaganda, Nation Building and Identity in Rwanda
The lead title is “Erasing Ethnicity,” the authors are Arthur Blouin and Sharun W. Mukand, and the paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy:
This paper examines whether propaganda broadcast over radio helped to change inter-ethnic attitudes in post-genocide Rwanda. We exploit variation in exposure to the government’s radio propaganda due to the mountainous topography of Rwanda. Results of lab-in-the-field experiments show that individuals exposed to government propaganda have lower salience of ethnicity, increased inter-ethnic trust and show more willingness to interact face-to-face with members of another ethnic group. Our results suggest that the observed improvement in inter-ethnic behavior is not cosmetic, and reflects a deeper change in inter-ethnic attitudes. The findings provide some of the first quantitative evidence that the salience of ethnic identity can be manipulated by governments.
Propaganda works.
The sex recession
From Kate Julian at The Atlantic:
Gen Xers and Baby Boomers may also be having less sex today than previous generations did at the same age. From the late 1990s to 2014, Twenge found, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times. A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex. Twenge recently took a look at the latest General Social Survey data, from 2016, and told me that in the two years following her study, sexual frequency fell even further.
Some social scientists take issue with aspects of Twenge’s analysis; others say that her data source, although highly regarded, is not ideally suited to sex research. And yet none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.
I enjoyed this sentence:
In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high.
This is interesting too:
“Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” Jonah Disend, the founder of the branding consultancy Redscout, told Bloomberg last year. He said that designs for master-bedroom suites were evolving for much the same reason: “They want their own changing rooms and bathrooms, even in a couple.” The article concluded that however “digitally nonchalant” Millennials might seem—an allusion, maybe, to sexting—“they’re prudish in person.”
The sex recession remains a puzzle. Here is my much earlier blog post on why people don’t have more sex.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Swedish “Future Skills” podcast: “Tyler Cowen – Economist and Master Generalist on: Economic Outlook, Social Change, and Future Cities.”
2. My 2006 take on Jane Jacobs.
3. Joshua Rothman interviews Knausgaard (New Yorker).
4. Kim and Kanye hire private firefighters.
Underargued claims, installment #1437
From Tim Wu, in a recent NYT Op-Ed, he presents a polemic against “monopoly”:
Postwar observers like Senator Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia argued that the German economic structure, which was dominated by monopolies and cartels, was essential to Hitler’s consolidation of power. Germany at the time, Mr. Kilgore explained, “built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power and forced virtually the whole world into war.”
To suggest that any one cause accounted for the rise of fascism goes too far, for the Great Depression, anti-Semitism, the fear of communism and weak political institutions were also to blame. But as writers like Diarmuid Jeffreys and Daniel Crane have detailed, extreme economic concentration does create conditions ripe for dictatorship.
The first ten words are already a give-away, as is the beginning of the second cited paragraph. For contrast, this is from Thomas Childers, well-known historian of Nazi Germany:
In his biography of Henry Kissinger, historian Niall Ferguson notes that “old man Thyssen” — that is, German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen — “bankrolled Hitler.” Businessmen such as Thyssen using their financial assets to assist the Nazis was “the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power,” according to John Loftus, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals.
But the Nazis were neither “financed” nor “bankrolled” by big corporate donors. During its rise to power, the Nazi Party did receive some money from corporate sources — including Thyssen and, briefly, industrialist Ernst von Borsig — but business leaders mostly remained at arm’s length. After all, Nazi economic policy was slippery: pro-business ideas swathed in socialist language. The party’s program, the Twenty-Five Points, called for the nationalization of corporations and trusts, revenue sharing, and the end of “interest slavery.”
And Wu’s two other cited sources? Both focus mainly on IG Farben. Diarmuid Jeffreys is “an award-winning journalist and television producer with thirty years’ experience in the media industry.” He does have a book on IG Farben and the making of the German war machine, but it does not demonstrate how economic concentration brings totalitarian regimes to power, instead focusing on how IG Farben profited from Nazi war aims and helped build the Holocaust. Earlier in the 1930s, IG Farben had in fact resisted Nazification. though the company did jump on board once it saw Nazification as inevitable.
Here is the Daniel Crane essay on antitrust and democracy. Try this excerpt: “… it does not necessarily follow that Farben’s monopolistic position in the German chemical industry is causally related to the rise of fascism—or that monopoly enabled Nazism. Two matters should give us pause before making such an inference.” Read p.14 to see what follows, but here is one tiny bit: “Though gigantic, Farben remained smaller than three American industrial concerns—General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil. Nor was Farben’s wartime market power exceptional.” On the other side of the ledger, Crane does note that fascistic governments, once in power, find it easier to take over and co-opt more highly concentrated industries, Farben being an example of that. So there is an argument here, but mainly one data point and also some very serious qualifiers.
Does that all justify the sentence “But as writers like Diarmuid Jeffreys and Daniel Crane have detailed, extreme economic concentration does create conditions ripe for dictatorship.”? “Ripe” is such a tricky, non-causal word.
I would instead stress that war, civil war, scapegoating, and deflation create the conditions “ripe for dictatorship.” You might want to toss Russia and China into the regression equation, or how about Cuba and North Korea and Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodia? How would the coefficient on industrial concentration end up looking? I’d like to know.
When big business is the target, and tech in particular, the standards of proof for Op-Eds seem to decline. Somehow, because we all know that the big tech companies are bad, or jeopardizing democracy, it is OK to make weakly argued claims.
Hey, wait a minute!
In November 1931 Churchill also published an article entitled ‘Fifty Years Hence’ in Maclean’s Magazine, in which he made some absurd predictions — that we would grow only those parts of chickens we wanted to eat, for example — but also some astonishingly accurate ones. ‘Wireless telephones and television…
That is from the new and excellent Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. It is true of course that the fifty years prediction was off. Here is the Churchill essay.
Monday assorted links
2. Profile of Shane Parrish and Farnam Street (NYT).
3. With @RyanHawk12 on The Learning Leader Show – Talked about developing skills for what is scarce, Stubborn Attachments, & having a complete dedication to your craft http://bit.ly/tylercowenryanhawk.
4. The Future Library — books that will not be published until their authors die (NYT).
5. New journal allows academics to publish controversial articles under a pseudonym (while they are still alive).
What do #1, #4, and #5 on this list have in common? Three such items in one day? Is it possible that Leo Strauss is underrated?
The philosophy and practicality of Emergent Ventures
Let’s start with some possible institutional failures in mainstream philanthropy. Many foundations have large staffs, and so a proposal must go through several layers of approval before it can receive support or even reach the desk of the final decision-maker. Too many vetoes are possible, which means relatively conservative, consensus-oriented proposals emerge at the end of the process. Furthermore, each layer of approval is enmeshed in an agency game, further cementing the conservatism. It is not usually career-enhancing to advance a risky or controversial proposal to one’s superiors.
There is yet another bias: the high fixed costs of processing any request discriminate against very small proposals, which either are not worthwhile to approve or they are never submitted in the first place.
Finally, foundations often become captured by their staffs. The leaders become fond of their staffs, try to keep them in the jobs, regard the staff members as a big part of their audience, and adopt the perspectives of their staffs, more so as time passes. That encourages conservatism all the more, because the foundation leaders do not want their staffs to go away, and so they act to preserve financial and reputational capital.
To restate those biases:
- Too much conservatism
- Too few very small grants
- Too much influence for staff
So how might those biases be remedied?
Why not experiment with only a single layer of no?
Have a single individual say yes or no on each proposal — final word, voila! Of course that individual can use referees and conferees as he or she sees fit.
The single judge could be an expert in some of the relevant subject areas of the proposals (that is sometimes the case in foundations, but even then the expertise of the foundation evaluators can decay).
This arrangement also can promise donors 100% transmission of their money to recipients, or close to that. If someone gives $1 million to the fund, the award winners receive the full $1 million. This is rare in non-profits. (In the case of Emergent Ventures there are unbudgeted time costs for me and my assistant, who prints out the proposals, and the paper costs of the printing get charged to general operating expenses at Mercatus. Still, a $1 million grant at the margin leads to $1 million in actual awards. I am not paid to do this.)
The solo evaluator — if he or she has the right skills of temperament and judgment — can take risks with the proposals, unencumbered by the need to cover fixed costs and keep “the foundation” up and running. Think of it as a “pop-up foundation,” akin to a pop-up restaurant, and you know who is the chef in the kitchen. It is analogous to a Singaporean food stall, namely with low fixed costs, small staff, and the chef’s ability to impose his or her own vision on the food.
Once a fixed sum of money is given away, and the mission of the project (beneficial social change) has been furthered, “the foundation” goes away. No one is laid off. Rather than crying over a vanquished institutional empire and laid off friends/co-workers, the solo evaluator in fact has a chance to get back to personally profitable work. It was “lean and mean” all along, except it wasn’t mean.
The risk-taking in grant decisions is consistent with the incentives of the evaluator, consistent with the level of staffing (zero), and consistent with the means of the evaluator. A solo evaluator, no matter how talented, does not have the resources to make and tie down multiple demands for complex deliverables. Rather, a solo evaluator is likely to think (or not) — “hmm…there is some potential in this one.” The wise solo evaluator is likely to look for projects that have real upside through realizing the autonomous visions of their self-starting creators, rather than projects that appear bureaucratically perfect.
And how about the incentives of the solo evaluator? Well, a fixed amount of time is being given up, so what is the point in making safe, consensus selections with the awards? The solo evaluator, in addition to pursuing the mission of the fund, will tend to seek out grants that will boost his or her reputation as a finder of talent. You might worry that an evaluator, even if fully honest will self-deceive somewhat, and use some of these grants to promote his or her own interests. I would say donate your money to an evaluator who you are happy to see rise in status.
In other words, the basic vision of Emergent Ventures, the incentives, and its means are all pretty consistent.
The solo evaluator also has the power to make very small grants, simply by issuing a decision in their favor at very low fixed cost. Alchian and Allen theorem! That helps remedy the bias against small grants in the broader foundation world.
The single evaluator of course is going to make some mistakes, but so do foundations. And the costs of these evaluator mistakes have to be weighed against the other upsides of this method.
In my view, at least two percent of philanthropy should be run this way, and right now in the foundation world it is about zero percent. So I am trying to change this at the margin.
How does this idea scale? What if it worked really well? How would we do more of it?
Well, it is not practical for this solo evaluator to handle a larger and larger portfolio of grant requests. Even if he or she were so inclined, that would bring us back to the problems of institutionalized foundations. The ideal scaling is that other, competing “chefs” set up their own pop-up foundations. Imagine a philanthropic world where, next year, you could give a million dollars to the Steven Pinker pop-up, to the Jhumpa Lahiri pop-up, to the Jordan Peterson intellectual venture fund, and so on. Three years later, you would have an entirely different choice, say intellectual venture funds from Ezra Klein, David Brooks, and Skip Gates, among others. The evaluators either could donate some of their time, as I am doing, or charge a fee for performing this service. You also could imagine a major foundation carving off a separate section of their activities, and running this experiment on their own, with an evaluator of their choosing.
In a subsequent post, I will discuss how this model relates to the classical age of patronage running through the Renaissance, into the 18th century, and often into the 20th century as well, often through the medium of individual giving. I also will consider how this relates to classic venture capital and the relevant economics behind “deal flow.”
In the meantime, I am repeating the list of the first cohort of Emergent Ventures winners. That link also directs you to relevant background if Emergent Ventures is new to you.
Sunday assorted links
1. Jordan Orlando on The White Album (which song is the most popular/enduring on that album? It is difficult to say, but it is now fifty years old).
2. Scott Sumner on global warming.
3. Korean refrigerator onomatopoiea.
4. How placebos work there is no placebo (NYT).
5. Scott Alexander is now more positive on preschool. And Scott Alexander on marijuana: “If the above calculations are true, preventing national legalization of marijuana would save half as many lives as successfully implementing Australia-style gun control in the US.” [Please note Scott is not suggesting a particular conclusion on either of these policy issues.]