Do good-looking people live longer?
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We find that the least attractive 1/6th had a significantly Higher Hazard of mortality
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The least attractive 1/6th of women lived almost 2 years less than others at 20.
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The least attractive 1/6th of men lived almost 1 years less than others at 20.
That is a new paper by Connor M. Sheehan and Daniel S. Hamermesh. Victims of lookism, or genetic correlations, or something else<? Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My very good Conversation with Joseph Stiglitz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz joined Tyler for a discussion that weaves through Joe’s career and key contributions, including what he learned from giving an 8-hour lecture in Japan, how being a debater influenced his intellectual development, why he tried to abolish fraternities at Amherst, how studying Kenyan sharecropping led to one of his most influential papers, what he thinks today of Georgism and the YIMBY movement, why he was too right-wing for Cambridge, why he left Gary, Indiana, his current views on high trading volumes and liquidity, the biggest difference between him and Paul Krugman, what working in Washington, DC taught him about hierarchies, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You were a debater, and when you were at Amherst, you were also head of student government, right?
STIGLITZ: That’s right.
COWEN: You voted to abolish fraternities. Isn’t there good evidence that fraternities raise wages?
STIGLITZ: [laughs] That was unions raise wages. Fraternities — I was opposed to fraternities because Amherst was a small college, a thousand boys, men, and they had the effect of dividing the community. The philosophy that I had was that we should be one community. The fraternities tended to interfere with that. Students from one fraternity would always sit at dinner at the same tables with the members of their fraternity. There were class aspects of fraternities.
They were just, I thought, very divisive in a small community, and it turned out that my perspective eventually prevailed. A number of years later, Amherst did abolish the fraternities. It’s an important lesson to me in my political life. Sometimes you begin a campaign knowing that in the next year, two years — while you’re actually there — you may not succeed, but sowing the seeds of discussion, debate, maybe in 5, sometimes 10, sometimes 15, 20 years, things turn out and you wind up winning the debate.
And this:
COWEN: Do you favor the deregulations of the current YIMBY movement — allow a lot more building?
STIGLITZ: No. That goes actually to one of the themes of my book. One of the themes in my book is, one person’s freedom is another person’s unfreedom. That means that what I can do . . . I talk about freedom as what somebody could do, his opportunity set, his choices that he could make. And when one person exerts an externality on another by exerting his freedom, he’s constraining the freedom of others.
If you have unfettered building — for instance, you don’t have any zoning — you can have a building as high as you want. The problem is that your high building deprives another building of light. There may be noise. You don’t want your children exposed to, say, a brothel that is created next door. In the book, I actually talk about one example. Houston is a city with relatively little zoning, and I have some quotes from people living there, describing some of the challenges that that results in.
And this;
COWEN: Your 1984 piece with Carl Shapiro on efficiency wage theory — looking back at that now, 40 years later, you think of that mainly as a contribution to understanding organizations, an explanation of unemployment, a claim about sticky wages? Or how do you frame that article? Because in the piece itself, the wage is actually flexible, at least the real wage is.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Wednesday assorted links
1. How can people be like this? Men who do absolutely nothing on long-haul flights.
2. Bet on me here, flying to France today btw.
3. Work for Astera on rebuilding the machinery of science.
4. Is delaying menopause going to help longevity? (NYT)
5. How politically biased is Wikipedia? Twitter version, Substack version, full study. By David Rozado.
6. AI meme generator. And using Claude for econometrics.
7. Book authors get a start-up to help them deal with AI companies.
What are the fundamental causes of the declining gender pay gap?
That is the theme of a new NBER working paper by Jaime Arellano-Bover, Nicola Bianchi, Salvatore Lattanzio, and Matteo Paradise. Here is the abstract:
This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We propose a model of the labor market in which a larger supply of older workers can crowd out younger workers from top-paying positions. These negative career spillovers disproportionately affect the career trajectories of younger men because they are more likely than younger women to hold higher-paying jobs at baseline. The data strongly support this cohort-driven interpretation of the shrinking gender pay gap. The whole decline in the gap originates from (i) newer worker cohorts who enter the labor market with smaller-than-average gender pay gaps and (ii) older worker cohorts who exit with higher-than-average gender pay gaps. As predicted by the model, the gender pay convergence at labor-market entry stems from younger men’s larger positional losses in the wage distribution. Younger men experience the largest positional losses within higher-paying firms, in which they become less represented over time at a faster rate than younger women. Finally, we document that labor-market exit is the sole contributor to the decline in the gender pay gap after the mid-1990s, which implies no full gender pay convergence for the foreseeable future. Consistent with our framework, we find evidence that most of the remaining gender pay gap at entry depends on predetermined educational choices.
This is one of the best and most interesting papers I have seen in some while, and it is a good example of how academic economics still produces useful results. The topic is important, the hypothesis is plausible, there is evidence in its favor, the idea is clever (in the good sense of clever), it relates to “the problems of young men,” it relates to gender gap issues, and it makes a prediction for the future, namely no full gender pay convergence anytime soon.
Arellano-Bover has a useful tweet storm on the piece. And here is commentary from Alice Evans.
What is the gravest outright mistake out there?
I am not referring to disagreements, I mean outright mistakes held by smart, intelligent people. Let me turn over the microphone to Ariel Pakes, who may someday win a Nobel Prize:
Our calculations indicate that currently proposed U.S. policies to reduce pharmaceutical prices, though particularly beneficial for low-income and elderly populations, could dramatically reduce firms’ investment in highly welfare-improving R&D. The U.S. subsidizes the worldwide pharmaceutical market. One reason is U.S. prices are higher than elsewhere.
That is from his new NBER working paper. That is supply-side progressivism at work, but shorn of the anti-corporate mood affiliation.
I do not believe we should cancel those who want to regulate down prices on pharmaceuticals, even though likely they will kill millions over time, at least to the extent they succeed. (Supply is elastic!) But if we can like them, tolerate them, indeed welcome them into the intellectual community, we should be nice to others as well. Because the faults of the others probably are less bad than those who wish to regulate down the prices of U.S. pharmaceuticals.
Please note you can favor larger government subsidies for drug R&D, and still not want to see those prices lowered.
“What We Got Wrong About Depression and its Treatment”
I am not endorsing these hypotheses, but they are interesting to ponder:
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Depression is neither disease nor disorder rather an adaptation that evolved to serve a purpose
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Depression is so much more prevalent than currently recognized that it is “species typical”
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Antidepressants drive neurotransmitter levels so high that homeostatic regulation kicks in
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Antidepressants may suppress symptoms in a manner that increases risk for subsequent relapse
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Cognitive therapy works by making rumination more efficient and “unsticking” self-blame
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Adding antidepressants may interfere with any enduring effect that cognitive therapy may have
Those are from a new paper by Steven D. Hollon.
New Magnus Carlsen Fantasy Chess start-up
Now the project he created, Fantasy Chess, is leveling up from experiment to venture-backed startup. Led by CEO Mats André Kristiansen, the former cofounder of an online grocery startup, Oslo-based Fantasy Chess has raised $3 million in initial pre-seed funding led by local VC firm SNÖ Ventures and Coatue, joined by billionaire investors Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives and Peter Thiel’s fund Thiel Capital.
>After testing a fantasy game with Norway Chess at its tournament last May, Fantasy Chess now hopes to open up the board beyond that genre, in which fans typically select players to fill out a team and receive points based on their performance in real-life matches. (In that instance, participants selected pieces of specific competitors to follow, winning points if they captured other pieces, and losing points if they were removed.)
Here is the full story.
Tuesday assorted links
Nuclear is Not Best Everywhere
Australia is having a debate over nuclear power. Hamilton and Heeney weigh in with an important perspective:
On the basis of many conversations about Australian energy policy over the years, we can divide the proponents of nuclear energy into three groups.
The first might be called the “ideologues”. They favour nuclear not because of its zero emissions, but despite it. Indeed, many are climate sceptics. They hate renewables because the left loves them, and they favour nuclear because the left hates it.
The second might be called the “engineers”. They favour nuclear energy because it’s cool. Like a Ferrari, they marvel at its performance and stability. They see it as the energy source of the future. The stuff of science fiction.
The third might be called the “pragmatists”. They are not super attentive or highly informed about the intricacies of energy policy. They superficially believe nuclear can serve as a common-sense antidote to the practical shortcomings of renewables.
Conspicuously absent are those who might be called the “economists”. They couldn’t care less about exactly how electrons are produced. They simply want the cheapest possible energy that meets a minimum standard of reliability and emissions.
On the basis of the economics, Hamilton and Heeney conclude that nuclear is expensive for Australia:
The CSIRO estimates the cost of 90 per cent renewables, with firming, transmission, and integration costs included, at $109 per megawatt hour. Based on South Korean costs (roughly one-third of the US and Europe), a 60-year lifespan, a 60 per cent economic utilisation rate (as per coal today), and an eight-year build time (as per the global average), nuclear would cost $200 per megawatt hour – nearly double.
The same electrons delivered with the same reliability, just twice as expensive under what is a fairly optimistic scenario.
Note–this is taking into account that nuclear is available when the sun doesn’t shine and the winds don’t blow–so are batteries.
I suspect that Hamilton and Heeney are right on the numbers but it’s this argument that I find most compelling:
If you need external validation of these basic economics, look no further than the opposition’s own announcement. Rather than lift the moratorium and allow private firms to supply nuclear energy if it’s commercially viable, the opposition has opted for government to be the owner and operator. A smoking gun of economic unviability if ever there were one.
I am optimistic about the potential of small modular reactors (SMRs) based on innovative designs. These reactors can ideally be located near AI facilities. As I argued in the Marginal Revolution Theory of Innovation, innovation is a dynamic process; success rarely comes on the first attempt. The key to innovation is continuous refinement and improvement. These small reactors based on different technologies give as an opportunity to refine and improve. To achieve this, we must overhaul our regulatory framework, which has disproportionately burdened nuclear energy—our greenest power source—with excessive regulation compared to more hazardous and less environmentally friendly technologies.
Electrons are electrons. We should allow all electricity generation technologies to compete in the market on an equal footing. Let the best technologies win.
The macroeconomics of narratives
We study the macroeconomic implications of narratives, defined as beliefs about the economy that spread contagiously. In an otherwise standard business-cycle model, narratives generate persistent and belief-driven fluctuations. Sufficiently contagious narratives can “go viral,” generating hysteresis in the model’s unique equilibrium. Empirically, we use natural-language-processing methods to measure firms’ narratives. Consistent with the theory, narratives spread contagiously and firms expand after adopting optimistic narratives, even though these narratives have no predictive power for future firm fundamentals. Quantitatively, narratives explain 32% and 18% of the output reductions over the early 2000s recession and Great Recession, respectively, and 19% of output variance.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Joel P. Flynn and Karthik Sastryx.
13.9 percent less democracy?
Estonian edition:
After the Citizenship Act was enacted in 1992, 90% of ethnic-Estonians automatically became citizens while only 8-10% of non-Estonians gained citizenship. This is due to a law that granted citizenship to those who were living in Estonia before 1940, which was the year of Soviet annexation. [3] Because of the law, those that moved or were born in Estonia after 1940 during Soviet times had to apply for citizenship. New numbers show that ‘as of April 2012, 93,774 persons (6.9% of the population) remain stateless, while approximately 95,115 (7% of the population) have chosen Russian citizenship as an alternative to statelessness’. [4] Because many Russian-speakers have not been able to gain citizenship, this combined 13.9% of the population does not have the right to participate in Estonian democracy.
Here is more detail. I believe in 1992, during the first election, about forty percent of the resident, age-relevant population was not eligible to vote. I am not sure what the percentages are right now, but I do know the same basic system continues.
I do not per se object to these policies (fear the Russian bear), while noting I do not have enough information to assess all the trade-offs involved. Nonetheless it is interesting how much attention the Hungarian and Polish democratic “deviations” receive, relative to this one. An EU country in fully good standing around the world, on the basis of ethnicity, denies a significant portion of its longstanding residents the right to vote.
Two further points. First, you have to worry about this issue, as a Russian ethnic, unless your ancestors arrived before 1940. So the worry here is not just about recent arrivals, but it is quite possible that your grandparents were born in Estonia, maybe even great-grandparents. Second, ethnic Russians do have a path to normal Estonian citizenship, but it is difficult, especially the language requirement, which I am told is very tough.
I heard Russian a great deal walking through the streets of Tallinn, and most of all at the ballet. I have seen estimates that one-quarter of the Estonian population is ethnic Russian, and in the major city it is surely more than that.
Garett Jones, telephone!
AI trends relative to AI predictions
In 2021, researchers were asked how smart AI would be in 2022. They predicted 12% pass-rate on the MATH dataset; AI outperformed significantly, scoring 50%. Now it’s at 90%.
Here is the link, including to background material.
Monday assorted links
1. “But SpaghettiOs stood alone as the most convenient of convenience foods.”
2. Meta-science reforms at NIH? Here is the Substack link.
5. Does the NBA undervalue genetics? Or is it home environment?
6. Capri lifts ban on tourists, I guess they didn’t want to raise the price of water.
Testing for Bird Flu is Too Slow
Remember my warnings about the FDAs takeover of lab developed tests?
…Lab developed tests have never been FDA regulated except briefly during the pandemic emergency when such regulation led to catastrophic consequences. Catastrophic consequences that had been predicted in advanced by Paul Clement and Lawrence Tribe. Despite this, for reasons I do not understand, the FDA plan is marching forward but many other people are starting to warn of dire consequences.
Well the plan marched forward and here we are. Regarding tests for bird flu:
KFFNews: Clinical laboratories have also begun to develop their own tests from scratch. But researchers said they’re moving cautiously because of a recent FDA rule that gives the agency more oversight of lab-developed tests, lengthening the pathway to approval. In an email to KFF Health News, FDA press officer Janell Goodwin said the rule’s enforcement will occur gradually.
However, Susan Van Meter, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a trade group whose members include the nation’s largest commercial diagnostic labs, said companies need more clarity: “It’s slowing things down because it’s adding to the confusion about what is allowable.”
One of the motivations for Operation Warp Speed and my work during the pandemic on things like advance market commitments was that firms wouldn’t invest enough in tests because diseases might fizzle out. The extreme costs of shutting down the economy, however, mean that it’s well worth paying for some tests for diseases that fizzle out if tests are ready when a disease doesn’t fizzle out.
Creating tests for the bird flu is already a risky bet, because demand is uncertain. It’s not clear whether this outbreak in cattle will trigger an epidemic or fizzle out. In addition to issues with the CDC and FDA, clinical laboratories are trying to figure out whether health insurers or the government will pay for bird flu tests.
We need a pandemic trust fund to ramp up advance market commitments when necessary.
On the plus side, I do approve of the new program to pay farmers and farm workers for testing. For example:
Friday’s incentives announcement included a $75 payment to any farm worker who agrees to give blood and nasal swab samples to the CDC.
“Bird flu” has now infected more than 50 types of mammals. To be clear, bird flu may yet fade but every potential pandemic pathogen is a test of readiness and we still are getting a C+ at best.
*The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War*
That is the new book by Nick Lloyd, it will be making my best non-fiction of the year list. Reviews are very strong, and you can either pre-order and wait, or order it from the UK, or buy it in the excellent Hedengrens bookshop in Stockholm. Here is one short bit:
As always with the Russian army, squabbles between the generals quickly surfaced.
A bit later:
This lack of cooperation within the Russian high command would seriously undermine its operations throughout the war, preventing Russia from bringing all her strength to bear and forcing her commanders to spend precious time bickering amongst themselves.
About one-third of the way through the text of the book:
Tsar Nicholas II had come to a momentous decision: to take direct command of Russia’s armies.
How it started….how it’s going…