What influences your social interactions?
Work doesn’t seem to limit socializing. My favorite result was that the better-educated people seem to fear visiting relatives:
Over time, increases in hours of work per capita have created the
intuitively plausible notion that there is less time available to
pursue social interactions. The specific question addressed in this
paper is the effect of hours of work on social interaction. This is a
difficult empirical question since omitted factors could increase both
hours of work and social interaction. The approach taken in this paper
utilizes an exogenous decline in hours of work in France due to a new
employment law. The results clearly show that the employment law
reduced hours of work but there is no evidence that the extra hours
went to increased social interactions. Although hours of work are not
an important determinant of social interaction, human capital is found
to be important. The effect of human capital, as measured by education
and age, is positive for membership groups but negative for visiting
relatives and friends. Also, contrary to expectations, there are no
important differences in the determinants of social interaction by
gender, marital status or parent status. Finally, a comparison between
France and the US show that the response to human capital and other
variables are much the same in both nations.
Here is the paper, I don’t yet see a non-gated version on-line.
Markets in everything, German style
The Copenhagen Consensus and its critics
Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, and Esther Duflo are all upset. You might recall the most famous recommendation of the Copenhagen Consensus was to invest in anti-HIV/AIDS programs as a higher priority than global warming. Banerjee writes:
Similarly, the proposal on HIV/AIDS seems to have entirely missed the mounting evidence…that we do not really know how to get people to behave in ways that would reduce the transmission of HIV.
Angus Deaton writes:
Lomborg’s Consensus does not even identify the "we" who are to spend the $50 billion, although it certainly shares Sachs’ confidence in the usefulness of social engineering by well-meaning outside experts.
Maybe that criticism is unfair; Lomborg might say he is playing by the rules of other people’s games. Esther Duflo writes:
…to my knowledge there is very little rigorous evidence on effective [HIV-AIDS] prevention strategies in Africa.
The three reviews are all in the Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007. The bottom line is that $50 billion doesn’t go as far as you might think.
Columbia Business School has a blog
Here, and you’ll find economists Glenn Hubbard, Frank Lichtenberg, and "CBS Blogger." Here is one post "Blogging Means Business." Columbia Business School has many great economists, let’s see if they are good enough to solve the free-rider problem with most (not all) group blogs.
Elsewhere from the world of business, here are search engine futures, thanks to Michael Foroobar for the pointer.
Why are there so many co-authored papers?
A loyal MR reader asks:
I’m reading (grr) a lot of academic papers lately and, to keep myself awake, have wondered: why do they almost always have more than one author? Is it like cops in New York City–they’ve got everyone persuaded it’s too dangerous to go alone? Is there some networking benefit, professional or psychological? Does it just enable everyone to claim more publications? Has anyone studied which fields have the highest and lowest average number of authors per paper?
I thought you could blog something interesting on this. I might add that the papers couldn’t be any duller, and I wonder if committee authorship plays a role in this as well.
I believe that co-authored papers are correlated with:
1. The existence of a laboratory
2. Senior scholars who generate funding and thus gains from trade
3. Empirical work, which tends to be more divisible than theory; co-authored papers are relatively rare in pure economic theory and in philosophy
Co-authored papers are becoming increasingly common in economics, also because the effort requirements for top publications have been rising. In most cases a co-authored piece is worth at least 2/3 of a singly-authored piece, so the incentives for co-authorship are strong. Here is an earlier post on co-authorship.
Animal Spirits
Keynes kept two sex diaries. The first documents people…
The other sex diary is more puzzling and, in a way, more informative. An economist to the core, Keynes organized the second sex diary also year-by-year, but this time in quarterly increments.
Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been prurient enough to crack it.
Here’s what Keynes’ tabulation looks like. For every quarter-year from 1906 to 1915, he tallies up his sexual activities and totals them under three categories: C, A, and W.
…according to Keynes’ tabulation, what he did most frequently and consistently was C. It happened seventeen times from May to August of 1908, twenty-eight times (!) from August to November that year, twenty times from February to May of 1909, and so on. That’s a lot of C. The high numbers for C loosely (but not consistently) correlate to university holidays, the break at Easter and the longer summer holiday, when Keynes would have had more leisure to pursue and enjoy his bouts of C.
More here. I debated whether to close comments on this post but I trust Marginal Revolution readers to keep to their high standards.
Hat tip to Kottke.org.
Mark Bittman on the economics of meat
In this excellent piece, I was most struck by the following passage:
But pigs and chickens, which convert grain to meat far more efficiently
than beef, are increasingly the meats of choice for producers,
accounting for 70 percent of total meat production, with industrialized
systems producing half that pork and three-quarters of the chicken.
Let’s say you want to protect the environment, and you are going to eat some meat, should you eat cows or pigs? Pigs. Let’s say you care about animal cruelty. Pigs are smarter and more social than cows. A pig (or chicken) also seems to yield less meat per unit of animal suffering. That would imply it is better for animal welfare to eat cows rather than pigs. The conflict between environmental goals and animal welfare goals is one of the most significant underreported stories in this area.
Code Red
The book is by David Dranove and the subtitle is An Economist Explains How to Revive the Healthcare System Without Destroying It. Here is the Amazon listing. Here is the book’s home page.
Code Red is one of the two or three best books on the economics of health care. It is especially strong on how the current mess evolved historically and what has been tried (or not tried) along the way. This is the place to go to understands PSROs or what happened to the HMO revolution. Dranove is very pro-Medicare but he (reluctantly) rejects single-payer systems for limiting innovation. Instead he finesses the market-government divide by calling for federalistic competition:
Congress should mandate that all states reach targets for the number of uninsured, say, below 5 percent within 5 years. Congress could tie compliance to a set of financial carrots and sticks, and it does with Medicaid. To prevent a race to the bottom, Congress should also specify a minimum benefit package. It would then be up to each state to devise the most effective way of meeting these coverage goals.
I fear that minimum benefit packages will prevent insurance from ever being cheap plus I wonder if Medicaid shouldn’t be done on the national level. This book won’t make anyone fully happy, but it is a must for fans of health care policy.
Logic of Life – Chapter 2: Game Theory isn’t Always about the Games We Play
This review is cross posted on orgtheory.net, the management & social science blog.
It’s a pleasure to be back at the Marginal Revolution. Let me start out by agreeing with Tyler and Bryan. Tim Harford is one of the leading popular social science writers and we’re lucky to have him.
Today, I’ll focus on Chapter Two of Tim’s book, "Las Vegas: The Edge of Reason." In this chapter, Harford describes game theory. In a nutshell, game theory studies any situation where (a) you have multiple people striving to achieve a goal and (b) your actions depend on the actions of the other people in the game. By most accounts, game theory is one of the great accomplishments of modern social science. Once you realize that people’s actions are both utility maximizing and interdependent, then game theory can help you model just about any form of cooperation or conflict.
Harford discusses the basic concepts of game theory with vivid examples ranging from poker, to nuclear war, to quitting smoking. And, as expected, game theory usually provides a great deal of insight. Harford shows how game theory can also be enormously useful, even life saving. Harford recounts how economist Thomas Schelling realized that some situations might encourage participants to jump the gun and initiate devastating conflict. What Schelling realized is that these dangerous games had low information, such as the US misunderstanding a Soviet action, and starting nuclear war. Schelling advocated increased communication between the US and Soviet leadership, including the creation of the hotline between Moscow and the US, which helped defuse tensions in later Cold War disputes.
I’ll finish this post with my one big criticism of game theory, at least the basic version described by Harford and taught in intro courses. In game theory 101, you assume that people develop optimal strategies in response to other rational actors. One huge problem with a lot of these models is that the games are very complicated. It’s hard to imagine most people perform the mental acrobatics of game theory actors.
One response is that game theory is empirically well supported, which suggests that some process drives people to the strategies described by game theory. For example, Harford describes how economists and mathematicians used game theory to sort through the insanely complex game of poker and that the optimal game theory strategy was actually fairly similar to what world class poker players do.
So game theory is supported, right? Not so fast. Game theory has two parts (a) a description of optimal strategies, and (b) a prediction that people will actually solve the game and find these strategies. In my view, game theory 101 is well supported, in poker at least, on point (a), but not (b). In other words, world class poker players rarely sit around and do backwards induction, or any other flavor of equilibrium analysis, but they still obtain strong strategies through trial and error.
What I suspect is that world class poker emerged from an evolutionary process. Very smart people can figure out certain strategies, but nobody can figure out the whole game by themselves, lest they become full time mathematicians. The typical world class poker player probably inherits a bunch of rules that were tested by earlier generations, and adds a few new twists. Competition weeds out bad rules. Even Steve Levitt, star economist, Harvard & MIT grad, developed his own idiosyncratic strategy, rather than solve the game himself.*
In the end, game theory is really a first step in understanding complex interactions. The next step is developing an evolutionary theory of games where actors inherit a tool box of strategies from previous generations of players. Already, there is a fairly well developed genre of game theory taking this approach, but I welcome the day when it becomes refined enough so that it can account not just the strategies of leading poker players, but how these strategies emerged from generations of competition.
*According to the news reports, he developed his own "weird style" rather than completely solve the poker game. But it works for him! What would Johnny von Neumann say?
Simple thoughts about stimulus
If every American saved the rebate and invested it in equities, we might be (ever so slightly) better off. Government can borrow at a low interest rate for us. Of course we’re being told to spend the money.
Most fundamentally, more aggregate demand is not the answer because insufficient aggregate demand was not the problem in the first place. Just as a social framing effect (and lots of fraud) led subprime loans to be perceived as
"not very risky," right now social framing effects — call them collective fear — are causing lower asset prices, some degree of
credit constipation, and higher risk premia. The economy is undergoing a sectoral shift toward less risky assets and that can bring an economic downturn. The shift itself is costly, it brings thorny coordination problems (e.g., sudden insolvencies, overturning of credit expectations), and lower-yielding assets also mean less wealth. Lack of liquidity simply is not the fundamental problem.
Arguably there is a secondary negative aggregate demand shock at work, mostly because asset prices are lower from the sectoral shift. Monetary policy should offset this secondary effect, to keep things from getting worse, but still monetary policy won’t and indeed can’t set things right again.
More speculatively, you might argue that boosting aggregate demand may convince people to postpone their adjustments to the sectoral shift, thereby making the coordination problems last longer. Maybe, but I won’t push that on you for lack of evidence. Another speculative argument is that boosting aggregate demand can push us all back into optimistic expectations but that is unlikely.
The bottom line: Our expectations from the Fed or a stimulus plan should be very modest, even if the boosts to aggregate demand are done perfectly.
An angry mob is protesting MarginalRevolution
The pointer is from the woman formerly known as Jacqueline Passey, and yes the link will shut off with just a little patience.
And if you want to protest me in person, I’ll be speaking at UCLA, Tuesday afternoon, 3 p.m., Kerckhoff Grand Salon; it is open to the public as well.
Fairfax City Public Library
For many moons I have been looking forward to the opening of a new library building in Fairfax. I’ve been going to the old location for eighteen years, so surely progress is a good thing? I noted:
1. The apex of the ceiling is now four or five times higher.
2. The space for computers is now four or five times greater.
3. The space to sit and read is now four or five times greater.
4. It now takes seven or eight minutes to park and get into the new fortress-like building, as opposed to one minute for the old building.
5. The space for parking is about ten times greater, much of it underground in a complex garage.
6. The space for books does not appear to be greater at all.
7. The shelves for the "New Books" section are slightly more squat, which means that about a quarter of the new books cannot be shelved with the spine and title facing outwards.
Where is the world’s largest swimming pool?
No Googling. Guess in the comments section. If you are desperate, the answer is here. Here is a close-up photo. Here are more good photos, with giveaways as to the location.
John DiNardo against Freakonomics
Here is John DiNardo’s review of Freakonomics, and here, and here are all three reviews he has written; one version was just published in the Journal of Economic Literature. These reviews struck me as grumpy and unfair, ultimately citing few contrary facts and boiling down to the complaint that the authors have not disproven all competing theories, or that the authors do not have a complete account of what a good explanation would look like. Three separate reviews of one book? And a popular book at that? What is going on? DiNardo is not some guy in his pajamas, rather he is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan with presumably a high opportunity cost. I am reminded of Einstein’s rejoinder. Upon being presented with a book of essays called something like "The critics against Einstein" (that is a paraphrase) he replied with something like "If they were right, one would have been enough." The point is not that Freakonomics is infallible (on most particular issues I genuinely do not know exactly how robust their results are and to know would take a good bit of study), but rather that factual criticism on a single point is usually the best way to make critical progress. Now I would like to read a philosophy of science critique of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
What I’ve been reading
1. Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, by Michael Reid. A good treatment of the region’s recent history; it is best for its balanced assessment of what market-oriented reforms have managed or not.
2. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J. Sheehan. Blah, blah, blah, blah, Europe has fewer soldiers than it used to, blah. Blah. Sheehan is a first-rate historian, but there’s not much to this book.
3. Architecture of Authority, by Richard Ross. This book is nothing more than photos of jail cells, parole hearing rooms, Mary Boone Gallery, and the like. Thought-provoking.
4. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike. Scattered essays on just about everything. Completely apart from his fiction, Updike is simply one of the smartest and most impressive people out there. It is amazing how many topics he knows so much about and how well he writes about them.
5. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill), by David Cay Johnston. This is quite a good compendium of different ways that government screws us over, written from a mixed populist/libertarian point of view. Recommended. I expected not so much but the substance here held my attention. I’d now like to know the total welfare cost of all these bad policies.