My history of economic thought reading list

by  Tyler Cowen in

History of Economic Thought syllabus

The honor code applies to this class. Accommodations will be made for disabilities in accord with the policies of George Mason University.

Your grade is 2/3 based on your paper, 1/3 based on a final exam. You are required to submit short progress reports on your paper on a regular basis.

Reading list:

Commerce, Culture, & Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Henry C. Clark.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.

Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?, free and on-line.

GPT-4, paid version, mandatory, $20 a month.

Phind (free, good for giving you reliable references)

Perplexity.AI, free, usually better than Google these days

The internet

I will assign other readings, predominantly on-line, depending on the topics we end up covering.

The economic returns to psychological interventions

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

One study of Ethiopia looked at the psychological impact of raising aspirations. The researchers created a randomized control trial, showing one group of people short films about business and entrepreneurial success in the community. Six months later, those who had seen the films had worked more, saved more and invested more in education, relative to those who had not seen the films. Even five years later, households that had seen the films had accumulated more wealth, and their children had on average 0.43 more years of education, which typically is considered an impressive effect.

Not all the results are so positive:

Sometimes psychological interventions produce only temporary effects. One research design taught self-efficacy lessons to women in India. The likelihood of employment rose 32% in the short run — but within a year the effects had dissipated…

None of these results demonstrates that there is a “psychology of poverty” to be overcome by external interventions. They do imply, however, that poorer economies can make marginal gains by investing in what might be called psychological and psychotherapeutic infrastructure. These research designs can be applied to hundreds or thousands of people, but it will never be easy to use them for entire citizenries. Nonetheless, countries can make therapeutic help more accessible and affordable, and foster a culture in which people feel comfortable seeking it out.

Are we in the west at the margins where more counseling and therapy are of zero value, or perhaps negatives?  Perhaps the only choice is either to have too little or too much self-reflection of a particular kind.

We need more talk of progress

by  Tyler Cowen in

Image

Here is the underlying John-Burn Murdoch FT piece, pointer here.  And a text excerpt:

Ruxandra Teslo, one of a growing community of progress-focused writers at the nexus of science, economics and policy, argues that the growing scepticism around technology and the rise in zero-sum thinking in modern society is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time.

I am pleased that Ruxandra is now also an Emergent Ventures winner.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Problems with U.S. shipyards.

2. Satellite imaging shows there is a lot more industry in the ocean than we had thought.

3. My podcast episode with Will Bachman, most of all about talent see also the Show Notes at the link.

4. Bravo NYT, glad they signaled their intent was not to insult my intelligence.

5. Straussian Taylor Swift? (NYT)

6. Scott Sumner movie and book reviews, he also has perfect taste in fiction.

7. Court strikes down some of Milei’s labor reforms.

*You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by my colleague Bryan Caplan, collected largely from his previous blog writings.  Bryan emails to me:

I just released a new book of essays on Amazon, entitled *You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*.  Emerson and Thoreau were right: Excessive conformity is a major impediment to living a full life in the modern world, and you really can improve a lot with modest effort.For details, see my recent Substack.…Like my other books of essays, You Will Not Stampede Me is divided into four parts.

  • The first, echoing Milgram, is “Disobedience to Authority.” These pieces dissect the psychology and economics of being normal.
  • The next section, “The World Is Wrong,” explores big, specific issues where the popular opinion sucks. Covid, of course, but also bioethics, trolling, the right of revenge, and more.
  • I follow with “The Weird Is Right,” most notably with the essay, “A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Success in a Conformist World.” Yes, the world does punish non-conformists, but so sporadically and thoughtlessly than the crafty can usually defy the world with impunity.
  • I close the book with “Non-Conformist Candor,” where I call a litany of hand-picked controversies just like I see them.

As usual with my books of essays, you can read them all for free in the Bet On It Archives. What you get for your $12 is curation, convenience, and coolness.

As you might expect, I like to troll Bryan by telling him he is a deeply conformist suburban Dad, in the good sense of course.  Read this book and find out if I am right or not.

My podcast with Brink Lindsey

by  Tyler Cowen in

He is starting a new podcast and I am perhaps the first episode?  There is video and text and audio.  Here is an excerpt:

Lindsey: Did they recognize early on that you were different and that they had a job to do to push you, or no?

Cowen: Well, my father thought I was weird, so he thought I was different, but it would’ve been easier for him if I had, say, been a football player in the way that he was captain of his high school football team. He accepted what I became but I was not obviously doing things he had done. My mother was very open-minded. But when I was quite young, I’m not even sure how young, she took me repeatedly to the public library. At first, it was a Carnegie library in the town of Kearney, New Jersey, but later to Bergen County libraries. And without those library trips, I would’ve been very different. And then my father’s mother, my grandmother, lived with us for a while and she taught my sister how to read. And I was about two and I learned by looking over her shoulder. And so my grandmother had to big influence on me. And my grandmother loved to read. She loved Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, John O’Hara, and also liked Ayn Rand even though she was not a partisan of any one of those things. So my grandmother too was a real influence.

And:

Lindsey: You’re now known for your incredible diversity of intellectual interests. Was that from the start? Did your curiosity just naturally pull you in a million different directions, or was there some point where you recognized, “Hey, my specialty is breadth and I need to lean into that”?

Cowen: Well, I think when I was quite young, I was much more conservative in the small-c sense of that word. I didn’t have an interest in traveling. I was more reserved. If you’re a chess player when you’re a kid, that’s extremely narrow. And that was the main thing I did with a bit of science fiction. So the breadth, I think, came gradually and most of all in my very late teens with classical music, beginning to travel. So I don’t think it was in me at the beginning in any obvious way.

Lindsey: But it came out in adolescence?

Cowen: Yes. But someone looking at me at age seven would not have predicted breadth later on.

Interesting throughout…and do subscribe to Brink’s Substack.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Jeffrey Paller 19 books to read on Africa.

2. Making the micropipette.

3. Miss America supports nuclear power.

4. “We found that living standards generally predicted and temporally preceded variations of romantic love in the Early Modern Period.”

5. Why is the Dominican Republican incumbent popular?

6. Very good Douthat column on higher education (NYT).  And: “Yet, through all her troubles, not a single right-leaning voice spoke up on Gay’s behalf. Indeed, during the past month, I didn’t talk to a single Republican on the Hill or around D.C. who had any kind of relationship with Gay. You might ask how Harvard’s president could have so few relationships.”  A good piece.

7. Twitter summary of the new superconductivity rumors.

What should I ask Jonathan Haidt?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him.  Here is my previous Conversation with him, almost eight years ago.  As many of you will know, Jonathan has a new book coming out, namely The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.  But there is much more to talk about as well.  So what should I ask him?

Why Britain’s economy is failing

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the past five years, the number of applications to connect to the electricity grid — many of them for solar energy generation and storage — has increased tenfold, with waits of up to 15 years. The underinvestment is restricting the flow of cheap energy from Scottish wind farms to population centers in England and adding to the delays for those with high power needs, like laboratories and factories. Laws that give local planning authorities considerable power are blamed for Britain’s shortage of housing and blocking the construction of pylons needed to carry electricity from offshore wind farms. Residents’ objections to noisy construction and changes to the landscapes have been a stumbling block.

With “waits of up to 15 years.”  And:

One way the British government turned off investors was by changing planning measures in 2015, and tightening them further in 2018, so that a single objection could upend a planning application — effectively banning onshore wind in England. John Fairlie was a consultant in the wind industry at the time.

Mr. Fairlie is currently a managing director at AWGroup, a land development and renewable energy company that recently got an onshore wind turbine up and running in Bedfordshire, in the east of England, that will generate enough electricity to power 2,500 homes. Because of planning restrictions and grid connection delays, the project took seven years to complete.

That is from the excellent Eshe Nelson in the NYT.

The rate of return on exercise

by  Tyler Cowen in

These are illustrative numbers, not definitive estimates:

Let’s make some base-case assumptions. The most important assumptions are:

  1. A 50 year old male who doesn’t exercise can expect to live to age 80
  2. That same male who puts in 8 hours per week of exercise can expect to live to age 88.
  3. We will measure investment and return in terms of hours per year
  4. We assume people value their waking hours, and sleep 8 hours a night. We don’t count the 8 hours of sleep as “return” though you of course could decide to do so.
  5. The exercise continues every year, even after age 80
  6. The exercise costs only the time allocated to it and provides only the expected extra years of life (i.e. no “disutility” or “utility” except the expected life extension benefit[14] )
  7. Everything else is constant

Given these assumptions, we can compute a “rate of return” just as we would with dollars.

When we do so we find that the return on investment is 5.8%.

Here is more from Roger Silk, including a table of sensitivity parameters, from his blog on investing.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The logic of American vs. Japanese ghost stories.

2. Paul Krugman on the economics of slavery (NYT).

3. The Year in Interintellect.

4. Casey Handmer on Elon Musk.

5. Nils Karlson open-access book on classical liberalism vs. populism.  The book is very much on the mark and I was happy to blurb it.

6. What Bill Ackman is up to.  A very long, programmatic tweet.

7. Good background explainer on the Ethiopia-Somaliland deal (NYT).  The agreement may end up with some charter city-like elements.