Saturday assorted links
1. Hans Niemann okie-dokie. And a response.
2. Should more British homes be built using straw?
3. Base models of LLMs do not seem to skew so much politically. Substack version here.
4. Cameroon starts first malaria vaccine rollout.
5. What economists thought in the 1980s.
6. Does the solar shield idea have potential? (NYT)
7. NYT profile of Coleman Hughes, a highly intelligent and reasonable man. Again, here is Coleman’s new book The End of Race Politics. I will be doing a CWT with him.
8. “Richest five families in Florence 🇮🇹 from 1427 are still the richest today (archival data). Not only the top shows persistence. Any family who was in the (1427) top third is almost certain to still be there today.” Link here.
9. Ross Douthat on Dan Wang on where the future dynamism lies (NYT).
Vaccine Induced Social Amnesia
NYT: In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organization’s European region. Over just the first 10 months of last year, according to an alarming bulletin the W.H.O. issued in mid-December, there were more than 30,000.
This is the kind of spike — a 3,000 percent increase — that looks implausible in headlines….But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Through December, case numbers in the region eventually reached over 42,000, and although the largest outbreaks were in countries most Americans regard as pretty remote (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia), there is also a vicious surge in Britain, which may look plausibly to us as the canary in a coal mine. There, in just one of England’s nine regions, the West Midlands, 260 cases have been confirmed and dozens more suspected, in a country which, as a whole, recorded just two cases as recently as 2021.
As David Wallace-Wells explains, vaccination rates are still 90%+ and down only slightly but measles is so infectious that even amid an otherwise well-vaccinated population, it can sometimes find pockets of low vaccination populations and spread like wildfire.
Measles is an especially nasty infection because it can induce “immunological amnesia“, thereby making individuals more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.
Ironically, just as measles can induce immunological amnesia, vaccines can induce social amnesia about the severity of diseases, thereby making society more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.
Student Demand and the Supply of College Courses
From a recent Jacob Light paper:
In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.
John Cochrane offers comment as well, the first half of the post is interesting on demographics also.
My TLS essay on the Clinton administration
Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern). Here is one excerpt:
Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it” has stuck in people’s minds. The reality is that, after Clinton-era welfare reforms, America spent more money on helping the poor. Welfare payments were attached to work requirements, but the states could redeploy federal money to programmes other than simple welfare payments, so funds for childcare, college scholarships, food stamps and tax credits for the poor all went up. The rate at which children fall into poverty has declined steadily. A significant Medicaid expansion followed under President Obama.
Yet the authors state that “The Era of Big Government is Over” in the section on welfare reform. If you squint you can see periodic references to the fact that Clinton-era welfare reform was not entirely radical, but nonetheless they write that this was “a drastic reform of the welfare system … that did in fact repudiate its New Deal heritage”. Calling the policy “an utterly misogynist step backward”, they note that Clinton’s “reputation as a heartless neoliberal was hereby well advanced within the ranks of progressive America”. Again, argument by adjective displaces the numbers.
And here is my summary judgment:
Too often the authors’ substantive arguments are presented in an “argument by adjective” form, relabelling events, institutions and individuals with negative adjectives or connotations, but without providing enough firm evidence. They write as if describing a policy reform as not having done enough for labour unions is per se a damning critique…
I can’t help but feel this work is largely directed at an internal Democratic Party dialogue. The basic premisses, or even the interpretations of the facts, don’t need to be argued for much. But good Democrats need to be told how to think about their own history. If strong labour unions are a sine qua non for social and economic progress, and if all good (and bad) things come together, how would the rest of history, including that of the Clinton administration, have to read? The notion that such stifling readings have become part of the problem, rather than the solution, does not appear in Nelson Lichtenstein’s and Judith Stein’s book.
I had turned down the previous invitation to review, because I didn’t think the book in question was good enough.
Dengue vaccine seems to be working?
Dengue outbreaks can affect 390 million persons yearly. In a trial involving 16,235 persons in Brazil, the live, attenuated, tetravalent Butantan vaccine was efficacious in all age groups at 2 years. Read the full trial results: https://t.co/YY0iRP2Xqb pic.twitter.com/8QkfoW6bif
— NEJM (@NEJM) January 31, 2024
I have been telling people that most major maladies will be fixable over the course of the next few decades…
Religion and the ideological gender gap
The key insight is that women have always been more [economically] left-wing than men, but that women were also more religious (both vs today and vs men) and that this was a moderating force against those left-wing views.
With religion in retreat, those views now take voice. pic.twitter.com/Ed3GJyHhap
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) February 2, 2024
Friday assorted links
1. “Europe regulates its way to last place” (WSJ).
2. “Throughout the twentieth century…graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women.” With smaller family sizes, this no longer seems to be true.
3. “The Poem/1 clock dreams up a new poem every minute to tell you the time.”
4. Vanity Fair on Apple Vision Pro.
5. On Eurasianism.
Claude of Anthropic does *GOAT*
Here is the new book bot, trained on Claude of course. Again, I call this a “generative book.”
Very powerful, and I am indebted to those who helped, including at Anthropic and also Jeff Holmes of Mercatus.
Here is the original web site and the original GPT-4 bot, which still is great. The full title is GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Should We Care? An audiobook will be coming, can you guess who is reading it?
Why it is difficult for Milei to rein in inflation
Like the heat in the austral summer, inflation in Argentina is high and showing no sign of meaningful relief anytime soon. It rose from a monthly 13% in November to 25% in December and, according to the latest central bank survey, may come in at around 20% in both January and February…
Argentina’s central bank in December lowered real interest rates to deeply negative territory, hoping to reduce the issuance of pesos to pay for those interests—a move that pushes consumers to spend or dollarize their savings, adding to inflation and to the exchange rate premium. In addition, the early lifting of price controls, including administered prices such as health insurance or gas, frontloaded the relative price correction at the expense of inflation.
All this, combined with the lack of a price reference—the central bank is still working on its monetary program—may have led to a so-called “repricing overshooting.”
And:
Moreover, if inflation persists, the December devaluation may soon look insufficient, feeding expectations of a new realignment that, in turn, would give inflation inertia a new push—ultimately leading to a stop-and-go exchange rate pattern that sacrifices the only remaining nominal anchor of the economy.
Add to that that a large portion of the fiscal plan has just been withdrawn from the Omnibus Bill currently under heated debate in Congress, and we are left with only one bullet to bring monthly inflation back to single digits in the near term: a severe—and politically fraught—economic recession.
That is all by Eduardo Levy Yeyati, there is much more and the piece is useful throughout.
Economics of fertility chapter
100 pp. or so, comprehensive, by Matthias Doepkea, Anne Hannusch, Fabian Kindermannd, and Michèle Tertilt.
Via Bruce Lambert.
Thursday assorted links
1. “The Spanish judge investigating Russian interference in the Catalonian independence process has extended the probe for another six months after receiving an anonymous letter containing an article that identifies the Russian who offered Catalonian separatists US$500 billion and a small army if they break away from Madrid.” Link here.
2. “We’ve streamlined our recruiting process for new officers. It now takes a quarter of the time it took two years ago to move from application to final offer and security clearance. These improvements have contributed to a surge of interest in the CIA.” Link here.
3. “Interestingly, we also find that same-sex couples default significantly more (53.9%) than similar different-sex couples, which suggests an unobserved characteristic that causes same-sex couples to default more, and could explain a part of observed disparities in mortgage approval, undermining results in previous research.” Link here.
4. Those new service sector jobs: helping people plan their Disney trips.
5. A resource guide to understand the ARPA model, from Institute for Progress.
6. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a good Estonian movie, original too.
Matriline versus Patriline: Social Mobility in England, 1754-2023
Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results.
Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of social outcomes is genetic then we expect the father and the mother to contribute equally (each giving half their genes). If, on the other hand, the primary determinant is social then we expect widely different mother-father contributions in different societies and at different times and for different characteristics. Fathers ought to matter more in patriarchies, for example, and mothers more in matriarchies and gender-egalitarian societies. Similarly, if social factors are determinative, we would surely see a rising contribution of mothers to child outcomes as the social power of women rises (you can’t use your mother’s contacts in the legal profession to get a job, for example, if your mother was never a lawyer.) Similarly, if social factors are determinative we would expect mothers to be more important perhaps for characteristics determined early and fathers for characteristics determined late.
As Clark and Cummins write:
Social institutions and conventions would suggest that social status will often be more strongly transmitted between generations on either the patriline or the matriline. The factors favoring stronger transmission on the matriline are the much greater involvement in all societies of mothers in the care and education of children. The greater time investment of mothers in childcare is found in all societies, even those such as in contemporary Nordic countries where gender equality is the most advanced. Thus we would on the human capital interpretation of social outcomes expect a greater maternal than paternal connection in the modern world. However, a countervailing force in earlier times was the greater access of fathers to resources, and professional contacts. Also since in earlier years only fathers had occupations and educational qualifications, the father could be much more of a model for the outcomes of sons. It is thus uncertain whether the paternal or maternal line would better predict social outcomes in any earlier society. But we would expect the paternal effect to be greater in high status groups, and the maternal effect greater in average or lower class families.
What we find with the FOE data, however, is that in 27 out of 31 child outcomes (other than wealth) examined across marriages in the years 1754-1995, the patriline and matriline had a predictive ability for child outcomes that was not statistically distinguishable at the 5% level. In the four cases where the coefficients differed significantly, in three the maternal effect was greater, and in one the paternal effect. Thus for most social outcomes – literacy, age at beginning work, age at leaving schooling, higher education, and occupational status – mother and fathers appear always to contribute roughly equally. The one clear exception is wealth, where always patriline wealth is a much stronger predictor of child wealth than is matriline wealth.
…The results suggest, however, that the mechanism of transmission is largely independent of parental time interacting with children. The results reported above are thus consistent with the finding of Clark (2023) that the pattern of inheritance of most social outcomes in England 1600-2022 was consistent with direct additive genetic transmission. Such transmission would imply a symmetry of mother and father predictive effects.
What would Anthony Downs say?
You need your harvard ‘key’ account to vote. If you need help getting access to your harvard key account we have been given the following feedback:
1. Visit https://key.harvard.edu/ and click the link “Claim Your HarvardKey.” 2. On the “Select User Type” page, click on the tab that reads “Alumni.” Then click “Continue.” 3. Enter your HAA ID in the first field. Your HAA ID is: <000000000> 4. In the second field, enter your last name. 5. In the third field, enter your degree year. Click “Continue.” 6. This will cause a confirmation email to be sent to the primary email address Harvard has on file for you. We updated your primary email address and you must wait 24 hours to claim your HarvardKey account. 7. Click the link in the email sent to your primary address and enter the 8-character confirmation code. Click “Continue.” 8. In the Login Name field, enter your primary email address to use as your username. Your username does not link to your email, only your recovery addresses are linked to your account. Click “Continue.” 9. Enter at least one recovery email. This will be used should you misplace your password or Login ID. Please do not use an alumni email forwarding address as a recovery email. You should use a real email address with an email inbox as your recovery address. You can use the same email you used for your username as your recovery address. Click “Continue”. 10. Enter and confirm your new password. Click “Submit” to complete the process. 11. If you still have trouble registering or need more detailed instructions, please see our registration help page at http://alumni.harvard.edu/help/site-access/registration. HUIT’s Support Desk staff is available to answer your questions seven days a week. Please call 617-495-7777 or email [email protected]. The Support Desk schedule is: Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Sunday, 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Not a joke, here is the website, which “helps” you to change the Harvard Board of Overseers. Whether or not you have voted (it is now closed), I hope you all adjust your donations accordingly.
And I wonder what the majority of Board members at Harvard think should be the voting requirements for presidential elections. No ID required, right? That would keep some people away from the process, right?
Addendum: Read this 2022 essay, voter suppression Harvard style.
If econs could hoop — The New Bazaar
That is my podcast with Cardiff Garcia, now on-line and with transcript too. Cardiff proposed a novel approach:
Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball?
On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
Inspired by the sportswriter Bill Simmons, Tyler wrote his book from the standpoint of a fan—having fun, taking sides, admitting biases, unapologetically trying to entertain the reader instead of presenting sober (boring) analysis.
Cardiff and Tyler—both huge basketball fans—first discuss Tyler’s ranking of the great economists and his lament for what economics used to be. Tyler also gives his reasons for releasing the book as a ChatGPT trained on its text, the first such book of its kind.
Then begins the fun. They take turns finding analogs for the great economists from the history of the NBA. And they do the same in reverse for basketball’s own GOATs. Which economist changed the nature of the field similar to the way Steph Curry set off the three-point revolution? Is there an economist whose comprehensive genius rivaled the ability of LeBron James to engineer exactly the outcome he wants on the court? What basketball player matched the charisma, brilliance, and even investment success of Keynes?
And why does Cardiff argue that Tyler himself is the Charles Barkley of economists despite their differences in personality, size, and other obvious dimensions?
All throughout the chat, Tyler and Cardiff are exploring the common traits that lead to greatness in hoops, the social sciences, and perhaps other domains. A treat for fans of either economics or hoops, or who simply appreciate the virtues of fandom itself.
Recommended, for some (not all)!
My new podcast with Dwarkesh Patel
We discussed how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, risk, human nature, anarchy, central planning, and much more.
Dwarkesh is one of the very best interviewers around, here are the links. If Twitter is blocked to you, here is the transcript, here is Spotify, among others. Here is the most salacious part of the exchange, highly atypical of course:
Dwarkesh Patel 00:17:16
If Keynes were alive today, what are the odds that he’s in a polycule in Berkeley, writing the best written LessWrong post you’ve ever seen?
Tyler Cowen 00:17:24
I’m not sure what the counterfactual means. Keynes is so British. Maybe he’s an effective altruist at Cambridge. Given how he seemed to have run his sex life, I don’t think he needed a polycule. A polycule is almost a Williamsonian device to economize on transaction costs. But Keynes, according to his own notes, seems to have done things on a very casual basis.
And on another topic:
Dwarkesh Patel 00:36:44
We’re talking, I guess, about like GPT five level models. When you think in your mind about like, okay, this is GPT five. What happens with GPT six, GPT seven. Do you see it? Do you still think in the frame of having a bunch of RAs, or does it seem like a different sort of thing at some point?
Tyler Cowen 00:36:59
I’m not sure what those numbers going up mean, what a GPT seven would look like, or how much smarter it could get. I think people make too many assumptions there. It could be the real advantages are integrating it into workflows by things that are not better GPTs at all. And once you get to GPT, say, 5.5, I’m not sure you can just turn up the dial on smarts and have it, like, integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Dwarkesh Patel 00:37:26
Why not?
Tyler Cowen 00:37:27
I don’t think that’s how intelligence works. And this is a Hayekian point. And some of these problems, there just may be no answer. Like, maybe the universe isn’t that legible, and if it’s not that legible, the GPT eleven doesn’t really make sense as a creature or whatever.
Dwarkesh Patel 00:37:44
Isn’t there a Hayekian argument to be made that, listen, you can have billions of copies of these things? Imagine the sort of decentralized order that could result, the amount of decentralized tacit knowledge that billions of copies talking to each other could have. That in and of itself, is an argument to be made about the whole thing as an emergent order will be much more powerful than we were anticipating.
Tyler Cowen 00:38:04
Well, I think it will be highly productive. What “tacit knowledge” means with AIs, I don’t think we understand yet. Is it by definition all non-tacit? Or does the fact that how GPT-4 works is not legible to us or even its creators so much? Does that mean it’s possessing of tacit knowledge, or is it not knowledge? None of those categories are well thought out, in my opinion. So we need to restructure our whole discourse about tacit knowledge in some new, different way. But I agree, these networks of AIs, even before, like, GPT-11, they’re going to be super productive, but they’re still going to face bottlenecks, right? And I don’t know how good they’ll be at, say, overcoming the behavioral bottlenecks of actual human beings, the bottlenecks of the law and regulation. And we’re going to have more regulation as we have more AIs.
You will note I corrected the AI transcriber on some minor matters. In any case, self-recommending, and here is the YouTube embed: