The certainty of the “New Atheists”
From the excellent Jonathan Haidt:
…I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind. (More details about the analysis can be found here.)
To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty. (I also analyzed The Moral Landscape—it came out at 2.34%.)
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Eric Auld.
John Roemer changes his mind on a bunch of things, including socialism
He has a new published paper, in Analyse & Kritik, entitled “Thoughts on Arrangements of Property Rights in Productive Assets,” here is the abstract:
State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor rations, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor-supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether such a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe — thus engendering the post-war movement toward social insurance — is an open question.
There are some probably gated versions here. He also explains later in the paper that socialism cannot work because a generally solidaristic social ethos will be undermined by a selfish minority, driven by greed, which will turn social institutions to their favor and evolve into a new ruling class. In other words, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is not yet obsolete and still holds the power to sway men’s minds.
For the pointer I thank Kevin Vallier.
The history of political economy workshop at Duke
Bruce Caldwell emails me:
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics this coming June. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics. Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive a $2000 stipend for attending, plus free housing and reading materials. The deadline for applying is March 3. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website,
http://hope.econ.duke.edu/I am writing to ask you if you would again promote our program on the Marginal Revolution blog. The 2012 institute, which was also aimed at grad students (the 2013 one was for faculty), attracted applicants from a host of universities, and we want to keep the momentum going. When we did follow up with previous participants to see how they had found out about the institute, a significant majority of them said that it was from reading about it on a blog.
Gangland average is over the rent is too damn high, Southland edition
So many gang members have been priced out of the neighborhood, he said, that their presence can be hard to spot during the week. But on Fridays and Saturdays, they make a pilgrimage back to their roots. They ride in from El Sereno, Eagle Rock, even the Inland Empire, to hang out. Each Monday, trash cans and stop signs wear fresh “ExP” graffiti.
“It becomes a weekend gang,” Arellano said.
The pointer is from Binyamin Applebaum.
Income volatility for top earners, especially in finance
Justin Lahart has a new article about research in the works on top earners, here is one relevant snippet:
The economists have also been looking into what’s going on with the top 0.1%, while digging more deeply into incomes for specific occupations. In a preview of this work he presented at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting last month, Mr. Guvenen showed that over the past 30 years income cyclicality for this group has risen substantially relative to the population at large.
That is largely a result of a change in the composition. It used to be that doctors — a group with very little income cyclicality — represented about a quarter of top 0.1%. Now they account for less than a tenth. Filling the gap, a bigger share of people in finance-related occupations.
The underlying research you will find here. For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez.
Assorted links
1. Major “Freestyle” chess tournament starts today. And what machines can’t do, by David Brooks.
2. Why Hollywood will never look the same again.
3. The New York Fed on labor market participation and Krugman’s response. Adjusting for changes in immigration is worth a ponder here too.
4. Interview with me in Italian.
5. DOT is moving forward with “connected vehicle technology.”
6. Demise of the Great Gatsby curve. And the economics of human sacrifice.
New estimates on ACA and employment
The Affordable Care Act will also reduce the number of fulltime workers by more than 2 million in coming years, congressional budget analysts said in the most detailed analysis of the law’s impact on jobs.
The CBO said the law’s impact on jobs would be mostly felt starting after 2016. The agency previously estimated that the economy would have 800,000 fewer jobs as a result of the law.
The impact is likely to be most felt, the CBO said, among low-wage workers. The agency said that most of the effect would come from Americans deciding not to seek work as a result of the ACA’s impact on the economy. Some workers may forgo employment, while others may reduce hours, for a equivalent of at least 2 million fulltime workers dropping out of the labor force.
That is from The Washington Post.
Addendum: Annie Lowrey adds comment.
*The Son Also Rises* and social mobility in India
That is the new Greg Clark book and yes it is an event and yes you should buy it. Here is one passage I found of interest:
There are surprisingly few studies of social mobility in India. Thus the two recent international surveys of social mobility…do not include India. However, a recent study estimated the Indian intergeneration income correlation to be 0.58, making social mobility rates in India among the world’s lowest.
The estimated persistence rate for income in India of 0.58, however, is not much higher than those for the United Kingdom (0.5) or the United States (0.47). The share of income variance in the next generation attributable to inheritance from parents in India is still only (0.58)squared, or 0.34. This suggests that even in India, an individual’s position in the income ranks is not primarily derived from inheritance. Thus, by conventional estimates, modern India has become a society of rapid social mobility, where three to four generations might see the elimination of all traces of millennia-old patterns of inequality.
You can buy the book here. Here is a previous MR post on the book, there will be more to come.
*The Fissured Workplace*
That is a new and important book by David Weil and the subtitle is Why Work Became so Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. I take the author’s main thesis to be that corporations have, in the interests of efficiency, focused increasingly on “core competencies.” That has led to an outsourcing of non-core jobs and the commoditization of those jobs, outside the sphere of benefits, workplace community, investing in workers, and caring about worker morale.
Here is one excerpt from the book:
By focusing on core competencies, lead businesses in the economy have shed the employment relationship for many activities, and all that comes with it. Shedding the tasks and production activities to other businesses allows lead companies to lower their costs, since externalizing activities to other firms (particularly those operating in the more competitive markets) eliminates the need to pay the higher wages and benefits that large enterprises typically provided. It also does away with the need to establish consistency in those human resource policies, since they no longer reside inside the firm. This aspect of fissuring pushes liability for adherence to a range of workplace statutes (and other public policies) to other businesses.
I found this by no means a perfect book in terms of presentation. The argument is meandering and it is not clear where the evidence is to come and what is to count as evidence for or against the thesis. I also would have liked a clearer discussion of incidence. If every company is producing “core competencies,” cannot the resulting boost in productivity make virtually all workers better off? And cannot most workers end up in companies where they contribute to core competencies? Well, maybe not, but the upshot here is not exactly clear from reading this book and furthermore the pessimistic tone of the book will then depend on other, quite separate mechanisms for distributing the benefits of these developments to capital not labor. Still, this work presents an important idea with insight and I hope it finds its deserved readership.
Assorted links
1. Gamifying the teaching of world news.
2. Consumption average is over. And more on the same theme from Nelson D. Schwartz.
3. Do the clever and lazy make good leaders?
4. 250Words.com, a new site for business books.
5. Why isn’t the ACA Innovation Center using RCTs? And new RCT on free health care in Ghana.
6. The Second Machine Age podcast with Russ Roberts and Erik B.
Who are the most overrated economists?
I was asked that question over lunch while visiting the PPE program at UNC, and my answer was this.
In general the market in ideas and reputations of economists works fairly well, at least in the United States. Nonetheless at any point in time, the most overrated economists are the most highly rated young empirical economists at the top schools.
Think of it this way. The half-life of a good empirical result is getting progressively shorter. Good empirical papers no longer stand as definitive accounts for fifteen years and sometimes not even for fifteen months. The science is getting better, but the individual economist is becoming less important, as we might expect from a growing division of labor. That is healthy, but it has implications for the distribution of reputation.
The total amount of repute and renown accorded to individual top young economists does not decline at the same rate that individual contributions become less important. That total amount of repute and renown at say Harvard, available to be doled out to the latest hot young economist, is fixed in the short run or may even be rising, due to the high returns on the school’s endowment.
So those economists end up individually overrated, even though as a whole they become more impressive over time.
Working backwards, one might be inclined to think old theorists and economists who have invented or fleshed out general methods are the most underrated.
Bernanke joins Brookings
The press release is here.
Charter High Schools Increase Earnings and Educational Achievement
Private and charter schools appear to have significant but modest effects on test scores but much larger effects on educational attainment and even on long-run earnings. A new working paper from Booker, Sass, Gill and Zimmer and associated brief from Mathematica Policy Research finds that charter schools raise high school graduation, college enrollment and college persistence rates by ~7 to 13%. Moreover, the income of former charter school students when measured at 23-25 years old is 12.7% higher than similar students. Similar in this context is measured by students who were in charter schools in grade 8 but who then switched to a traditional high school–in many ways this is a conservative comparison group since any non-random switchers would presumably switch to a better school (other controls are also included).
The effect of charters on graduation rates is consistent with a larger literature finding that Catholic schools increase graduation rates (e.g. here and here). I am also not surprised that charters increase earnings but the earnings gain is surprisingly large; especially so when we consider that the gain appears just as large among charter and non-charter students both of whom attended college (i.e. the gain is not just through the college attendance effect).
I wouldn’t bet on the size of the earnings effect just yet but what we are learning from this and related research, such as Chetty et al. on teachers, is that better schools and better teachers appear to have a significant and beneficial long-run impact that is not fully captured by higher test scores.
As I said in Launching, one of the factors that makes me optimistic about education in the United States is that it remains relatively decentralized and open to experimentation and evolution.
Very good Ezra Klein profile
You can read it here, by Benjamin Wallace, excerpt:
One evening last January, I sat with Klein at the MSNBC studio near American University in Washington, D.C., as he was getting ready to guest-host The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell. It was clearly part of an ongoing audition for his own show. But even though Klein has a pleasant TV persona, you could see the tension between his desire to be good at hosting and the sense that it wasn’t the most comfortable fit. When a producer suggested that Klein ask Barney Frank about supposed anti-gay remarks made by Chuck Hagel, the nominee for secretary of Defense, Klein deflected: “I just don’t think that attack on Hagel is very interesting.” Later, he anguished over his opening line about Obama’s choice of Hagel. “I kind of want to write, ‘It was the worst day for neoconservatives since the day Vice-President Cheney shot a dude in the face,’ ” he said to me. “Which is a funny way to open the show. But I feel like, Do I need to poke Dick Cheney? This is the thing about TV that I do find hard: It rewards a sharpness that I wouldn’t use in my writing.”
This is the piece on Ezra which captures him pretty well and I found it interesting the whole way through.
I recall, by the way, the last time I mentioned Ezra on this blog there were — as any time I mention a well-known blogger, columnist, commentator, or Wonkblog creator — rude comments. The same happens for say Thomas Friedman or David Brooks or a variety of others and I am reminded of Jonathan Swift’s remark that “Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.” Try doing their jobs for a week or two.
More generally, I wish to make a few points.
First, a lot of us out there who write, or who do economics, or who blog, know each other. We get on together, or not, based on a lot of factors but not mainly whether we agree on a bunch of political questions. Personally, I find taste in food, music, and movies to be better predictors of a sense of mutuality than politics. Those are ideologies too! (Should we not discuss Krugman’s taste in music a bit more and his views on fiscal policy a bit less? It’s OK enough stuff, but why can’t he listen to Bach more? Why can’t he promote this? Does he not yearn for a fugue or a complex raga in lieu of Arcade Fire, at the appropriate margin that is? Or some early Brian Eno? On science fiction I have kinship with him, though not exactly the same tastes.)
Second, when it comes to the category “working hard continually to improve what he does,” in the very top tier of people I have met — ever — is Ezra. Also Paul Krugman. Also Alex. These people deserve special appreciation, no matter what else you might disagree with them on. And furthermore these people should never be underestimated.
No, I cannot explain to you how Ezra’s new venture might make money (or not), but in its broadest terms think of it as a platform for measuring value and then adjusting. Successful ventures almost always evolve into something other than their exact origins. That doesn’t mean it will succeed financially but it is an important piece of perspective. Furthermore financial success is only one kind of success and it is not always the one most worth pursuing.
Third, if we are going to play the ideology game, why not do it on a global scale? What’s so special about the national level for politics? Virtually all Americans share so many preconceptions about the world it is a mix of embarrassing and disconcerting. If you, as an American, are getting too bent out of shape about the other Americans you disagree with, I say you need to spend more time in Russia, Haiti, and India, for a start.
End of sermon people, thanks for listening.
Assorted links
1. Scott Sumner reviews movies (and do not forget they are all a part of nominal gdp. He and I agree on virtually every book and film on this list.) And here is Scott on where the stress falls.
2. Whopper virgins.
3. Which are the happiest jobs? (speculative)
4. Economic development: it’s complicated.