Social media and well-being
Here is a new set of results, by Laura Lemahieu, et.al.:
Abstaining from social media has become a popular digital disconnection strategy of individuals to enhance their well-being. To date, it is unclear whether social media abstinences are truly effective in improving well-being, however, as studies produce inconsistent outcomes. This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis therefore aims to provide a more precise answer regarding the impact of social media abstinence on well-being. The databases of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Communication Source, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar were searched for studies examining the effect of social media abstinence on three outcomes, namely positive affect, negative affect, and/or life satisfaction. In total, ten studies (N = 4674) were included, allowing an examination of 38 effect sizes across these three outcomes. The analyses revealed no significant effects of social media abstinence interventions on positive affect, negative affect, or life satisfaction. Relationships between social media abstinence duration and the three outcomes were also non-significant. The findings thus suggest that temporarily stepping away from social media may not be the most optimal approach to enhance individual well-being, emphasizing the need for further research on alternative disconnection strategies. Nevertheless, important methodological differences between studies should be considered when interpreting these results.
I thank M. for the pointer.
Saturday assorted links
2. Owen Hatherley interview on Central European emigres to Britain.
3. AGI and the future of warfare.
4. 42 new words added to the OED (NYT).
5. Okie-dokie.
6. Argentina nearing new $20 billion loan from the IMF (FT). “He said the central bank’s gross reserves, which include a loan from China and money backing consumers’ bank deposits, would rise from $26bn to $50bn after deals with the multilateral lenders. Excluding liabilities, reserves are currently about $6bn in the red.”
Peter Marks Forced Out at FDA
Peter Marks was key to President Trump’s greatest first-term achievement: Operation Warp Speed. In an emergency, he pushed the FDA to move faster—against every cultural and institutional incentive to go slow. He fought the system and won.
I had some hope that FDA commissioner Marty Makary would team with Marks at CBER. Makary understands that the FDA moves too slowly. He wrote in 2021:
COVID has given us a clear-eyed look at a broken Food and Drug Administration that’s mired in politics and red tape.
Americans can now see why medical advances often move at turtle speed. We need fresh leadership at the FDA to change the culture at the agency and promote scientific advancement, not hinder it.
This starts at the top. Our public health leaders have become too be accepting of the bureaucratic processes that would outrage a fresh eye. For example, last week the antiviral pill Molnupiravir was found to cut COVID hospitalizations in half and, remarkably, no one who got the drug died.
The irony is that Molnupiravir was developed a year ago. Do the math on the number of lives that could have been saved if health officials would have moved fast, allowing rolling trials with an evaluation of each infection and adverse event in real-time. Instead, we have a process that resembles a 7-part college application for each of the phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials.
A Makary-Marks team could have moved the FDA in a very promising direction. Unfortunately, disputes with RFK Jr proved too much. Marks was especially and deservedly outraged by the measles outbreak and the attempt to promote vitamins over vaccines:
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks wrote in a resignation letter referring to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thus, as of now, the FDA is moving in the wrong direction and Makary has lost an ally against RFK.
In other news, the firing of FDA staff is slowing down approvals, as I predicted it would.
Is Mexico falling into recession?
Mexico’s economy is slowing sharply and will soon fall into recession, several economists predict, as Donald Trump’s changing tariff plans cast uncertainty over the relationship with its largest trading partner.
Mexico is one of the countries most vulnerable to the US president’s drive to reshore investment and close trade deficits. The country’s economy was already fragile, with the government cutting spending due to a gaping budget deficit and investors spooked by its radical judicial reforms.
Mexico’s GDP shrank 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year from the previous three months, while economic activity fell 0.2 per cent in January.
The central bank cut its key interest rate by 50 basis points on Thursday, warning that the economy would show weakness in the first quarter and that trade tensions posed “significant downward risks”.
Here is more from the FT.
What I’ve been reading
David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography. An excellent work, I view Yoko as a quite good visual and conceptual artist, a sometimes quite interesting but hard to listen to in any volume musical creator, and overall a pretty stunning woman. Sheff has known Yoko well for decades, so you get a real sense of her from this book, even if you wonder that perhaps not all details are being reported. I learned also that the same guy at Sarah Lawrence dated by Yoko and Sylvia Plath.
Diane Coyle has a new book coming out, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters.
Reviel Netz, Why the Ancient Greeks Matter: The Problematic Miracle that Was Greece. Uneven but periodically fascinating: “But science was but a small part of the Greek cultural sphere and it would be surprising if the overall contours of Greek cultural life could be explained through science alone. It seems much more promising to consider…what mattered the most to the Greeks themselves. This was their literary legacy: their canon.”
There is Michael M. Rosen, Like Silicon from Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
And Jill Eicher, Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War.
Edward Tenner, Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences, collects many earlier essays by the master. From The American Philosophical Society Press, a new venture.
And there is James Grant, Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution.
I’ve also been reading “in the cluster,” trying to better understand what is sometimes called The Hundred Years War, between England and France.
Science podcast with Hrvoje Kukina
Here is the YouTube link. Here is part of the episode summary:
I had a wonderful conversation with Professor Tyler Cowen. We discussed his view of economic growth, the chase for GDP growth, the most underrated risks to global economic stability, and whether capitalism will survive the next century. Other topics included universal basic income, behavioral economics, how cryptocurrencies challenge the traditional role of central banks, and what would it take for cryptocurrencies to become a significant driver of economic growth. We also explored whether Bitcoin’s role as ‘digital gold’ is sustainable or an overhyped narrative, whether cryptocurrencies democratizing finance should prompt nation-states to adopt their own digital currencies, and how to design a regulatory framework that fosters crypto innovation while protecting consumers.
Friday assorted links
1. Guess why Utah has so few restaurants.
2. Invisible College, August, for 18-22 year olds, Cambridge UK.
3. How did Kerala become relatively wealthy?
4. Sharks make clicking sounds? (NYT)
5. Digital Delacroix (NYT).
6. Bari Weiss interviews Leonard Leo.
7. Speculative.
8. Anthropic on how the AIs think. Blog post here.
Stripe economics of AI fellowship
The economics of AI remains surprisingly understudied, even as technical progress in artificial intelligence continues rapidly. The Stripe Economics of AI Fellowship aims to help fill that gap by supporting foundational academic research in the area.
We invite graduate students and early-career researchers who are interested in studying the economics of AI to apply, regardless of prior experience. Fellows receive a grant of at least $10k, participate in conferences with leading economists and technologists, and have the potential to access unique data via Stripe and its customers. Our initial cohort will include 15-20 fellows, and will form the foundation of a community at the bleeding edge of economic research.
The link has further information, here is the tweet thread from the excellent Basil Halperin.
Is a VAT an export subsidy?
Here is a good post by Brian Albrecht, he works through the logic. A VAT, properly understood, does not favor say European producers over American producers. Work through his example if you don’t see this right away. In this sense the pro-tariff “fairness” arguments are quite wrong. Yet I am not entirely convinced by the rebuttals. If you compare “the European expoter market position” to “the American exporter market position” it is correct that parity of treatment holds.
But there is another way to pose the question and that is “should the resources in the EU be allocated toward export, or not?” And then exports are VAT-free, and within-EU sales generally are not VAT-free. So there is an encouragement to exports here. America has sales taxes, but VAT rates usually are higher. Thus you can say that Europe does more to encourage exporters than does the United States. Of course you can say the same about many other European government interventions. Germany’s notorious Sunday closing laws also encourage more exports. Send it to the US, and let it be sold on a Sunday, bitte! (Just not in Paramus, NJ.)
From an American point of view, I don’t think anything is wrong with this kind of “export subsidy” (and that is not how I would describe it in a first-order sense, but we are steelmanning here). We get more German goods because they keep their shops closed on Sundays. Good for us, Alex nails the bottom line. Note that every time we liberalize and improve some part of the American economy, the “net European subsidy to exports” goes up. We want to keep on doing that, not its opposite.
It perhaps would be helpful if the people on the free trade side of the debate recognized this point a little more explicitly.
Where do stock market returns come from?
Here is a new and sure to be controversial piece from the JPE:
Why does the stock market rise and fall? From 1989 to 2017, the real per capita value of corporate equity increased at a 7.2% annual rate. We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation. Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase, followed by a lower risk price (21%) and lower interest rates (14%). The period 1952–88 experienced only one-third as much growth in market equity, but economic growth accounted for more than 100% of it.
That is by Daniel L. Greenwald, Martin Leftau, and Sydney C. Ludvigson. Of course in more recent times it is tech stocks that have done very well, and they also tend to elevate pay standards.
Dean Ball on “how it will be”
Your daily life will feel more controllable and legible than it does now. Nearly everything will feel more personalized to you, ready for you whenever you need it, in just the way you like it. This won’t be because of one big thing, but because of unfathomable numbers of intelligent actions taken by computers that have learned how to use computers. Every product you buy, every device you use, every service you employ, will be brought to you by trillions of computers talking to themselves and to one another, making decisions, exercising judgments, pursuing goals.
At the same time, the world at large may feel more disordered and less legible. It is hard enough to predict how agents will transform individual firms. But when you start to think about what happens when every person, firm, and government has access to this technology, the possibilities boggle the mind.
You may feel as though you personally, and “society” in general, has less control over events than before. You may feel dwarfed by forces new and colossal. I suspect we have little choice but to embrace them. Americans’ sense that they have lost control will only be worsened if other countries embrace the transformation and we lag behind.
Here is the full post.
That was then, this is now
This year is likely to be remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time, and with images since about 2012…
The eventual uses of GPT-3 are hard to predict, but it is easy to see the potential. GPT-3 can converse at a conceptual level, translate language, answer email, perform (some) programming tasks, help with medical diagnoses and, perhaps someday, serve as a therapist. It can write poetry, dialogue and stories with a surprising degree of sophistication, and it is generally good at common sense — a typical failing for many automated response systems. You can even ask it questions about God.
…It also has the potential to outperform Google for many search queries, which could give rise to a highly profitable company.
…It is not difficult to imagine a wide variety of GPT-3 spinoffs, or companies built around auxiliary services, or industry task forces to improve the less accurate aspects of GPT-3. Unlike some innovations, it could conceivably generate an entire ecosystem.
That was the opening paragraph of my 2020 Bloomberg column on GPT-3.
Thursday assorted links
1. The people who still use typewriters.
2. “Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism.”
3. David Perell on AI and writing.
4. Paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells.
5. Modeling how the military and the media interact. An underdiscussed topic.
6. How baseball analytics are keeping pitchers from true greatness (NYT).
The Madmen and the AIs
In Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance Harang Ju and Sinan Aral (both at MIT) paired humans and AIs in a set of marketing tasks to generate some 11,138 ads for a large think tank. The basic story is that working with the AIs increased productivity substantially. Important, but not surprising. But here is where it gets wild:
[W]e manipulated the Big Five personality traits for each AI, independently setting them to high or low levels using P2 prompting (Jiang et al., 2023). This allows us to systematically investigate how AI personality traits influence collaborative work and whether there is heterogeneity in their effects based on the personality traits of the human collaborators, as measured through a pre-task survey.
In other words, they created AIs which were high and low on the “big 5” OCEAN metrics, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and then they paired the different AIs with humans who were also rated on the big-5.
The results were quite amusing. For example, a neurotic AI tended to make a lot more copy edits unless paired with an agreeable human.
AI Alex: What do you think of this edit I made to the copy? Do you think it is any good?
Agreeable Alex: It’s great!
AI Alex: Really? Do you want me to try something else?
Agreeable Alex: Nah, let’s go with it!
AI Alex: Ok. 🙂
Similarly, if a highly conscientiousness AI and a highly conscientiousness human were paired together they exchanged a lot more messages.
It’s hard to generalize from one study to know exactly which AI-human teams will work best but we all know some teams just work better–every team needs a booster and a sceptic, for example– and the fact that we can manipulate AI personalities to match them with humans and even change the AI personalities over time suggests that AIs can improve productivity in ways going beyond the ability of the AI to complete a task.
Hat tip: John Horton.
Men watch women’s sports more than women do
Here is the link, via Alex T.