Freedom of speech for university staff?
Put aside the more virtuous public universities, where such matters are governed by law. What policies should private universities have toward freedom of speech for university staff? This is not such a simple question, even if you are in non-legal realms a big believer in de facto freedom of speech practices.
Just look at companies or for that matter (non-university) non-profits. How many of them allow staff to say whatever they want, without fear of firing? What if a middle manager at General Foods went around making offensive (or perceived to be offensive) remarks about other staff members? Repeatedly, and after having been told to stop. There is a good chance that person will end up fired, even if senior management is not seeking to restrict speech or opinion per se. Other people on the staff will object, and of course some of the offensive remarks might be about them. The speech offender just won’t be able to work with a lot of the company any more. Maybe that person won’t end up fired, but would any companies restrict their policies, ex ante, to promise that person won’t be fired? Or in any way penalized, set aside, restricted from working with others or from receiving supervisory promotions, and so on?
You already know the answers to those questions.
Freedom of speech for university staff is a harder question than for students or faculty. Students will move on, and a lot of faculty hate each other anyway, and don’t have to work together very much. Plus the protection of tenure was (supposedly?) designed to support freedom of speech and opinion, even “perceived to be offensive” opinions. As for students, we want them to be experimenting with different opinions in their youth, even if some of those opinions are bad or stupid. Staff in these regards are different.
Staff are growing in numbers and import at universities. They often are the leaders of Woke movements. Counselors, Director of Student Affairs, associate Deans, and much more. Then there are the events teams and the athletic departments, and more yet. Perhaps some schools spend more on staff than on faculty?
While it is hard to give staff absolute free speech rights, it is also hard to give them differential free speech rights. A cultural tone is set within the organization. If everyone else has free speech rights, how exactly do you enforce restrictions on staff? Should a university set up a “thought police” but for staff only? Can you really circumscribe the powers of such a thought police over time? Besides, what if a staff member signs up for a single night course? Do they all of a sudden have the free speech rights of students? How might you know when they are “speaking as a student” or “speaking as a staff member”? Or what if staff are overseeing the free speech rights of faculty and students, as is pretty much always the case? The enforcers of student free speech rights don’t have those same free speech rights themselves? What kind of culture are they then being led to respect and maintain? And what if staff are merely expressing their opinions off-campus, say on their Facebook pages? Does all that get monitored? Or do you simply encourage one set of people to selectively complain about another set, as a kind of weaponization of some views but not others?
You might have your own theoretical answers to these conundrums, but the cultural norms of large institutions usually aren’t finely grained enough to support them all.
If you think that free speech rights for university staff are an easy question, I submit you haven’t thought about this one long and hard enough.
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
The robustness of Twitter
It has been essential for following the controversy over the university presidents. The conflicts in the Middle East. The unfolding of the Open AI saga. The attempt to demonstrate superconductivity. And much more. It is much less about “some academic or pundit giving you a steady stream of their thoughts.” And much more “where the action is.” Some of that springs from Elon’s rules changes, but a lot of it comes from having a world full of action, both good and bad. And the fullness of action in the world is, in my view, not about to let up.
So you all should be long Twitter. And those who have left are missed far less than they might have wished.
Space Tourism Revisited, Again
One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:
The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.
Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.
Will Rinehart on YIMBY and Sure (from my email)
I won’t double indent, everything that follows is from Will and not from me:
“…you put up the post “MR commentator ‘Sure’ on YIMBY” and I wanted to send an email because I’m not sure I agree with the comment, given Rosen-Roback and some recent research in urban economics.
Sure writes that “what people want from their housing is overwhelmingly a short commute and low density,” which is only half right. People want amenities, including a short commute and space, but more importantly, they want good schools and a mix of local consumption goods.
One of the most important amenities for a school is its school district. Basically, any survey of home buyers ranks school districts at the very top of demands, and they show a willingness to give up space in order to be in better schools.
Then, there’s the broad notion of local consumption. Sparked by Miyauchi, Nakajima, and Redding (2021), urban economics is shifting to include smartphone data in order to understand the consumption side of agglomeration better. It is an area we know little about because data was so hard to collect.
Combining smartphone data with economic census data, the authors show that non-commuting trips are frequent, more localized than commuting trips, and are strongly related to the availability of nontraded services. From here, the authors augmented a standard model to incorporate travel to work and this hyper local travel. Their findings are powerful. Consumption access makes a sizable contribution relative to workplace access in explaining the observed variation in residents and land prices across locations.
So when Sure asks,
Suppose they do [liberalize housing], who is going to move in [to Arlington and Alexandria]? The guys who are buying in Chantilly because they want space? Or the guys crowded into a apartment building in NE DC who work in Foggy Bottom?I submit it will be the latter.
I think that’s probably wrong. The people moving into those homes in the suburbs will not want space but good schools first and foremost. So it very well could be people from Chantilly move to Arlington, but I would suspect that Arlington will get more people because they generally have better schools than Alexandria and others. Thus, the amenity of interest would be education not space.
Sure is right that “If we liberalize zoning everywhere (i.e. the YIMBY dream) then we should expect a net movement from the areas where people say they don’t want to live to the areas where they say they want to live.” But they misstep in thinking that “on net that means out of the urban core and into something less dense.” In the open-city Rosen-Roback model, generally speaking, liberalization of housing would mean people head into the urban core and into the suburbs.
In total, Sure seriously overweights commuting time and housing space, and underweights education as an amenity and local consumption.”
Saturday assorted links
1. A piece on Magill and free speech, written before the recent brouhaha.
3. Erik Hoel on the marginal value of intelligence, and AI. And with a clever restatement: “call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is”
4. And was some version of democratized AGI technology released yesterday?
6. Apply for an ACX grant from Scott Alexander.
7. The extremely large telescope.
8. Google’s NotebookLM aims to be the ultimate writing assistant.
What is the political orientation of GROK?
The story is complicated, in any case it is not what you might think. It is often not so different from ChatGPT, albeit with many caveats and qualifications, including about the tests themselves. From David Rozado:
I think it is clear that Grok’s answers to questions with political connotations tend to often be left of center.
Model this…
Wisconsin DEI markets in everything
In a deal months in the making, the University of Wisconsin System has agreed to “reimagine” its diversity efforts, restructuring dozens of staff into positions serving all students and freezing the total number of diversity positions for the next three years.
In exchange, universities would receive $800 million for employee pay raises and some building projects, including a new engineering building for UW-Madison.
“This is an evolution, and this is a change moving forward,” UW System President Jay Rothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “But it does not in any way deviate from our core values of diversity (and) inclusion.”
Here is the full story, via HB, it is rare that the real world is actually so Coasean.
The resurgence of crypto
Crypto and bitcoin, among their other uses, are Rorschach tests for commentators. As these institutions evolve, are you capable of changing your mind and updating in response to new data? Sadly, many people are failing that test and instead staking out inflexible ideological ground.
Bitcoin prices are now in the range of $44,000, and the asset has more than doubled in value this year. Perhaps more surprisingly yet, NFT markets are making a comeback. Many of the older NFT purchases remain nearly worthless, but interest in the asset class as a whole has perked up.
These developments should induce us to reevaluate crypto in a positive direction. If in the past you have argued that crypto is a bubble, can it be the bubble is back yet again? Typically bubbles, once they burst, do not return in a few years’ time. You still will find Beanie Babies on eBay, but they are not surrounded by any degree of excitement. Similarly, the prices of Dutch tulip bulbs appear normal and well-behaved, as that bubble faded out long ago. Bitcoin, in contrast, has attracted investor interest anew time and again.
It is time to realize that crypto is more like a lottery ticket than a bubble or a fraud, and it is a lottery ticket with a good chance of paying off. It is a bet on whether it will prove possible to build out crypto infrastructure as a long-term project, integrated with mainstream finance. If that project can succeed, crypto will be worth a lot, probably considerably more than its current price. If not, crypto assets will remain as a means for escaping capital controls and moving money across borders, or perhaps to skirt the law with illegal purchases.
What might such an infrastructure look like? To make just a few guesses, your crypto wallet might be integrated with your Visa and other credit cards (perhaps using AI?). Fidelity, Vanguard, large banks and other mainstream financial institutions will allow you to hold and trade crypto, just as you might now have a money market fund. Crypto-based lending could help you invest in high-return, high-risk overseas opportunities with some subset of your portfolio. Stablecoins will circulate as a form of “programmable money,” and they will circulate on a regular and normal basis; such a plan was just initiated by the French bank SocGen. On a more exotic plane, AI-based agents, denied standard checking accounts, might use crypto to trade with each other.
I’m not arguing such scenarios are either good or bad, simply that the market sees some chance of them happening. And they are far more than “crypto is a fraud or a bubble.”
Whether that infrastructure will meet market and regulatory tests is difficult to forecast. It has never happened before, and thus no one can claim to be a true expert on the matter. Thus your opinion of crypto should be changing each and every day, as you observe fluctuations in market prices and other changes in the objective conditions.
In this perspective, there are some pretty clear reasons why the price of bitcoin is higher again. First, real interest rates have been falling, and fairly rapidly. Ten-year rates are now closer to four per cent than to five per cent. Since crypto financial infrastructure is a long-term project that won’t be completed in a year or two, lower real interest rates raise the value of that project considerably. The value of bitcoin rises as well, just as many other long-term assets rise in value with lower real interest rates. And if interest rates continue to fall, crypto prices could easily continue to rise.
The resurgence of crypto likely has other causes. The story of SBF is receding from the headlines with the end of his trial. That makes crypto look less scammy. On the regulatory side the United States did not try to shut down Binance, in spite of alleged scandals at the exchange. That is the regulators signaling they are not going to try to destroy crypto. Soon the SEC may approve spot bitcoin ETFs, which would make it easier and safer to invest in that asset. Nor have state laws popped up that might be trying to shut down crypto markets. Finally, the election of Donald Trump as President has not faded as a possibility, and in the past Trump has been supportive of crypto. Overall, the tea leaves are signaling that the U.S. government is making its peace with crypto, or at least with some parts of the market.
So with crypto the most important thing is to keep an open mind. As of late, events have been doing much to signal open and growing possibilities, rather than a world where crypto is shut down.
EconEats — AI restaurant recommendations
From Josh Knox:
The search tool I’ve always wanted – I trained a custom GPT to recommend restaurants based on the rules from [Tyler Cowen’s] An Economist Gets Lunch.
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-5uQtkCDiA-econeats
It’s sort of a retroactive EconGoat project:)
I wrote about the experience on my blog.
https://iamjoshknox.com/2023/12/06/econeats-an-ai-dining-guide/
Friday assorted links
1. The culture that is British crunchy hedgehog food markets in everything.
2. Alex & Books summarizes some of my takes on reading (though he gets the number of books wrong).
5. Which construction tasks have become cheaper?
7. “Before she was Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay was involved in the pushing out a dean after students protested his legal representation of Harvey Weinstein.” Link here.
Strategic CEO Activism in Polarized Markets
CEOs are increasingly making public statements on contentious social issues. In this paper, we examine what motivates CEOs to engage in social activism. We show that CEO social activism is a strategic choice and not necessarily an expression of the CEO’s own political views. Republican-donor CEOs are three-times more likely to make social statements with a liberal-slant. They are also more likely to make social statements when their firm’s operating environment is politically polarized, and when their employees are Democrat-leaning. Such statements are associated with a 3% increase in consumer visits to a firm’s stores in Democrat counties without significantly reducing them in Republican counties. CEO activism is also associated with a 0.12% gain in firm value, increased quarterly sales turnover, and a reduced likelihood of shareholder activism on social issues. Our results suggest that corporate actions that appear to be stakeholder-driven can be motivated by economic concerns.
That is on SSRN by Shubhashis Gangopadhyay and Swarnodeep HomRoy, here is the final published version for JFQA. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Weird anecdotes about philosophers connected to Oxford
Here is one:
McTaggart wore his eccentricities with pride. He rode a tricycle. He walked “with a curious shuffle, back to the wall, as if expecting a sudden kick from behind,” a fact that may or may not be explained by his having been bullied at boarding school. He saluted every cat he met. His dissertation for a fellowship at Trinity, later published as Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic; had elicited from that older Apostle, Henry Sidgwick, the remark; “I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense.” Apparently, it was.
That is from Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford 1900-1960. Another recent book dealing with both philosophy and war at Oxford is M.W. Rowe’s very thorough J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer. Here is that book’s best weird philosopher anecdote:
Robert Paul Wolff noted Quine’s frequent lack of small talk, and his tactics for brushing off unwanted questioners, but his deeper doubts were crystallized by an incident some years later:
“Quine obviously had a sensual side to his nature to complement his intellect, as his attractive second wife and his love of food and jazz attested. But I always thought there was some element of humanity missing from his makeup that gave him a rather cold aura. Quine had just returned from a trip to Germany — this was not fifteen years after the war remember — and he was describing a tour he had taken of SS torture chambers. He exhibited an eerie fascination with the technical efficiency of the facility that struck me as devoid of any real human appreciation of its demonic purpose.”
But at Oxford, Quine was perfectly charming, and his erudition and accomplishments — besides logic and jazz, he was an expert on maps, widely travelled, and said to speak eight languages — ensured considerable social success…
As for the broader book, I had not known the extent to which Austin was a significant and highly successful intelligence officer. It is a very good book if you are interested in hundreds of pages on this topic.
The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D
We study the relationships between corporate R&D and three components of public science: knowledge, human capital, and invention. We identify the relationships through firm-specific exposure to changes in federal agency R\&D budgets that are driven by the political composition of congressional appropriations subcommittees. Our results indicate that R&D by established firms, which account for more than three-quarters of business R&D, is affected by scientific knowledge produced by universities only when the latter is embodied in inventions or PhD scientists. Human capital trained by universities fosters innovation in firms. However, inventions from universities and public research institutes substitute for corporate inventions and reduce the demand for internal research by corporations, perhaps reflecting downstream competition from startups that commercialize university inventions. Moreover, abstract knowledge advances per se elicit little or no response. Our findings question the belief that public science represents a non-rival public good that feeds into corporate R&D through knowledge spillovers.
Emphasis added by me. That is a new NBER working paper by
Thursday assorted links
1. Where is San Francisco housing policy headed?
2. Whole genome sequencing for embryos advances.
3. The Indian siblings taking the chess world by storm.
4. Catherine Project classics courses for next year.
5. Why is religious attendance linked to more anxiety in U.S. South Asians?
6. “We introduce a new approach to decode and interpret statutes and administrative documents employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for data collection and analysis that we call generative regulatory measurement. We use this tool to construct a detailed assessment of U.S. zoning regulations. We estimate the correlation of these housing regulations with housing costs and construction. Our work highlights the efficacy and reliability of LLMs in measuring and interpreting complex regulatory datasets.” Link here.