Progress

by  Tyler Cowen in

Mass incarceration fundamentally altered the life course for a generation of American men, but sustained declines in imprisonment in recent years raise questions about how incarceration is shaping current generations. This study makes three primary contributions to a fuller understanding of the contemporary landscape of incarceration in the United States. First, we assess the scope of decarceration. Between 1999 and 2019, the Black male incarceration rate dropped by 44%, and notable declines in Black male imprisonment were evident in all 50 states. Second, our life table analysis demonstrates marked declines in the lifetime risks of incarceration. For Black men, the lifetime risk of incarceration declined by nearly half from 1999 to 2019. We estimate that less than 1 in 5 Black men born in 2001 will be imprisoned, compared with 1 in 3 for the 1981 birth cohort. Third, decarceration has shifted the institutional experiences of young adulthood. In 2009, young Black men were much more likely to experience imprisonment than college graduation. Ten years later, this trend had reversed, with Black men more likely to graduate college than go to prison. Our results suggest that prison has played a smaller role in the institutional landscape for the most recent generation compared with the generation exposed to the peak of mass incarceration.

Here is the full article, via a loyal MR reader.  The causes of this advance should be a greater topic of discussion.

The politics of neuroticism and unhappiness

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve said this before, but the evidence for the proposition continues to mount: current political debate in America cannot be understood without the concept of neuroticism — as a formal concept from personality psychology — front and center.

And also as I’ve said before — neurotic isn’t the same thing as wrong!

Perhaps more importantly yet, even if a political ideology has a dominant vibe, the variance of temperaments within that ideology remains high, and high relative to the differences across ideologies.  I wonder whether, as the “vibes” of particular ideologies become more public and more salient through social media, whether this does not lead to partial secessions?  (Is Nate Silver one example of this?)

Imagine a future — or how about a present — where “people with a positive attitude” is actually an organizing intellectual and ideological principle?  Yes, that world can be ours, we need only to will it so.

Matt Yglesias on European politics

by  Tyler Cowen in

The deeper reason, though, is that Europe has kind of killed off politics. So much power now rests at the EU level, but the EU doesn’t conduct a recognizable form of democratic politics. Voting for the European Parliament has what David Schleicher terms a “second-order” pattern, where Spanish voters will cast their votes in the European Parliament elections as a way of voicing approval or disapproval for the performance of the prime minister in Madrid. The same is true in Italy, Poland, and so forth.

Regardless of the actual election results, the Parliament is always controlled by a grand coalition with a senior center-right bloc and a junior social democratic bloc. The European Commission — the EU’s version of a cabinet — guarantees each country one Commission slot, so the actual composition of the Commission is a mess based on who controls which country at any given time. And the prime ministers of even small and mid-sized EU countries don’t see moving up to Brussels as a promotion the way American governors become senators or cabinet secretaries run for president.

It’s not exactly an “undemocratic” system, but it’s very depoliticized. You don’t have clear partisan coalitions or a real policy debate, you don’t have incumbents worrying about reelection or ambitious opposition figures looking to gain power. And I think this has consistently undermined Europe’s ability to think clearly about tradeoffs and strike win-win bargains.

That is from this longer (gated but worth it) post on why America has leapt out ahead of Europe in the last few decades.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Inside the underbelly of Karachi.

2. “My glimpsed personal highlight of the conference was spotting Tyler Cowen and Ian Leslie discuss the Beatles and have 2 minutes listening in to them.”  Benjamin Yeoh on the Civic Future Progress Summit.

3. Maxwell Tabarrok on NSF > NIH during the Covid crisis.

4. Chat GPT as gynecologist?

5. Dylan Matthews on AI safety at Anthropic.  The piece has interesting details of note.

How the NSF Moved Faster than the NIH During COVID-19

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The NSF is a much smaller organization than the NIH but during the pandemic it moved more quickly. Why? Maxwell Tabarrok explains:

The NSF relied on its special congressional authority to skip peer review to bootstrap its pandemic-related granting. Two pre-existing programs which use this authority enabled the NSF’s speedy response. The RAPID (Rapid Response Research) and EAGER (EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) programs focus on “proposals having a severe urgency,” and “exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas,” respectively. Both turn applications around quickly: while typical federal science grants take 9-12 months of review, RAPID and EAGER grants usually provide funding to researchers in less than a month.

…The NSF funded valuable research through its RAPID grants program, including the development of the first COVID-19 test to get FDA approval, the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data dashboard, and both inhaled and micro-needle patch vaccines, the latter of which is currently being scaled up for use in HPV vaccines. These examples don’t conclusively show that the NSF avoided sacrificing quality control for speed, but they suggest that the NSF’s internal team of reviewers funded multiple effective projects that benefited from faster turnarounds. The benefits of speeding up these big successes when they were urgently needed outweighed the hypothetical costs of approving some below-average projects.

In crises generally, the success of a science funder is determined by its biggest wins, not by the average quality of the projects it approves. Science’s impact on the pandemic was dominated by a single technology: the mRNA vaccine. The next most important contributions, likely testing or pharmaceutical treatments, were less important than the vaccine, and the average COVID-19 research project may have had minimal impact. External peer review slows down the funding of all projects to make sure that low-quality research is not funded. This kind of bottom-end quality control is less important in a crisis environment. At crisis-response margins, it’s probably better for science funding agencies to anchor less on quality control and instead take more shots on goal.

The NIH, to be fair, also responded more rapidly than usual and it used some special “shark-tank” like programs to do so which also worked well.

Read the whole thing for more recommendations.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.  The new go-to book on this topic, magisterial on the lead-up causes and later on the international influences and contagions.  Will make the year’s best non-fiction list.

Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.  A wonderful book on this most underrated city, the best overall general introduction to Belfast.

Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is a historically important work about the significant of coined money in dragging the Western world out of the Dark Ages.

Florian Illies, 1913:The Year Before the Storm, considers what the leading German and Austro-Hungarian cultural figures were doing in that year, right before disaster struck.

Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  A lengthy and highly detailed polemic arguing that Protestantism is the true universal church, rather than a dissent per se.  These are not my issues, but some people will like this book a good deal.

I can recommend Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, mostly about the 1820s.

Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians is an interesting look at the earlier history of self-made celebrity images.

Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, is a Freakonomics-style look at what we can learn from controlled and also natural experiments in medicine.

Soon to appear is Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.  Here is my earlier CWT with Yasheng Huang.

I will not right now have time to read Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, but it appears to be a major work of importance.

Art market fractionalization

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email sent to me by The Art Newspaper:

Fractionalisation and tokenisation of art are all the rage. While the notion of unlocking the value in an artwork by selling shares in it has been around for over a decade, a slew of new initiatives is taking it to an explosive new level.

Among the splashiest new launches is the Artex Stock exchange out of Liechtenstein, co-founded by financiers Prince Wenceslas von Liechtenstein and Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, the latter seemingly the driving force. The project buys art (its first acquisition is Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963) bought for $52m in 2017 at Christie’s and now valued at $55m. Investors can buy shares for as little as $100 in the Bacon, which can be traded (or technically, the company that owns it) on the Liechtenstein MTF (an alternative trading platform). Other paintings will follow; trading starts on 21 July.

These ideas seem weird to me.  The more wonderful it is to own art, the lower should be its pecuniary rate of return, as recompense.  So why buy into fractional shares of an art work?  You don’t get to hang it on your work, and at the same time you get the subpar rate of return resulting from the fact that some people do get to hang it on their walls.

Mission Impossible 7 (no real spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eh.  It has some good scenes, but there was no movie in the movie, as they say.  I do understand this is a film and also a visual event, but the evil AI should have been kept abstract, rather than visualized in such a corny, stupid fashion.  That reminded me of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, which is also too visually literal.  This installation of the MI series uses a bunch of Hitchcock tricks, some expected James Bond, and then a bunch of LOTR moral and “power corrupts” themes, which don’t fit the kinetic emphasis in the on-screen action.  Most of all, I am struck by the great lengths they go to in order to portray lone individuals as decisive over the final outcomes.  In a Bond movie there is a wire to be cut, a button to be pressed, and a specific villain to be vanquished in a remote island lair, with a stomach punch-invulnerable henchman along the way.  OK enough, but here they have to work far harder.  They even solve for the strategic game between the AI and the good guys, and it still isn’t clear who is a decisive agent in the action.

And so the movie ends with “part I and uncertainty,” as even 2 hours 40 minutes was not enough to get a single individual to matter.  Modelmakers, take note.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Rasheed Griffith interviews Anton Howes on the Caribbean, Japanese toilets, and much more.

2. Puffin photo.

3. The economic life of cells?

4. Harvey Mansfield retires.

5. Good profile of BAP.  In my view, the so-called “New Right” needs to learn to live with feminization, one way or another.  I think of BAP as “Cope” for those people who will not or cannot do so.

6. Using AI to accelerate progress in science.

Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang on the productivity effects of LLMs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Now published in Science:

We examined the productivity effects of a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the assistive chatbot ChatGPT, in the context of midlevel professional writing tasks. In a preregistered online experiment, we assigned occupation-specific, incentivized writing tasks to 453 college-educated professionals and randomly exposed half of them to ChatGPT. Our results show that ChatGPT substantially raised productivity: The average time taken decreased by 40% and output quality rose by 18%. Inequality between workers decreased, and concern and excitement about AI temporarily rose. Workers exposed to ChatGPT during the experiment were 2 times as likely to report using it in their real job 2 weeks after the experiment and 1.6 times as likely 2 months after the experiment.

Those experiments were run a bit earlier, I am keen to see something similar attempted with GPT-4.  And I am pleased that Emergent Ventures was able to have supported this work.

Bottlenecks and the productivity slowdown

by  Tyler Cowen in
Despite the rapid pace of innovation in information and communications technologies (ICT) and electronics, aggregate US productivity growth has been disappointing since the 1970s. We propose and empirically explore the hypothesis that slow growth stems in part from an unbalanced sectoral distribution of innovation over the last several decades. Because an industry’s success in innovation depends on complementary innovations among its input suppliers, rapid productivity growth that is concentrated in a subset of sectors may create bottlenecks and consequently fail to translate into commensurate aggregate productivity gains. Using data on input-output linkages, citation linkages, industry productivity growth and patenting, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis: the variance of suppliers’ Total Factor Productivity growth or innovation adversely affects an industry’s own TFP growth and innovation. Our estimates suggest that a substantial share of the productivity slowdown in the United States (and several other industrialized economies) can be accounted for by a sizable increase in cross-industry variance of TFP growth and innovation. For example, if TFP growth variance had remained at the 1977-1987 level, US manufacturing productivity would have grown twice as rapidly in 1997-2007 as it did—yielding a counterfactual growth rate that would have been close to that of 1977-1987 and 1987-1997.

Here is the new NBER working paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Christina Patterson.