Is there too much gender conformity?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Maybe so:

Using thousands of essays written by 11-year-olds in 1969, we construct an index measuring girls’ conformity to gender norms then prevalent in Britain. We link this index to outcomes over the life-cycle. Conditional on age-11 covariates, a one standard deviation increase in our index predicts a 3.5% decline in lifetime earnings, due to lower wages and fewer hours worked. Education, occupation and family formation mediate half of this decline. Holding skills constant, girls who conform less to gender norms live in regions with higher female employment and university attendance, highlighting the role of the environment in which girls grow up.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Sreevidya Ayyar, Uta Bolt, Eric French & Cormac O’Dea.

MR and Guinea (Conakry), a short history (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will not double indent:

“Dear Tyler,

I am a great fan.  I am currently focused on Guinea (Conakry) and wondered what you might have posted about the country over the years. My search for “Guinea” in Marginal Revolution results in 50 posts:

  • In 13 of them you are referring to “guinea pigs”.
  • In 9 of them you are referring to “Papua New Guinea”.
  • In 9 you refer to “Equatorial Guinea”.
  • In 5 of there is no explicit mention of Guinea (I assume the reference to Guinea can be found if one follows the links?)
  • In 4 you refer to “Guinea Bissau”.
  • In 4 you refer to “Guinea”, the country of that name with capital in Conakry
  • In 3 the reference is to the broader region (Gulf of Guinea, etc).
  • One reference to the island of “New Guinea”.
  • One reference to the “guinea worm”.
  • One reference to “guineas” as in the coins.

Of the references to the country of Guinea, one refers to Bembeya Jazz (good one!), another to press coverage from that country on the DSK affair in 2011, one mentions Guinea as one of the countries of origin for Africans in Guangzhou, and a final one appropriately mentions it on the topic of “Wikipedia knowledge deserts”.

None of these is a dedicated post to the country, something each of the other Guineas does enjoy on Marginal Revolution. I wondered if you might consider redressing the balance?

If it helps, here I write for the Centre for African Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University on how Asian demand, investment and policies is driving a mining boom in Guinea. Guinea is posed to be one of the top 2 growing economies in the world over the next five years on the back of the $20 billion Simandou iron ore mining project. You heard it here first!

Cordialement,

Bernabé Sánchez”

An economist as interim leader of Bangladesh

by  Tyler Cowen in

The president of Bangladesh on Tuesday appointed Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer in microfinance and a Nobel laureate, to oversee an interim government, accommodating demands by protesters and offering a reprieve for a country scarred by violence.

The plans for a new government were announced a day after Bangladesh’s authoritarian leader, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country amid a popular uprising.

Here is more from the NYT.

Houston France markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Houston First, the city’s tourism department, revealed that it is paying $90,000 per year for three years — meaning the city will invest a whopping $270,000 to have the Michelin Guide here in Houston. Holly Clapham-Rosenow, Houston First’s chief marketing officer, says the city redirected some of its budget from various departments to the guide, which is standard for opportunities that come about during the year or when business strategies shift. “Budgets have some fluidity if the right opportunities come about, and opportunities like Michelin, Top Chef, and James Beard — we’re going to jump on them,” she says, adding that the investment seemed worth it considering the culinary scene is one of Houston’s biggest traveler draws.

According to Houston First’s 2023 Strategic and Budget Summary, money spent on food and beverage accounts for around 32 percent of the money spent during day trips to Houston and 24 percent of the money spent during overnight trips — the highest cost behind lodging.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.

The Long-Run Impacts of Banning Affirmative Action in US Higher Education

by  Tyler Cowen in

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion, earnings, and employment of URM individuals to non-URM individuals before and after affirmative action bans went into effect across several US states. We also employ event study analyses and alternative estimators to confirm the validity of our approach and discuss the generalizability of the findings. Results suggest that banning affirmative action results in a decline in URM women’s college degree completion, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, driven largely by impacts on Hispanic women. Thus, affirmative action bans resulted in an increase in racial/ethnic disparities in both college degree completion and earnings among women. Effects on URM men are more ambiguous and indicate significant heterogeneity across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive impact on labor market outcomes of Black men. These results suggest that the relative magnitude of college quality versus mismatch effects vary for URM men and women and highlight the importance of disaggregating results by gender, race, and ethnicity. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with others in the literature and directions for future research.

No comparison with the losers from these policies?  And wasn’t the original motivation for these policies supposed to be for blacks?  That is all from a new NBER working paper by Francisca M. Antman, Brian Duncan & Michael F. Lovenheim.

Dark oxygen: jubiliant for others, cry for yourself and your kin

by  Tyler Cowen in

To summarize the new results:

An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience jonal. The discovery could lead to a reconsideration of the origins of complex life on Earth.

The findings from a team of researchers led by Professor Andrew Sweetman at the U.K.’s Scottish Association for Marine Science, show that oxygen is being produced at around 4,000 metres below the surface of the ocean in complete darkness. This contradicts previous scientific assumptions that only living organisms, including plants and algae, can use energy to create oxygen through photosynthesis, using sunlight for the reaction.

As Julian Gough suggests, most life probably is on icy moons.  This means a lot more life!  Over a time slice, it could mean billions of additional lives out there.  Did you pop up the champagne?

The bad news is that the chance that Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” lies behind us is somewhat smaller.  Which boosts the chance that it may lie in our near future.  Did you pull out the tissues?

On net, did this news change your mood at all?  Why or why not?

Prices vs. price paths

by  Tyler Cowen

Recently I have been writing about how the federal government should not go further in bargaining or forcing down the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.  Supply is elastic and the benefits from new pharma drugs are enormous.

But it is not as simple as being “for higher prices.”  There is also a price trajectory over time.  Higher prices today can induce more competition, which can mean lower prices tomorrow, maybe even much lower prices.  If not tomorrow, perhaps five or ten years hence.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

So yes it is fine to be for higher prices for pharmaceuticals.  But in many scenarios you end up being for lower prices too, just not all the time and just not for everybody.

So shout it from the rooftops: “I am not the demonic Satan, I am for both higher and lower prices as part of a complex mix, to expand elastic supply.”  Catchy, right?

What to think about ranked choice voting?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one key segment:

Game theory can help explain how ranked choice voting changes the behavior of candidates, as well as the elites who support them. Consider a ranked choice election that has five or six candidates. To win the election, you can’t just appeal to your base. You also can’t alienate your opponent’s base. You want supporters of other candidates to regard you as “not too bad,” because if they hate you, they could rank you very low and get you tossed out of the running quickly.

Candidates are thus encouraged to moderate their positions and their behavior — that is, not to call each other too many names. If the favorite candidate of one voter calls the favorite of another “weird,” for example — to choose an example not quite at random — the latter voter might respond by voting down the name-caller to the very bottom.

The result? Negative campaigning diminishes, and politics moderates. The effect can be especially pronounced in party primaries, which sometimes are dominated by the most extreme voters.

The candidates also compete in different ways. In particular, they try to outdo each other when it comes to constituency service, which is a way of being popular without offending anybody.

The broader evidence on ranked choice voting shows that, when used, it has made US politics more moderate. Alaska’s ranked choice voting helped moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski beat her more ideological opponents in 2022. In Idaho, some conservatives regard ranked choice voting with suspicion, fearing it is a plot to neutralize their influence.

In Ireland, politics is fairly non-ideological on most matters of policy, and elections are not typically seen as major, course-altering events. After more than a century with this system, the Irish seem happy to keep it.

The lesson here is that it is not possible to evaluate ranked choice voting in the abstract. It usually makes politics less extreme and less ideological, but those are descriptive terms, not normative ones. I would prefer California’s politics to be less ideological, for example, but that is because it embodies an ideology distinct from mine. And sometimes the more extreme and ideological positions are entirely correct, as for instance John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s suffrage and birth control in the 19th century.

In general, ranked choice voting is best for places where voters feel things are already on the right track and ought to stay there. It is a voting system for the self-satisfied. Which parts of contemporary America might that describe? No voting method yet devised can settle that question.