They modeled this
…we demonstrate that individuals who hold very strict norms of honesty are more likely to lie to the maximal extent. Further, countries with a larger fraction of people with very strict civic norms have proportionally more societal-level rule violations. We show that our findings are consistent with a simple behavioral rationale. If perceived norms are so strict that they do not differentiate between small and large violations, then, conditional on a violation occurring, a large violation is individually optimal.
Life at the margin! That is from a new paper by Diego Aycinena, Lucas Rentschler, Benjamin Beranek, and Jonathan F. Schulz.
*The Case Against the Sexual Revolution*
The author is Louise Perry and the subtitle is A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. Definitely recommended, here is Louise’s brief summary of part of the book’s arguments:
In this book I’m going to ask — and seek to answer — some questions about freedom that liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think? What do we lose when we prioritise freedom above all else? And, above all, how should we act, given all this?
Some of my conclusions might not be welcome, since they draw attention to the hard limits on our freedom that can’t be surmounted, however much we try. And I start from a position that historically has often been a source of discomfort for feminists of all ideological persuasions: I accept the fact that men and women are different, and that those differences aren’t going away.
This book is very well written and I believe it will make a big splash. I am closer to a consent, libertarian viewpoint than is the author but still I read this eagerly. Here is Louise Perry debating Aella about the sexual revolution on YouTube. A smart set of exchanges.
Friday assorted links
1. An AI avatar makes a video pitch to me. So far I have declined.
2. “In 1858 the Foreign Office had a staff of 43. By 1902, at the almost peak for the British Empire the headcount was down to 42. Today it’s somewhere over 10,000.” Link here.
4. Does just thinking of uncertainty make uncertainty worse?
5. Alice Evans podcast with Daron Acemoglu.
6. The new temperance movement.
7. Howard Rosenthal has passed away.
8. A CWT parable. Related to Honduras and charter cities.
Have we seen peak social media?
That is the question I raise in my latest Bloomberg column. Please note it is one scenario, not a prediction. Here is one bit:
If I consider my own social media use, it is WhatsApp (also owned by Meta) that is steadily on the rise, which is consistent with the trend toward private and small-group messaging.
So is writing for a private, selected audience poised to eclipse writing for a broader public on social media? What would more private messaging, more texting and more locked social media accounts mean for public discourse?
Public intellectuals might still write on open social media, but the sector as a whole would shift toward more personal and intimate forms of communication. Again, this is not a prediction. But is it such an implausible vision of the future?
One of the more robust forms of social media is online dating, though these companies do not have the largest valuations. The percentage of couples who have met online continues to rise, and that trend is unlikely to reverse anytime soon. But online dating may not be as “social” as other forms of social media: People view some profiles and then switch fairly rapidly to private communications.
Private communications would seem to solve many of the problems cited by critics of social media. Social media wouldn’t corrupt so much public discourse because there would less public discourse to corrupt. And criticizing the new manifestations of these (formerly?) social media platforms would be akin to criticizing communication itself.
I do consider video, YouTube, and TikTok, all likely to prove robust in my view, in the broader piece.
What is wrong in this picture?
Developers in west London face a potential ban on new housing projects until 2035 because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support new homes, jeopardising housebuilding targets in the capital.
The Greater London Authority wrote to developers this week warning them that it might take more than a decade to bulk up grid capacity and get developments under way again in three west London boroughs — Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow.
Here is more from the FT. Via Patrick Collison, #punycivilization.
The climate segment of the new bill
The bill aims to tackle global warming by using billions of dollars in tax incentives to ramp up wind, solar, geothermal, battery and other clean energy industries over the next decade. Companies would receive financial incentives to keep open nuclear plants that might have closed, or to capture emissions from industrial facilities and bury them underground before they can warm the planet. Car buyers with incomes below a certain level would receive a $7,500 tax credit to purchase a new electric vehicle and $4,000 for a used one. Americans would receive rebates to install heat pumps and make their homes more energy-efficient.
I would like to know more details, most of all about how things actually happen (for instance can they succeed in keeping the nuclear plants open?). At the very least I will reiterate my oft-repeated claim that the age of policy gridlock has been dead for some while. (And Congress just passed the Chips and Science Act.) Here is the full NYT story. I do hope to cover the new bill more as details come out, but in terms of broad sweep most of the basic ideas already have been analyzed on MR.
*The Messenger*
The author is Peter Loftus, and the subtitle is Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World. An excellent book, here is one very short excerpt:
The FDA usually follows a rigid process of interacting with the drug companies it regulates. Normally, it can take months for a company to schedule an in-person meeting with the FDA.
Culture dies hard, here is Alex on the Invisible Graveyard. And this:
…Moderna executives expressed confidence they could hit the enrollment targets without significantly slowing down overall enrollment. But Fauci and Slaoui said they actually wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment in order to ensure they enrolled more minorities.
The book estimates the delay here at three weeks — how many lives was that in winter of 2020/2021?
Thursday assorted links
1. Ed Coulson, an urban/housing economist at UC Irvine, now has a Jeopardy winning streak.
2.”We’re currently running a prize at Open Philanthropy (https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com) for people to suggest new cause areas for us to explore on the global health and wellbeing side. We’ve extended the deadline for submissions to August 11th, and we’d love to see as many people applying as possible!”
3. Who deserves a festschrift more than David Gordon?
4. How Wikipedia influences judicial decisions.
5. NYT covers Barbados at length. Parts are very good, but it no longer seems allowed to criticize Caribbean nations for making their own policy mistakes. A useful but in some ways deeply misleading article. At what level does the “censorship” enter? The incentives of the writer or the world view of the writer? I suspect it is the latter.
Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation Online PhD Short Course
The Institute for Progress is hosting a six week course on the economics of ideas, science and innovation taught at the PhD level by Pierre Azoulay, Matt Clancy, Ina Ganguli, Benjamin Jones, and Heidi Williams. What an all star-cast! The syllabus is excellent. The course is aimed at first year or more PhD students. More details here.
The Covidization of science?
The COVID-19 pandemic saw a massive mobilization of the scientific workforce. We evaluated the citation impact of COVID-19 publications relative to all scientific work published in 2020 to 2021, finding that 20% of citations received to papers published in 2020 to 2021 were to COVID-19–related papers. Across science, 98 of the 100 most-cited papers published in 2020 to 2021 were related to COVID-19. A large number of scientists received large numbers of citations to their COVID-19 work, often exceeding the citations they had received to all their work during their entire career. We document a strong covidization of research citations across science.
Here is the full article, by John P.A. Ionnidis, et.al., via Michelle Dawson.
My Conversation with Leopoldo López
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the CWT summary:
As an inquisitive reader, books were a cherished commodity for Leopoldo López when he was a political prisoner in his home country of Venezuela. His prison guards eventually observed the strength and focus López gained from reading. In an attempt to stifle his spirit, the guards confiscated his books and locked them in a neighboring cell where he could see but not access them. But López didn’t let this stop him from writing or discourage his resolve to fight for freedom. A Venezuelan opposition leader and freedom activist, today López works to research and resist oppressive autocratic regimes globally.
López joined Tyler to discuss Venezuela’s recent political and economic history, the effectiveness of sanctions, his experiences in politics and activism, how happiness is about finding purpose, how he organized a protest from prison, the ideal daily routine of a political prisoner, how extreme sports prepared him for prison, his work to improve the lives of the Venezuelan people, and more.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: In 1970, you were richer than Spain, Greece, or Israel, which I find remarkable. But do you, today, ever look, say, at Qatar or United Arab Emirates, Dubai, and think the problem actually was democracy, and that here are oil-rich places that have stayed stable, in fact, but through autocratic rule, and that it’s the intermediate situation that doesn’t work?
LÓPEZ: Well, I think that I, personally, will always be in favor of a democratic regime, a democratic system that promotes a rule of law, the respect for human rights, the respect of freedoms. I think that’s a priority. For me it is, and I believe it’s a priority also for the large, large majority of the Venezuelan people that want to live in a democracy.
However, there has been great mismanagement due to misconceptions of the economy, to a state-led economy that did not open possibilities for a private sector to flourish independently of the state, but also with the level of corruption that we have seen, particularly over the past 22 years — it’s what has led Venezuela to the situation in which we are.
In Venezuela, you could argue that we did much, much better economically, and in terms of all of the social and economic standards, than what happened during these last 20 years of autocracy. This autocracy had the largest windfall and the largest humanitarian crisis.
During the democratic period of 40 years, Venezuela became one of the most literate countries in Latin America, with the largest amount of professionals being graduated every year, with the best in social, health, and education standards, vaccination rates, housing programs that were in Latin America. So, we did perform much better under the democratic period than has been the performance by any means in the autocratic regimes of the last 22 years.
Interesting throughout.
Ireland fact of the day
It appears that, in 2020, Ireland overtook South Africa as having the latest marrying couples worldwide.
The average age for a groom is 37.8 and for a bride is 35.7, for opposite-sex couples. This is the fairer comparison because same-sex marriages obviously aren’t allowed everywhere and are less relevant to reproduction.
37.8!
If you consider first-time marriages only, the average age of grooms marrying for the first time was 35.7 years and for brides the average age was 34.2 years. By comparison, for first-time marriages the United States is 30.5 for males and 28.6 for females.
That is from Sam Enright, with an assist from Fergus McCullough.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jimena Hurtado interviews me (briefly) about my life, and Colombia.
2. Significant new academic paper on the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.
3. Possibly Germany is rethinking its nuclear power exit? (FT)
4. “I Share, Therefore I Know? Sharing Online Content — Even Without Reading It — Inflates Subjective Knowledge.” Link here. Has to be true, right?
In praise of regulatory arbitrage
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
So if you issue a crypto token, but don’t have to register it as a security and go through the process of satisfying securities laws, you are engaging in regulatory arbitrage.
It is worth thinking through why some of the regulations ought to change in this new context. In the pre-crypto world, issuing a security involved a host of institutional preparations and investments and legal planning, even apart from whatever regulatory constraints needed to be met. Issuing crypto tokens is usually easier and quicker, and quite immature institutions have done so. Software and blockchains do much of the work that once required offices, personnel and a lot of hands-on management…
Standard US regulatory practice typically focuses on regulating host firms and intermediaries, rather than software. Yet once a blockchain is verifying, storing and communicating information, it is hard for regulators to step in and make a meaningful difference. Thus the old regulatory model no longer applies to a significant part of the crypto experience.
And the lower costs of token issuance mean that the issuing intermediaries can be quite thinly capitalized. Often they are either not able or not incentivized to meet a lot of regulations. In addition, an institution can participate fully in the crypto space without being based in the US or being tied to any specific nation-state.
You can inveigh against those features of the market. Regardless, they are going to mean a radically different set of regulatory constraints. They also mean that some kinds of securities (if it is appropriate to call them that) can be issued far more cheaply than before.
Given this reality, shouldn’t regulations be changed — and substantially? This may include some areas where regulation is even tighter, though overall regulations will likely become looser. The regulators will have to learn to live with a more decentralized market structure that has lower costs and is harder to control. It is common sense that when software can substitute for major capital investments, regulations ought to change, even if observers disagree over how.
Unfortunately, the regulatory process is static and typically slow to change. Regulatory agencies often stick with the status quo until it is no longer tenable. One of the benefits of regulatory arbitrage is that it forces their hand and brings about a new equilibrium.
Recommended, this topic remains underdiscussed. “Regulatory arbitrage” is in fact one of the more significant potential benefits of crypto, noting that not everyone in the crypto space wants to come out and say that.
Incentives matter, installment #5637
America needs more than 5 million new houses to meet demand, according to a study last year by Realtor.com. With sales of existing homes slowing, the need for more new houses is only growing. Florida, my home state, might have found part of the solution: Reform the permitting process so that building houses is easier.
Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that fundamentally changes the state’s permitting process for home building. It requires local jurisdictions to post online not only their permitting processes but also the status of permit applications. The transparency takes a good amount of mystery out of what can be an inscrutable branch of bureaucracy.
More important, the reforms also created a system that strongly incentivizes cities and counties to approve new home permits in a timely way. When a builder or property owner submits an application to build a new home, cities and counties have 30 business days to process it or request corrections.
If the government offices fail to respond in that time frame, the locality must refund 10 percent of the application fee for every additional business day of silence. Application fees can vary widely by locality, but the average cost in Florida is nearly $1,000, according to HomeAdvisor.com. If officials request corrections to the application, they have 10 business days to approve or disapprove of the resubmitted application. Blowing past that deadline leads to an automatic 20 percent refund, with a further 10 percent added for each additional missed day, up to a five-day cap.
And this:
A study of housing sales in southwest Florida between 2007 and 2017 by the James Madison Institute found that permitting delays added as much as $6,900 to the cost of a typical house. That’s a de facto tax on Florida families; now the Sunshine State is making cities and towns pay for their own delays.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.