Assorted links
Corporate economists are hot again
Bob Tita reports:
With more data available than ever before and markets increasingly unpredictable, U.S. companies—from manufacturers to banks and pharmaceutical companies—are expanding their corporate economist staffs. The number of private-sector economists surged 57% to 8,680 in 2012 from 5,510 in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2012, Wells Fargo & Co. had one economist in its corporate economics department. Now, it has six.
There is more here.
Bringing extinct species back to life
It will happen, in fact it has already happened and more than ten years ago:
Novak is tall, solemn, polite and stiff in conversation, until the conversation turns to passenger pigeons, which it always does. One of the few times I saw him laugh was when I asked whether de-extinction might turn out to be impossible. He reminded me that it has already happened. More than 10 years ago, a team that included Alberto Fernández-Arias (now a Revive & Restore adviser) resurrected a bucardo, a subspecies of mountain goat also known as the Pyrenean ibex, that went extinct in 2000. The last surviving bucardo was a 13-year-old female named Celia. Before she died — her skull was crushed by a falling tree — Fernández-Arias extracted skin scrapings from one of her ears and froze them in liquid nitrogen. Using the same cloning technology that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, the team used Celia’s DNA to create embryos that were implanted in the wombs of 57 goats. One of the does successfully brought her egg to term on July 30, 2003. “To our knowledge,” wrote the scientists, “this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies.” But it didn’t live long. After struggling to breathe for several minutes, the kid choked to death.
There is more here, interesting throughout. One risk is that these newly recreated animals may turn out to be efficient carriers of modern diseases. And the economic benefits of recreating extinct species are…? And here is a legal perspective:
In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism. He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.
And are they really the same animals after all, given the imperfections in the process of cloning and recreation? The philosopher might say this:
“I would like to have an elephant that likes the cold weather,” he told me. “Whether you call it a ‘mammoth’ or not, I don’t care.”
I say we would be wise to exercise option value on this one, but of course the incentives of scientists are to do something first.
Should we give Bill Clinton a tenured professorship?
Hans Noel flunks this test and says no:
I don’t think Clinton should be given a “tenured professorship.”+ Not because of his lack of a Ph.D. per se, but because, smart as he is, Clinton is not a scholar. He doesn’t do research. He is not in the business of contributing to the store of human knowledge. If Clinton is given a job as a tenured professor, what would he do? A “tenured professorship” is not a plum given to reward success. It’s an actual job.
The job of a professor is not the same as “being smart.” Academics write those pesky obscure papers that Kristof finds impenetrable and irrelevant because that’s how we learn things. The demands for publication may have perversities, but it is what drives people to do research.
I would offer a tenured professorship to any ex-President who is willing to spend real time with students and academic programs. That would be in a public policy school, a public administration department, a university-wide appointment, or even a political science department. A class actually taught by Clinton, even half of the time with another professor doing most of the actual work, would be fascinating. And if you don’t like Clinton, or don’t think he is smart (not my view at all), consider this a student’s chance to see the (ex) emperor with no clothes, which is itself a learning experience.
I know people who have had Obama as professor — before he was President of course — and loved him, and not for partisan reasons.
Have I mentioned that universities tenure plenty of people who don’t do research? Check out your music department, for a start, or Fine Arts. Or (very likely but not always) your business school.
I recently read Noel’s book on political polarization and enjoyed it, especially his discussion of how intellectual elites have led the process of polarization. Still, I would trade in having read that book for a five minute chat with Bill Clinton.
Addendum: I also would offer a tenured professorship to any ex-President who is not willing to spend real time with students and academic programs. The job offer would more than pay for itself, given the money it would bring into the university, directly and indirectly. Most universities support athletics programs, and pay the successful coaches millions more than any other state employee earns — can they not find room for a former Commander in Chief or two?
Public Choice Outreach 2014!
I write to ask your help recruiting promising undergraduate or graduate students for our annual Public Choice Outreach Conference. The 2014 Conference will be held on June 6 – 8, 2014 at the Hyatt Arlington conveniently located close to the National Mall and Georgetown areas of Washington DC. Applications are now available and are due on Friday, April 11, 2014.
The Public Choice Outreach Conference is designed as a “crash course” in Public Choice for students planning careers in academia, journalism, law, or public policy. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates are eligible to apply. Many graduates of the Outreach seminar have gone on to notable careers in academia, law and business. Students majoring in economics, history, international studies, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, public administration, religious studies, and sociology have attended past conferences as have a few mayors and other politicians! Applicants unfamiliar with Public Choice and students from outside of George Mason University are especially encouraged.
A small stipend is available and meals and rooms will be provided by the conference (for non-locals). Space, however, is very limited.
More information here.
P.S. Tyler and myself will both be speaking along with an all-star cast of scholars!
Catholics were much less likely to vote for the Nazis
A new paper was presented at the AEA meetings this January, “Religion, Economics, and the Rise of the Nazis,” by Philipp Tillman and Jörg Spenkuch, and the abstract for one version of the paper is this:
We investigate the role of religion in the electoral success of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany. Among historians, it is a well known fact that Protestants were much more likely than Catholics to vote for Adolf Hitler. However, in spite of the historical importance of the Nazis’ rise to power, the question of whether this correlation reflects a causal effect of religion has so far remained unanswered. We use an instrumental variable approach by relying on geographic variation in religious beliefs dating back to a peace treaty in the sixteenth century. According to the principle “cuius regio, eius religio.” the Peace of Augsburg granted local rulers the right to determine the religion of their serfs. Using rulers’ choices in the aftermath of the peace as an instrumental variable for the religion of Germans living in the respective areas more than three hundred years later, we are able to document an economically large effect of Protestantism on Nazi vote shares— even after controlling for a wide range of region fixed effects and socioeconomic characteristics. Taken at face value, our estimates suggest that Catholics were about 50% less likely to vote for the Nazi Party than their Protestant counterparts. We are currently testing multiple hypotheses to explain this effect and are in the process of collecting additional data.
That is not a new claim but it is new to have serious econometrics to back it up and show the vote tallies were not caused by associated demographic factors. You will find a related copy of the paper at the first link here. Tillman’s home page is here. Spenkuch is here. Here is Spenkuch’s paper on immigration and crime. Immigration is connected to higher rates of theft crime, although by small amounts, and not positively related to violent crime.
Addendum: Here is the most current version of the paper (pdf), with notable additions.
Does immigration undermine public support for social policy?
Mostly not. Again, Kevin Lewis points us to a fascinating paper:
Does Immigration Undermine Public Support for Social Policy?
David Brady & Ryan Finnigan
American Sociological Review, February 2014, Pages 17-42Abstract:
There has been great interest in the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in recent years, and particularly since Alesina and Glaeser’s (2004) influential work. Following literatures on solidarity and fractionalization, race in the U.S. welfare state, and anti-immigrant sentiments, many contend that immigration undermines public support for social policy. This study analyzes three measures of immigration and six welfare attitudes using 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for 17 affluent democracies. Based on multi-level and two-way fixed-effects models, our results mostly fail to support the generic hypothesis that immigration undermines public support for social policy. The percent foreign born, net migration, and the 10-year change in the percent foreign born all fail to have robust significant negative effects on welfare attitudes. There is evidence that the percent foreign born significantly undermines the welfare attitude that government “should provide a job for everyone who wants one.” However, there is more robust evidence that net migration and change in percent foreign born have positive effects on welfare attitudes. We conclude that the compensation and chauvinism hypotheses provide greater potential for future research, and we critically consider other ways immigration could undermine the welfare state. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that factors other than immigration are far more important for public support of social policy.
There is an ungated version here.
Assorted links
Is Islamic political control bad for women’s empowerment?
Maybe not, once we control properly for endogeneity:
Islamic Rule and the Empowerment of the Poor and Pious
Erik Meyersson
Econometrica, January 2014, Pages 229–269Abstract:
Does Islamic political control affect women’s empowerment? Several countries have recently experienced Islamic parties coming to power through democratic elections. Due to strong support among religious conservatives, constituencies with Islamic rule often tend to exhibit poor women’s rights. Whether this reflects a causal relationship or a spurious one has so far gone unexplored. I provide the first piece of evidence using a new and unique data set of Turkish municipalities. In 1994, an Islamic party won multiple municipal mayor seats across the country. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I compare municipalities where this Islamic party barely won or lost elections. Despite negative raw correlations, the RD results reveal that, over a period of six years, Islamic rule increased female secular high school education. Corresponding effects for men are systematically smaller and less precise. In the longer run, the effect on female education remained persistent up to 17 years after, and also reduced adolescent marriages. An analysis of long-run political effects of Islamic rule shows increased female political participation and an overall decrease in Islamic political preferences. The results are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes the Islamic party’s effectiveness in overcoming barriers to female entry for the poor and pious.
There are ungated versions here. That is via Kevin Lewis, who surveys other interesting papers on religion here.
What would Fedcoin look like?
JW, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
It’s 2018, Janet Yellen has been renominated to be Fed Chair by President Walker having served a successful first term of solid growth and low inflation. However, to achieve such growth Yellen has had to maintain very low interest rates. Then, disaster strikes. France leaves the Euro unexpectedly and causes a world wide credit crunch. It’s 2008 all over again. President Walker is unwilling to do any stimulus. Yellen decides that a regime change is necessary at the Fed.
Taking to heart MMT, Keynes, Bernanke, Yellen merges Keynes’ idea of burying money in jars with Helicopter Ben’s idea of dropping money from the sky. The Fed announces that the United States is going to create its own cryptocurrency, which can be exchanged for US dollars at any US regulated depository institution. No or minimal fees can be charged by the banks for this exchange. They will be created just like Bitcoin, decentralized and according to a mining algorithm. American citizens can mine them, create businesses to do so, and put people to work. Unlike Bitcoin, the supply of DollarCoin will not be finite, capped at 21 million. Instead, DollarCoin will be targeted to grow at an inflation rate consistent with an NGDPLT of 20 trillion US dollars. Liquidity is restored. No QE is necessary. CNBC starts cheerfully referring to DollarCoin as YellenCoin.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin plummets in value. With the US Government now accepting a cryptocurrency, its advantages vanish. People’s belief in its value goes away, and looking down, it crashes. Remittances are now sent to relatives in Africa and Latin America by YellenCoin, just as people once did briefly in Bitcoin.
It is interesting to think about why this is so implausible. There are a few reasons:
1. YellenCoin would be a means of payment but not the medium of account. This would move the economy into a currency substitution model, a’la Girton and Roper, but would not have the effects of a straightforward monetary expansion.
2. Cryptocurrencies are much more likely to be used for some kinds of transactions than others. So this act of “monetary policy” would be very much non-neutral.
3. Central banks are not supposed to be seen as taking major risks or overturning the established order of things. They are highly risk-averse when it comes to their public reputations, and their very much prefer sins of omission to sins of commission. If the Fed established Fedcoin and something went wrong with the idea, they would be subject to especially heavy blame. In the meantime, few people (are there exceptions?) are blaming them for not establishing a cryptocurrency.
Childhood obesity is falling
Federal health authorities on Tuesday reported a stunning 43 percent drop in the obesity rate among 2- to 5-year-old children over the past decade, the first broad decline in an epidemic that often leads to lifelong struggles with weight and higher risks for cancer, heart disease and stroke.
The drop emerged from a major federal health survey that experts say is the gold standard for evidence on what Americans weigh. The trend came as a welcome surprise to researchers. New evidence has shown that obesity takes hold young: Children who are overweight or obese between age 3 and 5 are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults.
There is more here, via Charles C. Mann.
Why many government jobs are a bad idea for many academics
When the Obama White House requested that I serve on the National Council on the Humanities, I agreed to have my name put forward. I went through the lengthy FBI check, including repeated probing of friends about my nonexistent drug use.
But in the end the White House decided not to move my nomination forward. There were two reasons. First, taxes. In 2009 and 2010, the years of my divorce, I filed my taxes late — four weeks and 10 days, respectively. Second, I was not willing to commit to never criticizing the administration, nor to restricting my publishing agenda to topics that were unlikely to be controversial. There is just no point trying to be a public intellectual if you can’t speak your mind. This requirement was conveyed and discussed through phone calls; I have no written record to prove it. But that was how it went.
Why did the White House want such restrictions? Lawyers told me that the administration didn’t want to have to deal with even one news cycle being overtaken by media frenzy about something some low-level official had said. The administration was trying to survive in our 21st-century media environment.
That is from Danielle Allen.
Assorted links
Markets in Everything: Protest Rights
At the Olympics if you want to protest a decision, you must have cash:
The reason that Mathieu — and many other coaches across most Olympic sports — make certain they always have a specific amount of cash on hand is that if they want to protest an official decision during competition, they need more than just a strong opinion and an angry yell.
They also need money.
…Depending on the sport, the fee varies: for luge, it is 50 euros (about $67). Cross-country skiing, like snowboard and Alpine skiing, demands 100 Swiss francs (about $112) but stipulates that all protests must be submitted in English. Bobsled and skeleton are among the most expensive: they require a deposit of 100 euros before any protest will even be considered. If multiple countries want to make a similar protest, sharing the tab is allowed.
Hat tip to the excellent PriorProbability who also points out that if your protest is successful you get your money back so these payments are also protest bets.
*The Tyranny of Experts*
The author is William Easterly and the subtitle is Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.
This is Easterly’s most libertarian book, self-recommending. It is due out March 4.