Education sentences to ponder
If Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests. pic.twitter.com/ackCK2MTtI
— Kathleen Porter-Magee (@kportermagee) October 24, 2022
Wednesday assorted links
1. Stanford professors protest [sic] free speech conference.
2. In defense of missile defense.
3. How Bryan and I met (includes a correction of my previous account).
4.”What English habits do you still have? How do you incorporate them into your New Jersey lifestyle?” (NYT) Perhaps a good question for job candidates!
5. Given that AI can craft essays, how will writing instruction have to change?
6. “San Francisco must give back a $15 million grant it received from the federal government to improve Market Street because it can’t start construction by the required deadline — which is three years away.” Link here.
How AI will change everything on the internet
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, Washington Post reprint here, and yes people this is for real. Here is one excerpt:
Change is coming. Consider Twitter, which I use each morning to gather information about the world. Less than two years from now, maybe I will speak into my computer, outline my topics of interest, and somebody’s version of AI will spit back to me a kind of Twitter remix, in a readable format and tailored to my needs.
The AI also will be not only responsive but active. Maybe it will tell me, “Today you really do need to read about Russia and changes in the UK government.” Or I might say, “More serendipity today, please,” and that wish would be granted.
I also could ask, “What are my friends up to?” and I would receive a useful digest of web and social media services. Or I could ask the AI for content in a variety of foreign languages, all impeccably translated. Very often you won’t use Google, you will just ask your question to the AI and receive an answer, in audio form for your commute if you like. If your friends were especially interested in some video clips or passages from news stories, those might be more likely to be sent to you.
In short, many of the current core internet services will be intermediated by AI. This will create a fundamentally new kind of user experience.
It is unlikely that the underlying services will vanish. People will still Google things, and people will still read and write on their Facebook pages. But more will move directly to the AI aggregator. This dynamic is already happening: When was the last time you asked Google for directions? They exist online, of course, but if you’re like me, you just use Google maps and GPS directly. You have in effect moved to the information aggregator.
Or consider blogs, which arguably peaked between 2001 and 2012. Then Twitter and Facebook became aggregators of blog content. Blogs are still numerous, but many people get access to them directly through aggregators. Now that process is going to take another step — because the current aggregators will themselves be aggregated and organized, by super-smart forms of machine intelligence.
The world of ideas will be turned upside down. Many public intellectuals excel at promoting themselves on Twitter and other social media, and those opportunities may diminish. There will be a new skill — promoting oneself to the AI — of a still unknown nature.
Of course there is more at the links above. I could have written a much longer column of course. Just imagine asking the service of your choice for “a Tyler take” or “an Alex take.” Solve for the whole equilibrium! Many more institutions are aggregators than you might at first think…
Tuesday assorted links
Forbidden Questions
It is extremly disturbing that major scientific organizations are forbidding the publication of research that offends some political sensibilities. Indeed, roadblocks are being put into place to even investigate some questions. Here is James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, talking about the NIH’s restrictions on behavioural science:
A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.
American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.
My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.
…The federal government was under no obligation to assemble the magnificent database that is the dbGaP. Now that it has done so at taxpayer expense, however, it does have an obligation to provide access to that database evenhandedly—not to allow it for some and deny it to others, based on the content of their research.
Keep in mind that when science is politicized the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be given change as politics changes. Science isn’t natural–science, like free speech, democracy, and the rule of law relies on supporting universal norms of open inquiry–open questions, open questioners, open answers–but these universal norms run against our baser instincts and as such require sustaining cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma where defection to our tribe is the dominant strategy.
The effect of low-skilled immigration on domestic labor
The U.S. limits work visas for low-skill jobs outside of agriculture, with a binding quota that firms access via a randomized lottery. We evaluate the marginal impact of the quota on firms entering the 2021 H-2B visa lottery using a novel survey and pre-analysis plan. Firms exogenously authorized to employ more immigrants significantly increase production (elasticity +0.16) with no decrease or an increase in U.S. employment (elasticity +0.10, statistically imprecise) across several pre-registered subsamples. The results imply very low substitutability of native for foreign labor in the policy-relevant occupations. Forensic analysis suggests similarly low substitutability of black-market labor.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Michael A. Clemens and Ethan G. Lewis. And I am very pleased to announce that Michael Clemens will be joining the GMU economics faculty this January as Full Professor.
Nat Friedman and Alexandr Wang discuss AI
Monday assorted links
1. “Before this attack, I had thought that I could take on a bear easily…”
2. China is publishing fewer economic indicators.
3.”A brief Googling suggests Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, Olof Scholz, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky are all 5’7, it’s an unprecedented consolidation of European power in the hands of short kings” Link here.
Russia sentence of the day
Some local girls married one VDV [part of the military] guy after another, because they’re dying quickly enough that you can get several compensations in a few months.
That is Kamil Galeev, interview with Jordan Schneider, excellent and interesting throughout. The close is with a Tatar folk song.
Pollution and Macro Inequality
Combining 36 years of satellite derived PM2.5 concentrations with individual-level administrative data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and Internal Revenue Service (IRS), we provide new evidence on the important role that disparities in air pollution exposure play in shaping broader patterns of economic opportunity and inequality in the United States. We first document that early-life exposure to particulate matter is one of the top five predictors of upward mobility in the United States. Second, we exploit regulation-induced reductions in pollution exposure from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to produce new age-specific estimates of pollution-earnings relationship. Combined with individual-level measures of pollution exposure during early childhood, we calculate that disparities in air pollution can account for 17-26 percent of the Black-White earnings gap, 5-27 percent of the Hispanic-White earnings gap, and 6-20 percent of the average neighborhood-earnings effect (Chetty and Hendren, 2018; Chetty, Hendren, and Katz, 2016). Collectively, our findings indicate that environmental inequality is an important contributor to observed patterns of racial economic disparities, income inequality and economic opportunity in the United States.
That’s Colmer, Voorheis and Williams summarizing Air Pollution and Economic Opportunity in the United States. The authors also estimate that
…a 1 μg/m3reduction in prenatal PM2.5 exposure is associated with a $1,105 increase in later-life W-2 earnings and…a 1 μg/m3 reduction in prenatal PM2.5 exposure is associated with a 1.29 percentile rank point increase in upward mobility…We estimate pollution-earnings relationships for each age of exposure from birth to age 12 and show that the relationship between pollution exposure and earnings is stable up to age 4 and then diminishes quickly. We do not estimate a meaningful relationship between particulate matter exposure and later-life earnings from age 8 onward.
These estimate are big but given the substantial number of micro-estimates of the effect of pollution on IQ and cognition that Tyler and I have discussed before (see also this video) substantial effects at the macro level are almost inevitable.
Are unions the saviors of workers?
Every now and then I write a deliberately obvious column, in part because the relevant points are not obvious to everybody. Here is one excerpt:
The brief for unions starts with the possibility of higher wages: Union workers enjoy a wage premium of 10% to 20% (although many of these estimates are dated, and globalization may have made the premium much lower, in some cases close to zero). Unions may also give workers a more effective medium for airing their workplace grievances, and may help them coordinate better services with their employers.
The more skeptical view of unions accepts the logic of these arguments, but questions the size of the associated benefits. The union wage premium is good for the workers that receive it, of course, but it also leads to higher prices. Other workers in turn pay those higher prices. So the net return to all workers is smaller than the wage premium would suggest.
It’s not that labor costs and retail prices move exactly in tandem. If labor costs rise by 12% but labor is a small part of the marginal cost of the product, prices may rise by much less than 12%. But if labor is only a small part of the cost, then unions are less likely to be involved. The more important the role of workers, the more likely that union wage hikes will be translated into retail price hikes.
Workers as a whole still may benefit from unions if the burden of the higher prices falls largely on the wealthy. That may be the case for fancy diamonds or expensive restaurants, but historically unions have been more common in industries that provide goods and services for the middle class, for instance automobiles…
Nonetheless it is plausible that higher union wages do harm some non-union workers, by lowering demand in the long run for labor in unionized sectors. It’s also worth noting that management tends to be hostile to unions, and part of the reason may be that unionization will lead to lower profits. And lower profits will eventually mean lower investment…
Even taking all these factors into account, it is still possible that unions benefit workers overall. But only by a modest degree. It would not be a reason to make unionization a top priority, or to put unions at the center of a theory of what makes workers better off.
Recommended for some, not all.
Sunday assorted links
2. Those new Brazilian service sector jobs (in Portuguese).
3. “After Denmark’s Queen Margrethe stripped the royal titles from four of her grandkids, news has surfaced that Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise may suffer the same fate.” Link here.
4. Knausgaard talk on the novel, recommended to me I have not heard it yet. But for this installment of The Norwegian Century you need to ff to about 29:00.
5. AI writes a thread on productivity hacks.
6. The real Stable Diffusion art.
7. Regulating the homeless (Ezra Klein, NYT).
The Age of Unpredictability
It is much harder to predict foreign policy outcomes, especially in times of turmoil when there is no “nothing happens” default path, than it is to predict the results of economic policies. There is no coherent model, no causal identification in the data, and the data are not very good or well-partitioned to begin with.
Currently it is very hard to predict an endgame for the Russia-Ukraine war. It is also very hard to predict the longer-run consequences of a Putin escalation, including but not restricted to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
It is very hard to predict the outcome of China-Taiwan, and possible American responses, and this will hang over our heads for some while even if an invasion comes very soon.
With the recent Biden chip sanctions, I don’t think it is ridiculous to assert that the United States is very close to being informally at war with the two other most destructive nations in the world.
Iran-Israel is a neglected wild card in all of this. In many scenarios a superpower war spreads to parts of the Middle East.
You don’t have to fear “Skynet goes live” to recognize that the total net effects of forthcoming AI will be very hard to predict.
Whatever you think of UAPs, the reports are not going away and the observers are not being discredited. The sensor readings are not “mere flocks of geese.” The most likely non-alien drone probe scenario is a U.S. military innovation, but that too would be big news and a major increase in global uncertainty. Imagine the shock when the U.S. first deployed the atomic bomb.
By the way, it seems we are getting pretty effective vaccines for Covid, malaria, dengue, and some forms of cancer? That too was hard to predict until recently.
So we are entering a new time, The Age of Unpredictability. I am not sure what it means to be “ready” for this. But again, cheap hobbies are always underrated.
Emergent Ventures Africa and African diaspora, first cohort
Saron Berhane, Australian-Ethiopian living in Ghana, for research in synthetic biology (bio-leather produced using microbes). Previously she was the co-founder of an agriculture technology startup that specializes in real-time airborne disease detection.
Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigerian microbiologist and lecturer at Plateau State University in Bokkos, for research on phage therapies and the development of a phage bank in Nigeria.
Dithapelo Medupe, Botswana medical doctor and Anthropology PhD candidate at UPenn, to support her research on statistical approaches to multilinear evolution in African development and for general career development.
Mercy Muwanguzi, Ugandan high school senior, to support her research on robotics design and development for medical purposes in Kampala. She was jointly awarded the President’s Innovation Award for Science and Innovation.
Nseabasi Akpan, a professional photographer from Ibadan, for promoting photography education to young people in Nigeria.
Colin Clarke, an Astrophysics undergrad in Ireland, for travel to Nairobi to assist in providing astronomy education to rural schools in Kenya with a non-profit called the Travelling Telescope.
Geraud Neema, Congolese policy analyst living in Mauritius, for in-depth research on the domestic policy impact of Africans educated in China and for general career development.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for leading the selection process behind our new branch of Emergent Ventures Africa and African diaspora.