Does GPT represent a triumph of WEIRD values?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, in short:

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The Dean Karlan plan for fixing USAID.

2. David Salle tutors an AI in how to make art (NYT).

3. Jellyfish evidence that “thinking/learning” goes on at the cellular level (NYT).

4. If the federal government shuts down, members of Congress still get paid though regular federal employees do not.

5. Rust Belt fact of the day: “Labor conflict accounts for half of the decline in the region’s share of manufacturing employment. Foreign competition plays a smaller role, and its effects are concentrated after most of the region’s decline had already occurred.”

6. Esquire profile of Knausgaard.

The Zero Sum Idea Trap

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In an excellent column, John Burn-Murdoch in the FT draws out some of the implications of zero-sum thinking,  based on the new NBER paper Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides.

Among the most striking Harvard findings was the discovery that there is a strong relationship between the extent to which someone is a zero-sum thinker, and the economic environment they grow up in.

If someone’s formative years were spent against a backdrop of abundance, growth and upward mobility, they tend to have a more positive-sum mindset, believing it is possible to grow the pie rather than just redistribute portions of it. People who grew up in tougher economic conditions tend to be more zero-sum and sceptical of the idea that hard work brings success. These attitudes are perfectly rational.

…Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks people in dozens of countries where they would place themselves on a scale from the zero-sum belief that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”, to the positive-sum view that “wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone”.

The average response among those in high-income countries has become 20 per cent more zero-sum over the last century. Moreover, two distinct rises in the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes have coincided with two slowdowns in gross domestic product growth, one in the 1970s and another in the past two decades.

The same pattern holds within individual countries. Britons and Americans have become significantly more likely to believe that success is a matter of luck rather than effort precisely as income growth has slowed.

The problem, of course, is that zero-sum thinking can causally lead to lower growth because it leads to anti-growth policies such as tariffs, anti-immigration, NIMBY, low-trust, high taxes, redistribution, identity politics and so forth.

All of this is reminiscent of Bryan Caplan’s Idea trap model. See also my earlier posts on how distrust leads to more regulation, even when people distrust the government!

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What I’ve been reading, new books sent my way

by  Tyler Cowen

Cara Fitzpatrick, The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America, is quite a good and also objective book.

Florian Illies, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War.  Take the top Continental artists and thinkers of the 1920s, and write a book about their affairs, and this is what you get.

Paul Lendvai, Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 is quite good.

Colleen P. Eren, Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration, is a good and useful history of the recent criminal justice reform movement.

There is Angus Deaton, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.

David Leonhardt is soon publishing Ours Was the Shining Future: The Rise and Fall of the American Dream.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism, is a useful neo-institutionalist survey of some of the different factors behind the rise of England.

There is Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.

School choice for North Carolina

by  Tyler Cowen in

North Carolina’s budget for the new biennium would expand school choice across the state to an unprecedented level.

The budget, slated for votes Thursday morning, would enlarge the piggybank for the Opportunity Scholarship Program — the state’s voucher that enables families to choose a private school education for their children — to $520 million by the 2032-2033 fiscal year.

“Expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program would not only be a game changer for North Carolina families, giving parents a real choice on where they attend schools, the new legislation would help to redefine public education and underscore that not all state-funded education has to be publicly funded, administered and delivered,” said Dr. Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation.

The budget also expands eligibility for Opportunity Scholarships to all families in a tiered system based on income. Lower income households would be first priority, while wealthier families would have access if sufficient funds remain available.

Here is the full story.  It is noteworthy that this happened without a GOP trifecta in the state…

The importance of mentorship

by  Tyler Cowen in

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor’s ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize’s conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34–44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé’s likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors’ research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.

That is from a new paper by Yifang Ma, Satyam Mukherjee, and Brian Uzzi.  How much of that is mentor value-added, how much that good mentors are amazing talent scouts/magnets, and how much is it that scientists on the rise are very good at mobilizing the highest-value mentors to help them?  Via PC, who pulls out some key pictures.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Monkey Cage blog reincarnated as Good Authority.

2. Expert opinion cannot persuade people away from anti-price gouging policies.

3. Sam Enright notes on South India.

4. Erbarme dich.

5. Karnataka fact of the day: “Depression treatment does not significantly increase earnings, consumption, or human capital investment in children.”

6. Might your credit card rewards go away?

7. Eugene Volokh moving to Hoover.

Patience and educational achievement

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educational outcomes. The results are impressive, albeit unsettling. In Italy, differing degrees of patience account for two-thirds of the achievement variation across the country’s regions. In the US, differing degrees of patience account for one-third of the variation in educational outcomes across states, a smaller amount but still notable.

Before I go any further, you might be wondering which are the most patient states. They are (in alphabetical order) Maine, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming. The least patient state? California. In Italy, patience is highest in the northern region bordering Austria, which has a relatively Germanic culture and history. Patience is the lowest by far in Sicily. In both Italy and the US, patience is generally greater in the North than in the South.

These results do not necessarily mean that lower patience results in lower grades. It could be that doing well in school makes you more patient, because you learn that working hard has its own rewards, and that may lengthen your time horizon. Or there may be some underlying factor, say conscientiousness, that is key to both patience and academic achievement.

Still, it is hard to avoid the overall impression that there is a tight connection between certain “bourgeois virtues” and academic achievement. If you are a parent, you might want to be rooting for your child to be more patient rather than less, no matter how complex all the interrelationships among the various personal and cultural attributes may turn out to be.

The researchers estimated patience by an ingenious method. There is already a widely accepted global preference survey that measures patience across nations. They then used Facebook data on interests, clicks and likes to see which interests were most popular in the more patient nations. Then they examined that data to see how popular those interests were in the various regions of those countries.

Here is the underyling research by Eric A. Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, Pietro Sancassani, and Ludger Woessmann.  I do consider whether “patience” is exactly the right word for what is going on here.  Hat tip also to The Wisdom of Garett Jones.

The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage

by  Tyler Cowen in

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using NLP tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008-2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: outlets may highlight meaningful social identities–race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship–to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.

That is from a new and important paper by Daniel J. Hopkins, Yphtach Lelkes, and Samuel Wolken.

Pharmaceutical Externalities

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In my view, pharmaceuticals are undervalued and underinvested in because, despite high prices, pharmaceutical innovations earn only a fraction of the value that they create (Nordhaus finds that in general that innovations reap only a small share of the gains that they create). In 2014, for example, we got Harvoni a new treatment that offered a complete cure for hepatitis C (HCV) infection. In 2014, Harvoni cost over $1000 a pill and between $60,000 and $100,000 for a full treatment. In 2015 Medicaid spent more on Harvoni than on any other drug and there were calls for regulation and price controls. Studies showed, however, that even at that high price, Harvoni was value/cost-effective. Today, with more competition, there are equivalent versions of Harvoni available from Amazon for $12,869 (and 64 cents) which is still expensive but cheap for a cure for an often debilitating and sometimes life-threatening disease (and the price is less for a private insurance buyer or Medicare/Medicaid). In 2030, Harvoni will go generic and prices will fall much more.

Writing at their new substack, Random Acts of Medicine (based on their book of the same name which I reviewed at the WSJ), Chris Worsham and Bapu Jena point us to another side-benefit of Harvoni and similar hep-C drugs. By curing hep-C these drugs results in fewer liver transplants but that means more livers are available for transplant to other people on the waiting list.

One simple statistic suggests that indeed, treatment of HCV is freeing up donor livers for patients with other diseases: in 2022, patients with chronic HCV infection represented only 11% of liver transplants (1,029 of 9,528)—down from the 38% in 2013 when the new HCV drugs were approved.

Beyond this simple figure, a new working paper by economists Kevin Callison, Michael Darden, and Keith Teltser has taken a new, rigorous look at data from 2014 to 2019 to understand how these new drugs for HCV have impacted liver transplants after their first 5 years of broad use. There were a number of encouraging findings:

  • Waiting lists for liver transplants were being occupied by fewer HCV-positive patients and more HCV-negative patients; this shift can be explained by an estimated 45% reduction in the addition of new HCV-positive patients to waiting lists
  • Patients on the waiting list were healthier, likely because waiting times for livers have decreased with less demand from HCV-positive patients
  • Compared to what would have been expected without the introduction of new HCV treatments, the researchers estimated a 39% decrease in transplants to HCV-positive patients coupled with a 36% increase in transplants to HCV-negative patients.
  • Over the five year period, researchers estimated 5,682 livers were transplanted to HCV-negative patients as a result of the new HCV drugs, corresponding to an economic value of $7.5 billion.

These kinds of external benefits from pharmaceuticals are often undercounted and they are one reason why I think the pharmaceutical price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act are a very bad idea.

My excellent Conversation with Lazarus Lake, ultra-marathons

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Lazarus Lake is a renowned ultramarathon runner and designer. His most famous creation (along with his friend Raw Dog) is the Barkley Marathons, an absurdly difficult 100-mile race through the Tennessee wilderness that only 17 people have ever finished in its nearly 30-year existence.

]Tyler and Laz discuss what running 100 miles tells you about yourself that running 26 miles does not, why so many STEM professionals do ultramarathons, which skill holds people back the most, why his entrance fee is no more or less than $1.60, the importance of the Barkley’s opaque application process, how much each race costs to mount, whether he sees a decline in stoicism and inner strength in America, what accounting taught him about running, which books influenced him the most, who’s going to win the NBA title next year, how he’s coping with increasing fame, the competition he’s most focused on now, and more.

And one excerpt:

COWEN: Of all of those skills, which is the most scarce? Which holds people back the most, apart from just the running and the endurance? What are they most likely to screw up?

LAKE: I think these days, navigation is a bigger problem than it used to be because people have become dependent upon GPS. If you don’t use part of your brain, it withers. If you’re not accustomed to knowing, in your head, where you are and just listening for a little voice to tell you when to turn next, it’s something of a problem because they don’t get to take GPS.

COWEN: They literally end up lost in the woods, some people.

LAKE: It happens.

COWEN: What happens to them then? They stay there for the rest of their lives? They wander slowly back to civilization, or . . . What becomes of them? They send out a call for help?

LAKE: If they don’t find their way out in a couple of days, we’ll go look for them. Usually, they will. So far, they’ve always found their way out.

COWEN: That’s the incentive.

LAKE: Sometimes they wander around for an extended period of time lost, but that’s what they signed up for. They’re on their own. All the electronics and all the conveniences of modern life are gone, and they just rely on themselves.

And:

COWEN: How did carrying bodies to the morgue influence your subsequent life?

LAKE: [laughs] How did you know I did that?

As I’ve said before, CWT guests who do not have a college degree are better on average (in equilibrium).