1. What increases and decreases morale.

2. How might AI reshape government?

3. David Deming on the wage gains from migration.

4. Historic bird once thought extinct returns to New Zealand visibility.

5. Zvi links on dating.

6. Is the U.S. economy seeing an upsurge of new firms?

1. Good advice from the very smart Susan Athey, but it is exactly what has gone wrong.  (To be clear, Susan herself does a great deal to help out other people, including those who cannot plausibly benefit her in return.  In any case she describes the screwed-up incentives in the profession very well.)

2. California DMV intervenes.

3. “Contrary to popular wisdom, we find that most artists’ reputations peak just before their death, and then start to decline.”  I believe the same is true for economists.

4. Do high-pollen days make us stupider?: “…we demonstrate that high pollen days are associated with increased accidents and injuries—one of the most extreme consequences of cognitive impairment.”

5. Are only 22 people needed to colonize Mars? (seems quite wrong to me)

6. Fukuoka drunk driving school.

In Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building, Bazzi, Gaduh, Rothenberg, and Wong use a nation-wide natural experiment to test when diversity leads to unity and strength and when it leads to disunity and weakness.

Indonesia consists of 17,000 islands with thousands of distinct ethnic groups and hundreds of languages. The post-Colonial leaders understood the difficulty of creating a nation from such diversity and to try to birth a nation they implemented several bold policies. One such policy was creating a national language that was not the language of the majority or any large plurality. Indeed, the Indonesian national language was spoken as a mother tongue by only 5% of the native citizens but its use is required in schools and official communications. The second bold policy was the transmigration experiment. The transmigration experiment moved millions of people from the more densely populated islands to the less densely populated islands. The policy was big, between 1979 and 1984, for example, 2.5 million people were moved.

One goal of the program was to relieve population pressures and give more Indonesians their own plot of land but another goal was the creation of a unified nation.

[T]he Minister of Transmigration stated “By way of transmigration, we will try to . . . integrate all the ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation. The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration and there will be one kind of man, Indonesian” (Hoey, 2003).

The program was voluntary. Migrants received plots of lands assigned by lottery in new villages. The way the program worked was that people of many different ethnicities and languages volunteered and (more or less, see the paper for details) lined up haphazardly to be assigned to a new village on a new island. The migrants could not choose their new village. Thus, the new villages varied in diversity: some of them were highly fractionalized (a high probability of two randomly chosen people in the village having different mother tongues) but due to bunching in the entry line, some of the villages had less diversity.

The authors show that people who for random reasons ended up in villages with a high fractionalizatin adoped more “national” or “unifying” behaviours. For example, people in high fractionalization villages were more likely to adopt the national language as the language spoken in their home (as opposed to speaking their mother tongue at home). In addition, the people in high fractionalization villages were more likely to intermarry and to give their children less ethnic names. Measures of social capital such as trust, tolerance and public goods provision were also higher in high fractionalization villages.

A simple way of summarizing these results is that people in high fractionalization villages adopted behaviours similar to those of people in cities.

Now, you might think; of course people in fractionalized villages adopt the national language because that was the only common language! There is something to that although it doesn’t explain why people adopt the national language as their home language. More importantly, the authors make a distinction between fractionalized and polarized villages. Polarized villages also have significant diversity but instead of many small groups there are a few large groups. People in polarized villages are less likely to adopt the national language as the language spoken in their home, are less likely to intermarry, less likely to give their children less ethnic names and measures of social capital such as trust, tolerance and public goods provision tend to be lower in high polarization villages.

My interpretation, which goes beyond what the authors say, is that diversity is good when it promotes individualism. A highly diverse society lets people break free from traditional constraints and develop as unique individuals. City air sets you free was a principle of law but also a recognition that in a city with many groups none could impose their will on all and thus social freedom blossomed. As Milton Friedman once said freedom promotes diversity and diversity protects freedom.

In contrast, diversity in the form of polarization, two or three big groups, makes tribalism even worse because the presence of multiple large groups increases the salience of group identity and makes people conform more and enforce conformity to their own group more, both as a kind of reactive self-defense.

One surprise is that the authors argue that ethnic segregation in high fractionalization villages tends to reduce the good effects of diversity but segregation in high polarization villages tends to ameliorate the costs of diversity; in other words, segregation significantly dampens the effects of both fractionalization and polarization. That’s surprising because other work argues that geographic segregation increases the salience of groups and group differences–if blacks and whites live in different parts of town or different castes live in different parts of town, for example, that increases the salience of racial or caste differences which might diminish if races and castes were more evenly distributed, even absent other changes.

In any case, this is a great paper taking advantage of a novel experiment in social engineering that, unusually, may have worked.

Philippe Lemoine tweeted:

Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it. It’s truly extraordinary.

Twitter is full of opinions, I will give you mine.  First, I am pretty close to Nate Silver:

A person in the 90th percentile of giving a shit about food will generally eat better in the US than France. Median close, may lean France. 20th percentile more strongly France.

But I have a few more points to add:

1. It is important to distinguish between supermarket food and restaurant food.  If you are content with a limited number of quality supermarket items, France clearly has better food.

2. If you go to a French food market (“Marché”), and are willing to spend 25-30 euros, you can get something much better than what is available in the United States, given the kind of meal you are assembling, with bread, cheese, strawberries, sausage, etc.  And you all should do this if you are visiting France.  That said, America has been gaining in this department, and French quality is static (at a very high level).

3. If you prefer to eat Asian and Latino cuisines in restaurants, the American options are radically superior.  It is not even close.  France does have better North African options.

4. Too many French restaurants have limited hours, limited seating options, low quality service, and so on, relative to their American peers.  I am not sure if those variables count in this debate, but they do for me.  So often eating in France is a pain in the neck.

5. While Paris may have the best restaurants in France, the best actual dining options — price and availability taken into account — are very much outside of Paris.  I would rather spend five days dining in Toulouse, and furthermore many of your best individual meals will come in small towns that have single specialties, such as “roast chicken,” etc.  Parts of Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico excepted, America does not really have anything comparable to this phenomenon.

6. France has better desserts, though I do not count that for much, others might.

If you are wondering, I’ve spent maybe eight months of my life living in France, total?

1. MIE: NYC tourists take late hours authentic “rat tours.”

2. Economists Writing Every Day — top blog posts of 2023 so far.

3. Safety and open source AI.

4. Bob Barker RIP, at age 99.  And here is data from The Price is Right, but I think sooner of Truth or Consequences, a favorite of my grandmother’s.

5. FIBA: Team USA encounters the culture that is New Zealand.

6. The cash heist that is Swiss.

7. More Solano County reports.  Exciting times!