Indiana’s new intellectual diversity law for universities

by  Tyler Cowen in

Indiana’s Republican governor has just signed new law that introduces “intellectual diversity” as a standard for tenure decisions in state universities. Under the law, campus boards of trustees will determine what intellectual diversity consists of, and lack of such diversity can be grounds for denying tenure. Intellectual diversity also must be considered in the post-tenure review process.

Please note that while I sympathize with many of the complaints I am against this new law, as I explain in my latest Bloomberg column:

Under some scenarios, right-wing and conservative professors could easily end up worse off under this new system. For purposes of argument, let’s assume the worst of a left-leaning academic department, namely that they intentionally prevent conservative professors from getting tenure. Under the new law, there is a chance that a Board of Trustees might grant tenure to a conservative voted down by the department. How would a department of committed lefties address that problem? They’d avoid hiring conservative professors at all, for fear of having their tenure decisions overturned.

Even if you think a Board of Trustees can intervene in tenure decisions in a meaningful and informed manner, they cannot run a job search, which involves going through hundreds or even thousands of applications. The bias merely will be shifted to some other part of the process.

And:

Further issues arise from how the law creates a channel that students and university employees can use to complain about the political orientations of faculty members. The net effect will be to shift power to students, which means easier classes and more grade inflation. Are those trends likely in the longer run to support conservative or classical education values in our universities? As a long-time teacher for almost forty years, I suspect not.

There are further good arguments at the link.

Is an Economic Growth Explosion Imminent?

by  Tyler Cowen in

On the road, I haven’t had a chance to read this paper yet, but I pass it along as a matter of interest:

Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically analyse this claim. We clarify how AI affects the ideas production function (IPF) and propose three models relating innovation, AI and population: AI as a research-augmenting technology; AI as researcher scale enhancing technology; and AI as a facilitator of innovation. We show, performing model simulations calibrated on USA data, that AI on its own may not be sufficient to accelerate the growth rate of ideas production indefinitely. Overall, our simulations suggests that an economic growth explosion would only be possible under very specific and perhaps unlikely combinations of parameter values. Hence we conclude that it is not imminent.

That is from Derick Almeida, Wim Naudé, and Tiago Sequeira.

Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by  Tyler Cowen in

We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. In follow up surveys, participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and correctly predicted the tasks for which GPT-4 were most helpful. These results have important descriptive and normative implications for the future of lawyering. Descriptively, they suggest that AI assistance can significantly improve productivity and satisfaction, and that they can be selectively employed by lawyers in areas where they are most useful. Because these tools have an equalizing effect on performance, they may also promote equality in a famously unequal profession. Normatively, our findings suggest that law schools, lawyers, judges, and clients should affirmatively embrace AI tools and plan for a future in which they will become widespread.

That is by Jonathan H. Choi, Amy Monahan, and Daniel Schwarcz, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Have CEOs changed?

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is a recent paper by Yann Decressin, Steven N. Kaplan, and Morten Sorensen:

Using more than 4,900 assessments, we study changes in the characteristics and objectives of CEOs and top executives since 2001. The same four factors explain roughly half of the variation of assessed CEO characteristics in this larger sample of executive assessments as in Kaplan and Sorensen (2021). After the global financial crisis (GFC), the average interviewed CEO candidate has lower overall ability, is more execution oriented / less interpersonal, less charismatic and less creative / strategic than pre-GFC. Except for overall ability, these differences persist in hired CEOs. Interpersonal or “softer” skills, if anything, decline over time for both CEO candidates and hired CEOs. Pre- and post-GFC, we find a positive correlation between the ability of assessed CEOs and other C-level executives assessed at the same company, suggesting that higher ability executives complement each other. Finally, we look at the relation of the objectives for which the CEOs are interviewed to CEO characteristics.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Pacific Heights: A Movie Ahead of Its Time

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Pacific Heights is a 1990 movie starring Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, and Matthew Modine. Conventionally described as a “psychological thriller,” or a horror movie it’s actually a Kafkaesque analysis of tenancy rights and the legal system. The movie centers on a young couple, Drake and Patty, who purchase a San Francisco Victorian with dreams of fixing it up and renting several of the units to help pay the mortgage. Their dream turns into a nightmare  when Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) moves in and exploits tenant protection laws to torment and exploit them.

Hayes moves in without permission and without paying rent and he changes the locks. It doesn’t matter. When Drake (Modine) shuts off the power and heat, Hayes calls the police and the police explain to Drake:

What you did is against the law….turn the power and heat back on and apologize because according to the California civil code he has a right to sue and most likely he will win. If he’s in, he has rights, that’s how it works.

A lawyer later adds “He’s taken possession so whether he signed a lease or paid money or not he’s legally your tenant now and he is protected by laws that say you have to go to court to prove that he has to be evicted but the net effect of these laws is to…slowly drive you bankrupt and insane.”

What makes Pacific Heights a horror movie is that the tenant’s rights laws depicted are very real. Here’s just one example of thousands from NYC:

As I wrote on twitter “Decades of anti-landlord legislation has created a moocher-class of squatters who steal homes and then call the police on the owners.” Moreover, even today such laws continue to be added to the books. A bill in Congress, for example, would prevent landlords from being able to screen tenants for criminal records.

All of this has been exacerbated recently by COVID laws preventing eviction (some of which remain but which acclimatized some tenants to not paying rent and contributed to court backlogs), court backlogs and the greater ease of finding unoccupied houses using foreclosure data, death announcements, Zillow and so forth. In extreme cases it can take decades to evict a squatter who uses the law to their advantage.

Returning to Pacific Heights, what the movie gets wrong is the second half where Patty (Melanie Griffith) extracts revenge against Hayes. A less cathartic but more accurate ending would have had the couple exhausted with the complexities of tenant law and the court system and finally giving up when they realize that the law is not for them. Instead, they pay Carter Hayes a ransom to leave their own home. Of course, Drake and Patty choose never to rent to anyone ever again.

My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.

She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.

And an excerpt:

COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?

ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.

At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.

So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.

COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?

ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”

Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.

Interesting throughout.

*Build, Baby, Build*, by Bryan Caplan

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my blurb for the book:

“Bryan Caplan is a pioneer in the use of graphic novels to expound economic concepts. His new book Build, Baby, Build is thus a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. If you want to learn the economics, ethics, and political economy of YIMBY— namely the freedom to build this is the very best place to start.”

And from Bryan:

Please forgive my laughable arrogance, but I assure you that BBB is the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written. In fact, I assure you that there will never be a more fascinating book on housing regulation!

While objective self-interest impels you to buy the book as soon as it releases, it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or anywhere else. Why? Because all pre-orders count as “first-week sales” for national best-seller lists — and I’m aiming high.

Here is the book’s home page.  It is really very good.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Are more stable rock bands more likely to be successful?

2. Harvard will not proceed with its geoengineering experiment.  I think you can guess why not.

3. The Zvi on Devin.

4. Is there ever a labor market motherhood premium?

5. Mysteries of the Gardner Museum theft (NYT).

6. “Police Scotland’s officers are being told they should target actors and comedians under Scotland’s new hate crime laws.” (mostly gated, you can read a bit of it)

7. Regulatory arbitrage, tech no-mergers edition.

8. Noah on various matters, including the Canadian economy (I think he is putting too much weight on the last two years, no doubt they are in a downturn).

LDS principles for AI

by  Tyler Cowen in

Knowing that the proper use of AI will help the Church accomplish God’s work of salvation and exaltation, the Church has issued the following guiding principles for using AI. These were introduced to employees of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints worldwide on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, by Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (co-chair of the Church Communication Committee) and Elder John C. Pingree of the Seventy (executive director of the Correlation Department).

Here is the full link, better than most of what is done in this area.  For instance:

  • The Church will use artificial intelligence to support and not supplant connection between God and His children.
  • The Church will use artificial intelligence in positive, helpful, and uplifting ways that maintain the honesty, integrity, ethics, values, and standards of the Church…
  • The Church’s use of artificial intelligence will safeguard sacred and personal information.

Worth a ponder.  Via Tyler Ransom.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Long paper on how the grid is regulated, co-authored by an uncle of Matt Yglesias.

2. Sam Altman on Lex, transcript (it’s happening).  They will be doing amazing things over the course of 2024 (and beyond).  And a ChatGPT billing joke.

3. Are college extracurriculars replacing studying and reading?

4. Toyota building a smart city.

5. PEPFAR will be extended.

6. How to run a CIA base in Afghanistan.

7. Python farming as a flexible and efficient form of agricultural food security.

The Puzzling Law and Economics of Out-of-State Tuition

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Bryan Caplan has a good post on out-of-state tuition:

[State schools] almost always charge students from their own state much lower tuition. In the most recent data, average out-of-state tuition for four-year colleges was $26,382, versus $9,212 for in-state — roughly a 3:1 ratio.

I’ve argued for a long time that an enterprising lawyer ought to sue on the grounds that this is a violation of the constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause (Article IV, Section 2): “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Indeed, in Toomer v. Witsell the Supreme Court noted that

“…without some provision of the kind removing from the citizens of each State the disabilities of alienage in the other States, and giving them equality of privilege with citizens of those States, the Republic would have constituted little more than a league of States; it would not have constituted the Union which now exists.

and they ruled that it was unconstitutional to charge out-of-state fisherman a much higher price for a fishing license than in-state fishermen.

Thus, we hold that commercial shrimping in the marginal sea, like other common callings, is within the purview of the privileges and immunities clause. And since we have previously concluded that the reasons advanced in support of the statute do not bear a reasonable relationship to the high degree of discrimination practiced upon citizens of other States, it follows that § 3379 violates Art. IV, § 2, of the Constitution.

Appellants maintain that by a parity of reasoning the statute also contravenes the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That may well be true, but we do not pass on this argument, since it is unnecessary to disposition of the present case.

Education is more important than fishing licenses, especially in creating a Union, the purpose Article IV, S.2, thus I suggest the case for the unconstitutionality of out-of-state tuition is high.

Caplan’s article is about the economics, not the legality, of out-state-tuition. although the two issues have some bearing. Caplan asks how are we to think about the out-state fee. Is the out–of-state fee the monopoly price and the in-state fee the competitive price? Or is the out-of-state fee the competitive price and the in-state fee a highly subsidized price?

If the out-of-state fee represents a monopoly price, it is surprising that there isn’t more competition to attract out-of-state students. Given the potential profitability of out-of-state fees, it’s also curious why sought-after institutions such as UVA limit out-of-state enrollment! Moreover, out-of-state students are likely to have a more elastic demand than in-state students. After all, the out-of-state students have 49 states from which to choose while the in-state students may prefer to live closer to home. Thus, theory suggests that it’s the in-state students who should be charged the higher price not the out-of-state students.

Caplan instead argues that we should think of the out-of-state fee as the competitive (close to cost) price and the in-state fee as highly subsidized. But if we do that then state subsidies are much, much higher than is commonly considered. Indeed, so much so, that we have to start thinking about “dark subsidies” (like dark matter) to account for the differences (Caplan suggests such things as the implicit land subsidy).

My view is that the in-state fee is close to costs (after the obvious subsidies are taken into account) and the out-state fee is well above cost but that it’s not a “monopoly” price per se because the state-schools are not profit-maximizers. Instead, some in-state schools are able to attract some out-state students and earn a bit of cream to spread the fixed costs but they can do so only under a political constraint not to let to many out-of-state students in because the voting public thinks every out-of-state student in the “good” school could have been their in-state kid (this may well be false, the out-of-state kids allow the university to expand but it’s how the voters think.)

I agree with Caplan, however, that the economics of out-of-state and in-state tuition are sorely under researched and not well understood. Moreover, the economics connect to the constitutional issues, because subsidies for in-state students (i.e. with taxpaying parents) are more likely to be constitutionally acceptable than naked discrimination against out-of-state students simply because they are residents of another state of the union.

Scenarios for the Transition to AGI

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Anton Korinek and Donghyun Suh, in a new NBER working paper:

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic tasks that differ in their complexity. Advances in technology make ever more complex tasks amenable to automation. The effects on wages depend on a race between automation and capital accumulation. If automation proceeds sufficiently slowly, then there is always enough work for humans, and wages may rise forever. By contrast, if the complexity of tasks that humans can perform is bounded and full automation is reached, then wages collapse. But declines may occur even before if large-scale automation outpaces capital accumulation and makes labor too abundant. Automating productivity growth may lead to broad-based gains in the returns to all factors. By contrast, bottlenecks to growth from irreproducible scarce factors may exacerbate the decline in wages.

The best paper on these topics so far?  And here is a recent Noah Smith piece on employment as AI proceeds.  And a recent Belle Lin WSJ piece, via Frank Gullo, “Tech Job Seekers Without AI Skills Face a New Reality: Lower Salaries and Fewer Roles.”  And here is a proposal for free journalism school for everybody (NYT, okie-dokie!).

My interview with Sam Matey

by  Tyler Cowen in

He is a podcaster who mainly does transcripts.  Our discussion was largely but by no means entirely about climate change, here is one excerpt:

Sam: And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They’re building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I’m feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.

Tyler: I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it’s very far from a national priority with any party that I’m aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there’s a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn’t, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.

So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.

And:

Sam: I agree that there’s not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?

Tyler: It makes sense, but keep in mind there’s also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it’s a bigger requirement than is often imagined.

Again, I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic either. I’m genuinely uncertain.

And this:

Tyler: Maybe, but there’s two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we’ve already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I’m very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There’s so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there’s this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there’s this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.

In the latter part of the dialogue we talk about Morocco, Kenya, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the productivity crisis in Canada, among other issues.  Will Buddhism rise or fall in influence?  And what does it mean to suggest that books are overrated?