Category: Uncategorized
The Norwegian migration to America and psychological selection
Norwegian psychiatrist Ørnulf Ødegaard has studied personality types. He has shown that relatively more Norwegian-born persons in Minnesota suffered from mental illness, especially schizophrenia,in the 1920s than did members of Norway’s population. He maintained that the greater frequency of illness might be due in some degree to the greater strains the emigrants were exposed to in a foreign society, but he also held that people who were disposed to this illness were more restless and found it easier than other personality types to break out of their environment.
That is from Ingrid Semmingsen, Norway to America: A History of the Migration, and I believe the original reference is to ” Immigration and Insanity: A Study of Mental Disease Among the Norwegian-born Population of Minnesota,” Ø Ødegaard – Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, Suppl, 1932.” Here is a related post on gene-culture interaction.
I am delighted that Facebook is cutting back on its news feed
A few points:
1. Facebook can now claim it is truly addressing the problems (way exaggerated in my opinion) associated with the 2016 election. This looks decisive, and the company can present it as a turning point.
2. In essence, they are blaming the media, without having to throw the stones themselves. Americans respond positively to attacks on the media, so this is a strong public relations move. Facebook retains the option of blaming the media more explicitly for its previous troubles, if need be.
3. The news feed can always be reintroduced under another name or guise. Two years from now, the entire dialogue about the major web companies is likely to be different, one way or another.
4. I do understand this may devastate some marginal media outlets, and in fact many media outlets are marginal these days in economic terms. Still, in the longer run I prefer a scenario where other web sites try to compete with Facebook rather than being co-opted by it and dependent on it.
5. Does this mean more ads will turn up on Instagram, chat apps, Facebook Messenger, and other Facebook services?
There is also this angle (NYT, speculative):
Facebook’s pulling back from the news — which necessarily depends on conflict — and elevation of homier material may bolster the company’s attempt to enter China, where it has been met with stiff resistance.
“Facebook is just desperate to get into China, and it will never do that unless it censors news — and this is actually a neat solution to that,” Mr. Weisberg, the Slate chairman, said. “If you only have news on the platform shared by users, users who live under repressive regimes don’t have access to real news and can’t share it, because it’s legally prohibited.”
I’m not entirely happy about this last factor, but I also don’t see how it is better for China for Facebook to remain permanently outside the country. And if the desire to enter China makes Facebook in some way worse for Americans, that is a potential problem, but I don’t see how this move makes the overall media environment worse for Americans.
Saturday assorted links
1. IKEA does price discrimination.
2. Chinese plans for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
3. The Bush administration, diplomacy, and North Korean nukes.
4. Will simulating empathy through VR help or hurt?
5. Russian economic history postdoc, working under John Nye. And be a Hoover National Fellow.
6. How much did late marriage boost the Industrial Revolution?
Friday assorted links
1. Extreme peak-load pricing for London restaurant.
2. History of Henry George, NYC, and the single land tax.
3. Economics lessons from the career of Andre Agassi?
4. If you would like to attend my NYC Conversation with Matt Levine.
5. WSJ review of Hanson and Simler.
6. “Butcher breaks out of own freezer using black pudding.” Beef and lamb prove to be inferior escape tools.
Is lobbying profitable for business?
Maybe not, as I argue in my latest Bloomberg column:
The numbers instead indicate that lobbying hurts the underlying capital values of the corporations. Lobbying doesn’t increase the chance that favored bills are passed by Congress, and it isn’t associated with the company receiving more government contracts.
Those are the key results from a new study by Zhiyan Cao, Guy D. Fernando, Arindam Tripathy and Arun Upadhyay, published in the Journal of Corporate Finance and considering 1,500 S&P companies over the period 1998 to 2016. Neither spending money at all on lobbying nor spending more money on lobbying over those years seem to help companies, and for that matter contributions to political action committees don’t work either.
And:
If corporate lobbying is an unprofitable use of money, why does it happen? One possibility is that corporate leaders are using company resources to indulge their own ideological preferences. Other researchers have found that companies with weaker governance and more entrenched management are those more likely to spend on lobbying. This study finds that lobbying expenditures are higher when the percentage of CEO perks is higher and when the board of the company is larger.
It’s also possible lobbyists are ripping off companies with slick sales pitches, or that incompetent CEOs are spending money on lobbying so they seem to be doing something constructive.
Do read the whole thing, I also consider under what kind of hypothesis the lobbying actually might be paying off.
Is marrying your cousin bad for democracy?
The title of the paper is “The Churches’ Bans on Consanguineous Marriages, Kin-Networks and Democracy” and the author is Jonathan F. Schulz, here is the abstract:
This paper tests the hypothesis that extended kin-groups, as characterized by a high level of cousin marriages, impact the proper functioning of formal institutions. Consistent with this hypothesis I find that countries with high cousin marriage rates exhibit a weak rule of law and are more likely autocratic. Further evidence comes from a quasi-natural experiment. In the early medieval ages the Church started to prohibit kin-marriages. Using the variation in the duration and extent of the Eastern and Western Churches’ bans on consanguineous marriages as instrumental variables, reveals highly significant point estimates of the percentage of cousin marriage on an index of democracy. An additional novel instrument, cousin-terms, strengthens this point: the estimates are very similar and do not rest on the European experience alone. Exploiting within country variation support these results. These findings point to the importance of marriage patterns for the proper functioning of formal institutions and democracy.
I recall reading related ideas in the MR comments section from Steve Sailer and others. For the pointer I thank Alexander B.
Is this the market working or the market failing?
A Twitter battle over the size of each “nuclear button” possessed by President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has spiked sales of a drug that protects against radiation poisoning.
Troy Jones, who runs the website www.nukepills.com, said demand for potassium iodide soared last week, after Trump tweeted that he had a “much bigger & more powerful” button than Kim — a statement that raised new fears about an escalating threat of nuclear war.
“On Jan. 2, I basically got in a month’s supply of potassium iodide and I sold out in 48 hours,” said Jones, 53, who is a top distributor of the drug in the United States. His Mooresville, N.C., firm sells all three types of the product approved by the Food and Drug Administration. No prescription is required.
Here is the full piece, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
Thursday assorted links
1. Macron challenges farm subsidies.
2. Bitcoin conference stops accepting Bitcoin.
3. Bloomberg reports on five papers from the AEA meetings. And Tankersley and Scheiber cover bias against women in the economics profession (NYT).
4. Gourmet chocolate becomes economic lifeline in Venezuela crisis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Markets in everything: Sol LeWitt sports bra. And there is no great stagnation.
2. Canadian documentary about Jordan Peterson. Covers gnosticism, the Heideggerian side, Jung, etc. Not so much about the anti-PC stuff or the personality psychology.
4. Chetty’s on-line Stanford class.
5. The drone wars heat up, this time in Syria and against Russia.
6. Dylan Matthews on Auten and Splinter and inequality debates.
In praise of earmarks
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
In essence, earmarks give congressional leaders more control over individual members. Recalcitrant representatives can be swayed by the promise of a perk for their district. That eases gridlock and gives extreme members of Congress something to pursue other than just ideology.
But is more legislation always a good result? Advocates of smaller government should keep in mind that reforming spending and regulation requires some activism from Congress. Gridlock today is not the friend of fiscal responsibility, coherent policy, or a free, well-functioning capitalist economy.
But what if you’re a Democrat? In these days of Republican rule, you might have discovered a newfound love for stasis. Still, earmarks make it harder for, say, far-right party members to hold legislation hostage to their demands. In other words, party leadership can put up a more centrist bill and then buy off the extremists with local benefits rather than policy concessions.
There is much more at the link. Addendum: I thank Garett Jones for spurring my interest in this topic.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Learning to love Lagos. And new copies of the Gospels from the Ethiopian desert.
2. I am pleased to have recently met Melissa Kearney. And an intervention to increase the number of women in economics. AEA acts on transparency and gender issues.
4. Do black politicians matter?
5. Jason Furman on tax reform. And: “The question I first posed was what to make of a president who is rhetorically unfit yet mainstream in policy.” — from Martin Gurri. And a superb David Brooks column.
6. Review of Tesla Model 3. And Christina Cacioppo reviews various books.
It seems like there won’t be another Mickey Mouse copyright extension act
…advocates of a new copyright term extension bill wouldn’t be able to steamroll opponents the way they did 20 years ago. Any term extension proposal would face a well-organized and well-funded opposition with significant grassroots support.
“After the SOPA fight, Hollywood likely knows that the public would fight back,” wrote Daniel Nazer, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an email to Ars. “I suspect that Big Content knows it would lose the battle and is smart enough not to fight.”
“I haven’t seen any evidence that Big Content companies plan to push for another term extension,” Nazer added. “This is an election year, so if they wanted to get a big ticket like that through Congress, you would expect to see them laying the groundwork with lobbying and op-eds.”
Of course, copyright interests might try to slip a copyright term extension into a must-pass bill in hopes opponents wouldn’t notice until it was too late. But Rose doesn’t think that would work.
Here is the full piece, via someone in my Twitter feed sorry I forget.
Monday assorted links
3. Baffling bathrooms, I very much relate to this.
4. “the surprising positive genetic correlation between intelligence and autism…”
5. “The project is intellectual, involving a change in beliefs, but it is not only intellectual — and its intellectual character is inseparable from its affective and motivational character.” Agnes Callard in the NYT.
6. Eli on Ethereum vs. Bitcoin.
7. India clings to cash? (NYT).
Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid?
I added the question mark, the subtitle of that article is: “Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases.” It is by Scott O. Lilienfeld, et.al. Here is one excerpt:
(11) Gold standard. In the domains of psychological and psychiatric assessment, there are precious few, if any, genuine “gold standards.” Essentially all measures, even those with high levels of validity for their intended purposes, are necessarily fallible indicators of their respective constructs (Cronbach and Meehl, 1955; Faraone and Tsuang, 1994). As a consequence, the widespread practice referring to even well-validated measures of personality or psychopathology, such as Hare’s (1991/2003) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, as “gold standards” for their respective constructs (Ermer et al., 2012) is misleading (see Skeem and Cooke, 2010). If authors intend to refer to measures as “extensively validated,” they should simply do so.
…(14) Influence of gender (or social class, education, ethnicity, depression, extraversion, intelligence, etc.) on X. “Influence” and cognate terms, such as effect, are inherently causal in nature. Hence, they should be used extremely judiciously in reference to individual differences, such as personality traits (e.g., extraversion), or group differences (e.g., gender), which cannot be experimentally manipulated. This is not to say that individual or group differences cannot exert a causal influence on behavior (Funder, 1991), only that research designs that examine these differences are virtually always (with the rare exception of “experiments of nature,” in which individual differences are altered by unusual events) correlation or quasi-experimental. Hence, researchers should be explicit that when using such phrases as “the influence of gender,” they are almost always proposing a hypothesis from the data, not drawing a logically justified conclusion from them. This inferential limitation notwithstanding, the phrase “the influence of gender” alone appears in over 45,000 manuscripts in the Google Scholar database (e.g., Bertakis et al., 1995).
It is difficult to use words properly, they don’t even want me to say “operational definition” again!
For the pointer I thank Denis Grosz.
Sunday assorted links
1. White noise video on YouTube hit by five copyright claims.
2. Charlie Stross’s update on the Charlie Stross view of the world and why we may be doomed.
3. Inside the Amish town that helps build rock and roll sets.
4. “However, another company, GenePeeks, Inc., was established precisely for the purpose of molecularly genotyping potential donors, though it is currently only aimed at predicting possible rare diseases in offspring between clients and donors. It seems a small step to include other non-medical traits of interest, however, especially if they can be accurately predicted from polygenic profiles. Currently, things like intelligence cannot be accurately predicted for an individual, but it may be possible to generate comparative scores that would influence donor selection. The new company Genomic Prediction, Inc., aims to use polygenic profiles to predict risk for complex disorders – the same approach could certainly be used for many non-medical traits.” Link here.
5. Lauren Gunderson, an Atlantan living in San Francisco, is America’s most produced playwright.
6. “You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30… or 40, or 50, or 60 …” Measured effects of that kind don’t always hold up, but fyi. Addendum: Andrew Gelman says no.