Ames, Iowa, underrated mecca of science
Ames is only the 9th largest city in Iowa, and yet:
1. The city (and university) has supported three Nobel Laureates in economics, namely Schultz, Hurwicz, and Stigler.
2. The plutonium for the first atomic bomb was synthesized there.
3. The first electronic digital computer was built there.
4. George Washington Carver worked and taught there.
5. Neal Stephenson is from there.
6. Russ Roberts spent 1957 there.
7. The library of Iowa State University has some large (and very good) pro-science murals by American regionalist painter Grant Wood.
Hail Ames, Iowa!
How Mexico built a state (that was then, this is now)
Mexico in the nineteenth century presents a dramatic example of this problem. Mexico suffered extreme political instability and strife in the nineteenth century. There were 800 revolts between 1821 and 1875. Between independence in 1821 and 1900, Mexico had 72 different chief executives, meaning that the average term was only a little more than one year long. Likewise, the country had 112 finance ministers between 1830 and 1863. In addition there were several invasions and secessionist movements.
The country also experimented with several different forms of government, including two empires (one headed by a French-backed, Austrian-born member of the Habsburg dynasty), one disputed period where there were presidents from both main parties, four republics, one provisional republic, and a long dictatorship. President Guadalupe Victoria was the first constitutionally elected president of the country, and the only one who would complete a full term in the first 30 years of independence.
Some other examples: There were four Mexican presidents in the years 1829, 1839, 1846, 1847, and 1853, while there were five in 1844 and 1855 and eight in 1833. Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was President of Mexico on ten separate occasions, was president four different times in a single year.
Mexico faced constant challenges to its sovereignty in the first 50 years of independence, from the secessions of Texas and Central America, to the secession attempts of the Yucatán, as well as numerous smaller rebellions.
Here is more from the excellent Robin Grier, from Works in Progress. There are further points of interest in the piece.
Tokyo hotel bleg
Part of the time we will be in Roppongi, which is another good/different complementary part of town to stay in? And do you have particular hotel recommendations? This will be my fourth Tokyo trip, if that gives you further context.
Friday assorted links
1. Jon Elster on Marx and Freud.
2. Are right-wing boycotts working?
3. UFO information is not classified in Brazil.
4. Alex Ross on Franz Liszt (New Yorker).
5. New issue of Works in Progress, haven’t read it yet, looks great.
6. Rachel Kleinfeld on political polarization. One implication is that if you are making the other side feel more threatened, you are part of the problem.
The Real Secret of Blue Zones
Netflix has a new documentary on Blue Zones, regions in the world such as Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California, where people appear to live “extraordinarily long and vibrant lives.” What are the secrets of such blue zones and how can you live to be 100?
These blue zones first started to be discussed in the 2000s which means that people aged 100 or older were born sometime around 1900. What do we know about that period of history? It was before vital records were uniformly established. And what happens when state-wide certification goes into effect? Saul Justin Newman shows that the number of supercentarians [100+] drops sharply a hundred or so years later!
…the introduction of state-wide birth certification coincides with a sharp reduction in the number of supercentenarians born in each state. In total, 82% of the GRG supercentenarian records from the USA predate state-wide birth certification. Forty-two states achieved complete birth certificate coverage during the survey period. When these states transition to state-wide birth registration, the number of supercentenarians falls by 80% per year overall and 69% per capita when adjusted relative to c.1900 state population sizes.
The author goes on to show that in many countries the number of of extremely old people is positively correlated with poverty, shorter average life spans and illiteracy. All factors which are difficult to explain if we think these factors are causally related to health but which make sense if we think that the explanation is unreliable birth and death records. Supercentenarian birthdates also exhibit patterns such as age-heaping that are “strongly indicative of manufactured birth data.”
In addition, cross-country comparisons don’t make much sense if we focus on health:
In 1900 the UK had eight million more inhabitants than Italy, a 1.22-fold larger population. Citizens of the UK also enjoyed 2.5 times the GDP per capita, earned 3.5 times higher wages in real terms, had 1.25 times lower income inequality, received 2.2 times the average education (with just 5.3 years of schooling), were four times less likely to be murdered, were 3.8cm taller, and lived 5.3 years longer on average than people in Italy. Given these indicators and the long history of birth records in both countries, it is difficult to reconcile why the healthier, wealthier, better-educated, taller, and longer-lived population of the UK produced roughly a quarter as many SSCs per capita. One explanation is that remarkable age records result, not from better health or greater longevity, but from the historical accumulation of illiteracy-driven errors and the modern dynamics of poverty-driven fraud.
Thus, in Blue Zones, people aren’t necessarily living longer lives; they’re just experiencing a ‘senior moment’ with their date of birth.
Hat tip: The always skeptical, Paul Kedrosky.
Northern Virginia (Singapore) fact of the day
The data center cluster in Northern Virginia is three times the size of the next-largest data center area in the world, in Singapore. The industry saw a major boost during the pandemic, as more work and social life shifted online. Those boom times are expected to continue, with new artificial intelligence technology driving even more demand for server space. That’s significant for local governments increasingly dependent on the industry for tax revenue.
…Northern Virginia’s data centers had a 2% vacancy rate in the first half of 2023, and prices for companies looking to lease that space jumped by 15-20%, both signs of remarkably high demand for square footage in the massive complexes.
Here is the full story.
The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested
That is a new NBER working paper by Protty A. Akbar, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard. Here is the abstract:
We assemble a new global database on motor vehicle travel speed in over 1,200 large cities in 152 countries. We then estimate comparable city-level indices of travel speed and congestion. Most of the variation in urban travel speed is across countries, not within. National income per capita explains most of this cross-country variation in speed. In rich countries, urban travel is roughly 50% faster than in poor countries. To investigate the link between economic development and mobility, we develop an urban model with endogenous travel, road infrastructure, and land area. The model provides an exact decomposition of how city size, infrastructure, and topography contribute to explaining why urban travel is faster in richer countries. We find that richer countries are faster, mainly because their cities have more major roads and wider land areas. These effects operate by increasing uncongested speed, not by reducing congestion.
In general, I am much more skeptical about slower modes of transportation than are many other MR readers, most of all those on the Left.
If you look on p.36, “major road length” is the variable most predictive of speed if you ask why rich countries are faster than are poor countries — please do not forget the Lucas Critique however! After all, they do measure Flint, Michigan as the fastest city [sic] in the world.
Here is a good paragraph (p.37):
Compared to other cities in the oecd, us cities are (exp(−0.27) − 1 =) 24% less populous, cover 72% more area, have 67% more major roads, and have 30% more roads that conform to the road network’s main grid orientation. Panel A of figure 5 reports the corresponding decomposition result. The low density of us cities explains most of why they are faster. Major roads matter too, as do griddier road networks. City size variables account for 47% of the speed difference between the us and other oecd countries, infrastructure accounts for 35%, and the share accounted for by topography is negligible.
If you are wondering, by their measures Dhaka is the slowest city in the world.
An excellent paper, recommended.
The impacts of Covid-19 absences on workers
In the Journal of Public Economics, by Gopi Shah Goda and Evan J. Soltas:
We show that Covid-19 illnesses and related work absences persistently reduce labor supply. Using an event study, we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons. Our estimates suggest Covid-19 absences have reduced the U.S. labor force by approximately 500,000 people (0.2 percent of adults) and imply an average labor supply loss per Covid-19 absence equivalent to $9,000 in forgone earnings, about 90 percent of which reflects losses beyond the initial absence week.
Here is the full article.
Claims about Italy, Tiebout edition
Using census data, we study false birth-date registrations in Italy, a phenomenon well known to demographers, in a setting that allows us to separate honesty from the benefits of cheating and deterrence. By comparing migrants leaving a locality with those who remain in it, we illustrate the tendency of Italians to sort themselves across geographic areas according to their honesty levels. Over time, this tendency has modified the average honesty level in each locality, with relevant consequences for the distribution across geographic areas of outcomes like human capital, productivity, earnings growth, and the quality of local politicians and government.
That is from a new paper by Massimo Anelli, Tommaso Colussi, and Andrea Ichino, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. How many people recall that Tiebout’s initial work was drawn from New Jersey data?
What should I ask Rebecca F. Kuang?
I am a big fan of her latest book Yellowface, which I read straight through (and it’s much more double-edged and subversive than you might be expecting). Here is a partial bio:
Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, as well as the forthcoming Yellowface. [TC: no longer forthcoming] She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
Here is her Twitter. Here is her full of facts, but somehow a bit convoluted Wikipedia page. So what should I ask her?
Law-Abiding Immigrants
The subtitle is The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the U.S.-Born, 1850–2020, and the authors are Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres. Here is the to-the-point abstract:
Combining full-count Census data with Census/ACS samples, the researchers provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the U.S.-born. As a group, immigrants had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for the last 150 years. Moreover, relative to the U.S.-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: Immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to U.S.-born whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline likely reflects immigrants’ resilience to economic shocks.
Here is the full paper, via Anecdotal.
Why do immigrants oppose immigration?
This question does not receive enough discussion, but there is a new paper of note, by Aflatun Kaeser and Massimiliano Tani:
…successful immigrants in the United States (i.e., those who are in the top quintile of the socioeconomic classification), who may benefit the most from being perceived as unrelated to unskilled undocumented immigrants, have negative views about immigration, especially with respect to its contribution to unemployment, crime, and the risk of a terrorist attack. This effect does not arise in the case of countries that apply stricter controls than the United States on immigration, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, or do not attract as large a number of undocumented immigrants. We interpret these results as evidence that immigrants’ attitudes toward other immigrants respond to the lack of a selective immigration policy: namely, if successful immigrants run the risk of being perceived as related to undocumented or uncontrolled immigration, they respond by embracing an immigrants’ anti-immigration view.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Wednesday assorted links
My Conversation with the excellent Jerusalem Demsas
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves.
Spanning centuries and genres and yet provoking similar questions, these books prompted Tyler and Jerusalem to wrestle with enduring questions about human nature, gender dynamics, the purpose of travel, and moral progress, including debating whether Le Guin prefers the anarchist utopia she depicts, dissecting Swift’s stance on science and slavery, questioning if travel makes us happier or helps us understand ourselves, comparing Gulliver and Shevek’s alienation and restlessness, considering Swift’s views on the difficulty of moral progress, reflecting on how feminism links to moral progress and gender equality, contemplating whether imaginative fiction or policy analysis is more likely to spur social change, and more.
An actual conversation! This one is difficult to excerpt, and unlike many I suspect it is better to listen than to read the transcript. Nonetheless here is one short excerpt:
DEMSAS: Yes. The only walls on the anarchist planet [in The Dispossessed] are the ones that surround the space travel, the launching pad or whatever it is. That’s something that’s said very early on, but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all of these other “invisible walls” that he’s discovering. That’s made very explicit at times, sometimes maybe too explicit. [laughs] But I think it’s also a lesson in how much you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself.
He’s alone for a really long time, and when he’s doing his studies at the beginning or in the middle of the book, and he can’t get these scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to — it’s when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs. I think that’s also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important.
Recommended.
Misandry
John Tierney lets loose in a well-researched piece:
Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore—or work to suppress—the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect,” based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly—women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence—and it’s obvious in popular culture.
“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.” Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.
Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.
The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males—a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.
Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
Read the whole thing.