New evidence on schooling and pandemic learning
We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in Grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, within commuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines in pass rates (13.4 p.p. in math, 8.3 p.p. in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.
That is from a new paper by Rebecca Jack, Claie Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Discussion of linear TFP growth and its possible implications.
3. Vaclav Smil interview (NYT).
4. Modeling landscape formation on Titan.
6. On yield farming (Bloomberg).
7. On pessimism.
The Myth of Primitive Communism
AEON: Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. To take an influential example, the economists Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi have argued for 20 years that property rights coevolved with farming. For them, the question is less whether private property predated farming, but rather why it appeared at that time. In 2017, an article in The Atlantic covering their work asserted plainly: ‘For most of human history, there was no such thing as private property.’ A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’
In fact, although some tribes had communal sharing of (some) food, most did not. Private property, far from being unknown, was normal among all hunter-gatherers that have been studied. Manvir Singh writing in Aeon continues:
Agta hunters in the Philippines set aside meat to trade with farmers. Meat brought in by a solitary Efe hunter in Central Africa was ‘entirely his to allocate’. And among the Sirionó, an Amazonian people who speak a language closely related to the Aché, people could do little about food-hoarding ‘except to go out and look for their own’. Aché sharing might embody primitive communism. Yet, Hill admits, ‘the Aché are probably the extreme case.’
…More damning, however, is a starker, simpler fact. All hunter-gatherers had private property, even the Aché….Individual Aché owned bows, arrows, axes and cooking implements. Women owned the fruit they collected. Even meat became private property as it was handed out. Hill explained: ‘If I set my armadillo leg on [a fern leaf] and went out for a minute to take a pee in the forest and came back and somebody took it? Yeah, that was stealing.’
Some proponents of primitive communism concede that foragers owned small trinkets but insist they didn’t own wild resources. But this too is mistaken. Shoshone families owned eagle nests. Bearlake Athabaskans owned beaver dens and fishing sites. Especially common is the ownership of trees. When an Andaman Islander man stumbled upon a tree suitable for making canoes, he told his group mates about it. From then, it was his and his alone. Similar rules existed among the Deg Hit’an of Alaska, the Northern Paiute of the Great Basin, and the Enlhet of the arid Paraguayan plains. In fact, by one economist ’s estimate, more than 70 per cent of hunter-gatherer societies recognised private ownership over land or trees.
Moreover, the sharing that some hunter-gatherers practiced was functional rather than ethical.
Whatever we call it, the sharing economy that Hill observed with the Aché does not reflect some lost Edenic goodness. Rather, it sprang from a simpler source: interdependence. Aché families relied on each other for survival. We share with you today so that you can share with us next week, or when we get sick, or when we are pregnant.
take away the function and the sharing disappeared, often brutally:
In their book Aché Life History (1996), Hill and the anthropologist Ana Magdalena Hurtado listed many Aché people who were killed, abandoned or buried alive: widows, sick people, a blind woman, an infant born too soon, a boy with a paralysed hand, a child who was ‘funny looking’, a girl with bad haemorrhoids. Such opportunism suffuses all social interactions. But it is acute for foragers living at the edge of subsistence, for whom cooperation is essential and wasted efforts can be fatal.
None of this should be surprising to anyone familiar with the property-rights tradition of Demsetz and Barzel. The primitive communism of hunter-gatherers is no different in principle from the primitive communism of the wifi service at Starbucks, the modern day police and fire departments, or the use of Shakespeare’s works. As Barzel put it, “New rights are created in response to new economic forces that increase the value of the rights.” Thus, in this respect, there are no major differences among peoples, only differences in transaction costs, externalities, and technologies of inclusion and exclusion.
France analysis of the day
Macron had promised to reduce state spending — then a record at more than 56 per cent of gross domestic product — by about 5 percentage points. Instead, under pressure from protests and the pandemic, state spending rose to a staggering 60 per cent of GDP. France’s government spending is 15 points above the average for developed economies.
Moreover, that gap is explained less by heavy spending on education, health or housing than on welfare programmes, which at 18 per cent of GDP is nearly double the average for developed economies. France is stuck in a welfare trap, spending generously on income transfers but pushed by voters to spend even more, given discontent with the rising cost of living and with inequality.
Here is more from Ruchir Sharma at the FT. And this:
Total billionaire wealth doubled under Macron to 17 per cent of GDP, and nearly 80 per cent of French billionaires’ wealth is inherited — among the highest in the world.
On Nebraska (from the comments)
How much can one shift the Twitter equilibrium?
the free speech compromises twitter and fb have made are a delicate balance between users, employees, governments, and ad buyers. this is what they’ve had to do to run them. i think “glorious leaders” can help on the margin but it’s not the same as an engineering megaproject
— roon (@tszzl) April 25, 2022
Monday assorted links
Friston’s theory of everything
Bayesian Brain theory flips this idea around again so that cognition is a cybernetic or autopoietic loop. The brain instead attempts to predict its inputs. The output kind of comes first. The brain anticipates the likely states of its environment to allow it to react with fast, unthinking, habit. The shortcut basal ganglia level of processing. It is only when there is a significant prediction error—some kind of surprise encountered—that the brain has to stop and attend, and spend time forming a more considered response. So output leads the way. The brain maps the world not as it is, but as it is about to unfold. And more importantly, how it is going to unfold in terms of the actions and intentions we are just about to impose on it. Cognition is embodied or enactive…
Friston is largely a modest person, but he is not afraid to bang the table a little more these days. At the 2021 Brain Connectivity Workshop, Friston asserted he has done nothing less than found a fourth branch of physics. You have Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics (that is, thermodynamics), and now you can have Bayesian mechanics—the physics of systems which can exert a predictive control over their worlds. We can debate the truth of this claim. However, I applaud the ambition. Neuroscience establishing its own deep mathematical foundation at last. This is why I pitch the Bayesian Brain as the big thing of the past 20 years.
That is John McCrone summarizing Friston in a short piece. And if you wish to read further, here is one famous paper by Friston. I do not have an opinion of my own here, but am always happy to pass along (relatively) new ideas. And here is Friston (with co-authors) applying his framework to autism.
Via Michelle Dawson.
Emergent Ventures winners, 19th cohort
Avi Schiffman, Harvard University. a second award to Avi, for his Ukraine Take Shelter project.
Carol Vieria de Magelhaes, Brazil and Northwestern University, to support a visiting research internship at Harvard Medical School.
BioDojo House, “A 3 month long co-living community in the Boston/Cambridge area from June-Aug, hosting 6-10 next generation builders & young emerging scientists between 18-25 years old.”
Serene, a free speech project, to expand Tor/Snowflake for Russian and other access to the uncensored internet.
Hector Alberto Diaz Gomez, Peru, Amazonas, general career development and travel, and for research into multilingual search engines.
Louise Perry and Fiona Mackenzie, London area, The Other Half, “a feminist think tank with a post-liberal agenda.”
Bridget Pegg, St. Louis and Mizzou, for general career development, and intellectual and policy outreach for Missouri and the broader Midwest.
Marius Hobbhahn, Tübingen, AI safety and for writings on many other topics as well.
Zeel Patel, Harvard and Broad Institute of MIT, applying machine learning to health care through AI.
Dwarkesh Patel, Austin, podcasting and general career support.
Tim Farrelly, Dublin, working on AI and vision issues and for general career development and conference travel.
Yang Zheng, North Hollywood, a project to crowdsource AI problems.
Ben Smith, University of Oregon, from New Zealand. For his project on “multi-objective reinforcement learning with an exponential-log function.”
Paulina M Paiz, San Francisco/Toronto, travel grant to attend scientific conferences, and to continue with her work using DeepChem.
Congratulations!
The equilibrium
The South African drugmaker Aspen Pharmacare earlier this year finalized a deal to bottle and market the Johnson & Johnson vaccine across Africa, a contract that was billed as an early step toward Africa’s development of a robust vaccine production industry. Aspen geared up for production, but no buyers, including the African Union and Covax, have placed orders yet, said Stephen Saad, Aspen’s chief executive.
The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, stopped its production of Covid shots in December last year, when its stockpile grew to 200 million doses; Bharat Biotech, another Indian firm that was a major producer, also stopped making vaccines in the face of low demand. The companies say they have no further orders since their contracts with the Indian government ended in March.
Here is more from The New York Times.
Sunday assorted links
1. Economic factors behind the demise of footbinding.
2. Paul McCartney plays bass for an obscure Malawian group.
3. Effective pandemic policy reduces fear.
4. Hadza hunter-gatherers are not deontologists and do not prefer deontologists as social partners.
5. The global median income has doubled in 17 years from 2000 to 2017.
Why are skyscrapers so short?
Brian Potter has a delightful primer on the physical, economic and regulatory barriers to building height beginning with the Great Pyramid of Giza and running to today. He concludes that the limit today isn’t technological–we could build much higher–but regulatory:
…we can estimate the magnitude of building height restrictions by comparing the cost of rent to the marginal cost of adding an additional floor. When Glaeser et al. 2005 did this for Manhattan, they found that the cost of rent was approximately twice the marginal cost of an additional floor, concluding, “the best explanation for why [developers] do not take advantage of this opportunity is the reason they tell us themselves: New York’s maze of building regulations effectively cap their building heights.” Cheshire et al. 2007 found similar magnitudes of rent-to-cost ratios in a variety of major European cities. When Glaeser et al. tried to estimate the size of building height externalities in New York, they concluded it was nowhere near the magnitude of the rent/construction cost difference, suggesting current height limits are far stricter than necessary.
These building height restrictions make us all poorer – not only do they cause a deadweight loss by artificially restricting the supply of available building space where it’s needed the most, but they also screen off the potential agglomeration benefits that accrue from increased density. This makes workers and businesses less productive and innovative than they could be, which not only hurts them, but everyone else who would benefit from cheaper and better goods and services.
The upshot is that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in building taller buildings. We don’t need to invent any new technology for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to build, we just need to stop getting in our own way.
I concluded the same thing when I looked at building height in Mumbai, India. This video also contains a very nice explanation of the Floor Space Index also known as the Floor Area Ratio.
What drives people to extremist YouTube videos?
There is a new and very interesting paper on this topic by Annie Y. Chen, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, Ronald E. Robertson and Christo Wilson. Here is the abstract:
Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Despite widespread concerns that YouTube’s algorithms send people down “rabbit holes” with recommendations to extremist videos, little systematic evidence exists to support this conjecture. Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample (n=1,181), we show that exposure to alternative and extremist channel videos on YouTube is heavily concentrated among a small group of people with high prior levels of gender and racial resentment. These viewers typically subscribe to these channels (causing YouTube to recommend their videos more often) and often follow external links to them. Contrary to the “rabbit holes” narrative, non-subscribers are rarely recommended videos from alternative and extremist channels and seldom follow such recommendations when offered.
I am traveling and have not had the chance to read this paper, but I do know the authors are very able. I am not saying this is the final word, but I would make the following observation: there are many claims made about social media, and many of them might be true, but for the most part they are still largely unfounded.
Local changes in intergenerational mobility
We study changes in intergenerational income mobility over time at the local level in the U.S., using data on individuals born in the 1980s. Previous research has found no change in mobility at the national level during this time period, but we show that this hides substantial increases and decreases in mobility at the local level. For children from low-income families, there is convergence in mobility over time, and average differences by region become much smaller. For children from high-income families, the geographic variation in mobility becomes much larger. Our results suggest caution in treating mobility as a fixed characteristic of a place.
Here is the published piece by Christopher Hnady and Katharine L. Shester. As for a few concrete results:
1. Mobility in the southeast has been rising.
2. Mobility in the northeast has been declining.
3. There is more mobility from rural than urban areas, and this gap has been rising.
4. For wealthier families, mobility depends more on where you live.
For most of these claims, the data are from cohorts born in the 1980s.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
That is from Harvey Bungus.