Results for “daniel klein” 117 found
What went wrong in the West and with liberalism?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and the core of my answer is that liberalism and cooperativeness declined in the West, as WWI and the Cold War receded into historical distance (I am indebted to a much earlier conversation with Daniel Klein on these matters). But I wish to excerpt from another point of the piece:
There is another explanation for the rise in anti-liberal sentiment: immigration. Through a series of historical accidents, it was kept off the table as a major issue for many decades. The U.S. had choked off immigration in 1920, and at first the liberalization of the 1960s did not have much of a visible impact on the American population. In those early decades after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, many poor nations were so poor and unfree that it wasn’t easy to leave them.
As for Europe, in-migration was too small to make much of a political impact. For a while in the 1960s and 1970s, the bigger story was emigration, due to high taxes, from countries such as the U.K. and Sweden. The presence of the Iron Curtain also blocked some of the routes and sources that enable some migration to Western Europe today.
In a democratic society where there simply isn’t much immigration, it is much harder for nationalists and populists to use it as an issue. But today much of the West has seen high immigration for 20 years or more, giving nationalist and populist forces a major talking point. Even if most of the population is broadly pro-immigration, perhaps a core of 15 to 20 percent will not be. With that base, a movement of counterreaction can have real political impact.
Do read the whole thing.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Rich Lowry on separating families, a contrarian view. Some good points on broader context, but in my view even if he is completely right this is still a major PR disaster for the United States. Nor does the law have to be the way it is. Here is more on the precedents of family separation. This is a longstanding issue.
2. Daniel Klein criticizes Jordan Peterson’s PoMo bashing.
3. A meta-analysis on whether education improves intelligence.
5. Canadian court recognizes three legal parents.
6. IBM debater (NYT).
Comprehensive occupational licensing reform in Nebraska
Also known as the Occupational Board Reform Act, LB299 requires legislative committees to review 20 percent of licenses under their purview a year, in a continuous five-year cycle.
This process creates a framework for identifying less restrictive regulations than licensing, including private certification, registration, insurance or bonding requirements, inspections, open market competition, or a combination of these approaches.
Workers with conviction histories could also receive an advisory opinion from state licensing boards about their eligibility to work in a licensed profession prior to beginning a training program.
While piecemeal occupational licensing changes have passed in the Nebraska Legislature before, reforms of more burdensome licenses have had trouble advancing from committee. That motivated the Platte Institute to educate lawmakers about the need for a more comprehensive approach.
Here is the full story, via Daniel Klein.
The Economic Consequences of Partisanship in a Polarized Era
That is the title of a new paper by Christopher McConnell, Yotam Margalit, and Neil Malhotra. The main (and sad) point is that even in non-political settings we trust other people less if they have different political views than ours:
With growing affective polarization in the United States, partisanship is increasingly an impediment to cooperation in political settings. But does partisanship also affect behavior in non-political settings? We show evidence that it does, demonstrating its effect on economic outcomes across a range of experiments in real-world environments. A field experiment in an online labor market indicates that workers request systematically lower reservation wages when the employer shares their political stance, reflecting a preference to work for co-partisans. We conduct two field experiments with consumers, and find a preference for dealing with co-partisans, especially among those with strong partisan attachments. Finally, via a population-based, incentivized survey experiment, we find that the influence of political considerations on economic choices extends also to weaker partisans. Whereas earlier studies show the political consequences of polarization in American politics, our findings suggest that partisanship spills over beyond the political, shaping cooperation in everyday economic behavior.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
In this issue (.pdf):
Instrument found flat: Stan Liebowitz criticizes an influential Journal of Political Economy article about music piracy’s impact on the sound recording industry.
You get what you measure: Daniel Schwekendiek explainshow South Korea followed a proven template of incentivizing exports to boost Web of Science publications and raise the rankings of its academic institutions.
Now entering a Republican-free zone: Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel Klein report on the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology.
Whither science in gender sociology? Charlotta Stern investigates whether gender sociologists blinker themselves from scientific findings about sex differences.
Carl Menger on classical political economy in relation to the politics of his day: A first-ever English translation of Menger’s 1891 article calling for a recovery of the Smithian tradition, with an introduction by the translators Erwin Dekker and Stefan Kolev.
How to Do Well by Doing Good! In this 1984 essay,Gordon Tullock counsels young economists that doing well and doing good go together. Some elements of the essay, if accurate once, are dated now, but others are timeless.
EJW Audio
Erwin Dekker on Carl Menger on Adam Smith
Frank Machovec on Perfect Competition
Call for papers
EJW fosters open exchange. We welcome proposals and submissions of diverse viewpoints, and also submissions ‘beyond Econ,’ from contiguous social sciences.
Download entire September 2016 issue (.pdf)
How social science got the “psychoticism” factor wrong
Remember the paper that said “conservatives” were on average more likely to exhibit “psychoticism,” but then it turned out there was a statistical mistake and this should have been attributed to “liberals,” at least within the confines of the paper’s model? How did it all happen, and why did it take so long to correct? Jesse Singal has the scoop, here is one excerpt:
Hatemi is convinced that Ludeke is out to get him. In our phone conversation, he repeatedly impressed on me just how minor the error is, how few times the papers in question had been cited, and how much of an overreaction it was for anyone to care all that much. “This error is freaking tangential and minor and there’s nothing novel in the error, whether [the sign on the correlation] was plus or minus,” he told me. “There’s no story. And I wish there was — if there’s any story, it’s, Should people be allowed to honestly correct their errors, or should you lampoon them and badmouth them for everything they didn’t do because they had a real error they admit to?”
Yes it’s that kind of story. There is much more at the link, including tales of academics acting “like dicks.” Here is the conclusion of the piece:
…the social-science landscape isn’t yet as embracing as it could be — and should be — of the replicators, challengers, and other would-be nudges like Ludeke who tend to make science better and more rigorous, who make it harder for people to coast by on big names and sloppy research.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
Banning credit checks harms African-Americans
But a new study from Robert Clifford, an economist at the Boston Fed, and Daniel Shoag, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, finds that when employers are prohibited from looking into people’s financial history, something perverse happens: African-Americans become more likely to be unemployed relative to others.
…What’s surprising is how that redistribution happened. In states that passed credit-check bans, it became easier for people with bad credit histories to compete for employment. But disproportionately, they seem to have elbowed aside black job-seekers.
I can’t say that mechanism makes me feel better about the world, but there you go. Consider this:
A powerful study published last year in the Review of Economics and Statistics shows something of the opposite happening: When employers began to require drug tests for job applicants, they started hiring more African-Americans.
“The likely explanation for these findings is that prior to drug testing, employers overestimated African-Americans’ drug use relative to whites,” the study’s author explained in an op-ed. Drug tests allowed black job applicants to disprove the incorrect perception that they were addicts.
It’s possible that credit checks were playing a similar role to drug tests, offering a counterbalance to inherent biases or assumptions about black job-seekers.
Here is the Jeff Guo Wonkblog piece, here is one version of the original study. Here is related earlier work by Daniel Klein.
Monday assorted links
Economists on FDA Reciprocity
Daniel Klein & William Davis surveyed economists about whether it would be an improvement to reform the FDA so that “as soon as a new drug is approved by any one of five [FDA approved international] agencies, that drug automatically gains approval in the United States.” They report:
Of the 467 economists who answered the question and did not mark “Have no opinion,” 53 percent agreed that the reform would be an improvement, while 29 percent disagreed. (The remainder said they were “neutral.”) Moreover, those favoring the reform were more likely to say they held their belief “strongly.” Hence, the balance of economist judgment certainly leaned in favor of the liberalization.
Economists are not the only ones in favor of reciprocity. Others are also coming around, at least partially. In Generic Drug Regulation and Pharmaceutical Price-Jacking I argued in response to the massive increases in the price of Daraprim (generic name Pyrimethamine) that we ought to allow importation:
Pyrimethamine is also widely available in Europe. I’ve long argued for reciprocity, if a drug is approved in Europe it ought to be approved here. In this case, the logic is absurdly strong. The drug is already approved here! All that we would be doing is allowing import of any generic approved as such in Europe to be sold in the United States.
In a paper in JAMA discussing the same case, Drs Jeremy Greene, Gerard Anderson, and Joshua M. Sharfstein agree, writing:
A second option is to temporarily permit the importation of drug products reviewed by competent regulatory authorities and approved for sale outside the United States. For example, Glaxo, the original manufacturer of pyrimethamine, sells a version of the drug approved for use in the United Kingdom at less than $1 per tablet.
Dr Sharfstein by the way was Principal Deputy Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration from March 2009 to January 2011.
Addendum: I will be discussing/debating pharmaceutical policy with Dr. Sharfstein at on event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC the morning of Monday January 25. Invitation only but email me if you want an invite.
Thomas Merrill on David Hume’s coalition
American University professor Thomas Merrill writes:
Hume’s message to the “honest gentlemen” is therefore something like this: “you may not understand this curious character the philosopher; you may think him flaky and unhinged; but if you care about establishing a regime dedicated to individual liberty, you need him around. You need not model your life on his; in fact it is better if you do not. But you need to tolerate him and even be open to being guided by him. Especially do you need to heed his negative message of calling into question the political claims advanced by the various forms of superstition on the basis of alleged insights into the ‘original and ultimate principle.’ Think of the philosopher as you might a garbage man: you might not want to do the job yourself, but it is very useful to society that someone does it.”
That is from Merrill’s Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, and the passage was sent to me by Daniel Klein, who describes the book as “new and highly recommended.”
Why Weren’t Left Economists More Opposed and More Vocal on the Export-Import Bank?
That is the new piece by Veronique de Rugy, Ryan Daza, and Daniel Klein, the abstract is this:
From 2013 to the present in 2015, the Export-Import Bank has been widely and actively discussed, because its charter was expiring and because people then wrangled (and still wrangle) over its extension and possible recharter. Working from a list of the top 200 economics blogs, we examine the discourse on the Export-Import Bank. We find that classical liberal economists were very often highly vocal in opposition to the institution, but that left economists were mostly silent. The impetus of our investigation is to promote reflection on a question of political psychology: Why weren’t left economists more opposed and more vocal on the issue?
Jeremy Horpedahl asks a related question about defending Uber and Lyft. Both pieces are from the latest issue of EconJournal Watch.
Can economists justify pre-market exclusion for pharmaceuticals?
One recurring problem in economics, and the other social sciences all the more, is that researchers will accept a lot of conventional wisdom on a topic if it suits their preexisting biases, especially if it is not an area which they have researched themselves. Yet this entire question is — surprise, surprise — largely unstudied. Social scientists love to talk about themselves, but critical self-scrutiny backed by data is less popular.
Jason Briggeman just wrote a GMU dissertation to investigate these and similar questions, here is his abstract:
In the United States and most other wealthy nations, all drugs are banned unless individually permitted. This policy, called pre-market approval, is controversial among economists; the preponderance of the economics literature that offers a judgment on pre-market approval is critical of the policy, but surveys of U.S. economists show that many, perhaps a majority, support pre-market approval. Here I analyze the results of a recent survey that asked economists who support pre-market approval to justify, with reference to the economic concept of market failure, their support of the policy. I find that, while almost all the economists surveyed could point to a market failure or failures that may plausibly exist and affect the market for pharmaceuticals, none were able to make a well reasoned connection between those market failures and the particular remedy of pre-market approval. None of the economists surveyed cited in support of their position any literature specific to pre-market approval. I supplement the survey findings with a review of relevant reading material assigned in health economics courses at top universities, searching that material for discussions of what may justify pre-market approval. I find a strong argument that the prospect of overt disasters being caused by avoidable mistakes can justify some intervention in pharmaceuticals; however, I find little to justify the other interventions that are part of pre-market approval. I suggest that future inquiry into possibilities for liberalizing reform concentrate on understanding matters such as the informational effects of product bans, the distinction between safety and efficacy, the nature of demand for drugs about which little is known, and the political economy of drug substitutes.
The upshot is that economists hold a lot of views whose justifications they cannot articulate very well. I think you would find the same when it comes to the Ex-Im Bank (are you sure it fits the model of strategic trade theory?), the mortgage agencies (what was that externalities argument for home ownership again?) or all sorts of random regulations. The relatively interventionist economists will pull some justification out of a hat, and the relatively pro-market economists will be pretty skeptical.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
Monday assorted links
1. How bad were the Black Panthers?
2. Spending a night in the robot-staffed hotel.
3. The Chinese stock market crash is worse than you think.
4. New Yorker profile of Varoufakis. Interesting throughout, covers Obama too, not just the usual even if this seems like familiar territory by now. “Adding up is the essence of democracy.” What an excellent line. The piece is by Ian Parker, and it deserves one of those David Brooks awards.
5. Brains striving for coherence.
6. Daniel Klein on who is a liberal.
7. “…even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth.”
Assorted links
Economics and chess session at the SEA
Session 16M, Economics and Chess
Papers:
“Thinking Outside the Game Tree: Game Preparation at Chess World Championship”
Doru Cojoc, Columbia University“Do Rational Agents Make Rational Decisions? Evidence from Chess Data”
Alexander Matros, University of South Carolina
Irina Murtazashvili, Drexel University“Human and Computer Preference Divergences at Chess”
Kenneth Regan, University at Buffalo
Tamal Tanu Biswas, University at Buffalo
Jason Zhou, SUNYIT
The link to the program is here. Here is Cojoc’s earlier paper on mixed strategies in chess.
Carlsen played an imperfect match, by the way, especially in the second half, but won on the grounds of age and stamina. For the next cycle, I see Grischuk as the most likely challenger, as Aronian tends to choke at key moments and Caruana does not yet have a good enough positional understanding of the middle game and end game. Carlsen will hold the title still for some while to come.
The pointer is from Daniel Klein, here is his earlier paper on why don’t government officials seem like villains (pdf).