My podcast with GMU president Gregory Washington
Here is the link, it was very good rapport I thought, I enjoyed doing this very much.
My Conversation with Daniel Carpenter, on regulation and also the FDA
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, I found it a very substantive and also illuminating episode. Carpenter is very, very smart and also very well-informed historically. Here is part of the summary:
Daniel Carpenter is one of the world’s leading experts on regulation and the foremost expert on the US Food and Drug Administration. A professor of Government at Harvard University, he’s conducted extensive research on regulation and government organizations, as well as on the development of political institutions in the United States. His latest book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, details the crucial role petitions played in expanding the franchise and shaping modern America.
Here is an excerpt from the non-FDA section, much of which focuses on (non-FDA) regulation:
COWEN: What kinds of records should the Postal Service keep about itself?
CARPENTER: [laughs] Great question. There’s a whole set of things that they don’t since the Griswold decision and since the First Amendment decisions. They don’t keep as much records of what goes through the mail. They can’t prohibit things like pornography, contraception.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “itself.” I would start with the idea that basic privacy restrictions, which governed the postal system as much through norm as by law in the 19th century and early 20th century, should govern the system.
It’s a crime if I were to walk past your mailbox and open your letter. I’m committing a federal crime, but there were also norms that seals were not to be broken, things like that. I do think whichever way the Postal Service goes — and it’s quite possible that you could imagine an electronic platform for the US postal system — I think basic privacy restrictions have to be guaranteed.
Actually, in some respects, I think we need to know a fair amount about what postal workers do without, say, calling for Amazon tracking. But if we think that postal workers are misplacing ballots or not providing birth control pills or something like that, then we should probably have some way of picking up on that kind of nefarious behavior.
In the FDA section I got mad at him, the first (but not last?) time that has happened in a CWT, do read or listen to the whole section, the two of us really had at it! Here is a tiny sliver from it:
COWEN: But shouldn’t there be a button within the FDA that can be pushed, where the FDA goes into a kind of wartime mode?
I don’t want to misrepresent Carpenter by an ill-chosen excerpt, so please do digest his full set of replies. Recommended.
Genetics of Psychic Ability
My jaw just about hit the floor when I read this paper.
It is commonly believed that psychic ability, like many mental and physical traits, runs in families. This suggests the presence of a genetic component. If such a component were found, it would constitute a biological marker of psychic ability and inform environmental or pharmacologic means of enhancing or suppressing this ability.
On the one hand, almost every human trait has some genetic component. On the other hand, shouldn’t you demonstrate that a trait exists before searching for its genetic correlates? The combination of science and nonsense in this paper–seemingly without irony–is disconcerting, like discovering that Newton spent a huge amount of his time trying to discern hidden codes in the Bible.
On finding psychics and matched case-controls, “individuals with indications of psychotic or delusional tendencies were excluded from further consideration.” Ok, then.
Oh, in case you are wondering:
…none of the protein-coding sequences (i.e., exons) showed any variation that discriminated between cases and controls. However, a difference was observed in the intron (i.e., non-protein-coding region) adjacent to an exon in the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7. This variation, an alteration of GG to GA, was found in 7 of 9 controls and was absent from all psychic cases.
The most conservative interpretation of these results is that they result from random population sampling. However, when the results are considered in relation to other lines of evidence, the results are more provocative. Further research is justified to replicate and extend these findings.
Disappointing really.
Hat tip: Jonatan Pallesen.
Are women making progress in academic economics?
Here is a new paper by Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn:
This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15% less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulative publications, citations, grants and grant dollars. In contrast, we found no significant gender differences in promotion in other fields including biomedical science, physical science, political science, mathematics and statistics, and engineering. We separated the sample by the research intensity of institutions and found suggestive evidence that these results were being driven by less research-intensive institutions.
What is the best model for understanding this result? The “ol’ boys’ network” matters more at lower-tier institutions? Something else? There doesn’t seem to be a gender tenure penalty at higher-ranked research institutions.
How would actual alien spacecraft influence asset prices?
Primarily as an exercise, I thought about that question for a while, and here is part of my answer in a Bloomberg column:
If you know you are being watched, what exactly do you wish to buy more of? I would bet on defense stocks to rise, whether or not there is much we can do to defend ourselves against this alien presence.
Of course investors could not be sure that these alien drone probes will merely observe us forever. They might be observing with the purpose of rendering judgment. If they are offended by our militaristic tendencies, the quality of our TV shows and our inability to adopt the cosmopolitan values of “Star Trek” over the next 30 years, maybe they will zap us into oblivion. But that kind of systematic risk is hard to insure against. After such an act of obliteration, neither gold nor Bitcoin will do you any good.
My main prediction is that alien UFOs will be bullish for the dollar. The U.S. government seems most closely connected to the UFO phenomenon, for whatever reason. (Maybe its pilots fly more sallies and record better data?) In any case, if alien UFOs become more likely, an informational advantage would accrue to the federal government. And the dollar already has a tradition as a safe haven currency…
Most of us would get used to the idea of alien presence without quite believing in it. As The New Yorker makes clear, many Americans believed in alien-origin UFOs after World War II, as did many American policymakers. It might have spurred greater interest in the space program and science fiction, but it didn’t affect most aspects of American life, nor did it seem to drive markets.
Never underestimate the capacity of markets, like humans, to adapt. Just as many of the strangest parts of our lives can come to seem normal, so Wall Street can find a way to do business with just about anybody — aliens included.
I do full, literally mean everything stated in the column. But the piece also has (at least) two esoteric meanings — can you guess what they are?
Tuesday assorted links
1. The Chinese feminist eugenicist movement: just how well do those two views fit together?
2. How good is oxygen intervention for India and Indians?
5. Douthat on whether Trump made everything progressive (NYT).
Who is the best-known, non-political American married couple?
With Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing, and Kanye and Kim doing the same, America now has a paucity of very well-known married couples, at least outside of politics, where Barack and Michelle Obama reign supreme.
Who is the Lucy and Desi of our time? The George Burns and Gracie Allen? The Sonny and Cher?
George and Amal Clooney are in the running, but is she so well known to most Americans? Could they tell you her name from scratch, or cite what she is known for?
Kurt Cobain has passed away, as has Kobe Bryant, Larry and Laurie David split some time ago, and John and Yoko and Paul and Linda (an honorary American couple, for media purposes) are distant memories. Movie stars barely still exist these days.
Perhaps Elon Musk will marry Grimes, who is a musical star of some renown.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn have been married for 24 years, and they are pretty well known.
Harry and Meghan maybe are becoming an American couple, at least for media purposes?
Who else?
We Will Get to Herd Immunity in 2021…One Way or Another (Revisited)
By July it will all be over. The only question is how many people have to die between now and then?
Youyang Gu, whose projections have been among the most accurate, projects that the United States will have reached herd immunity by July, with about half of the immunity coming from vaccinations and half from infections. Long before we reach herd immunity, however, the infection and death rates will fall. Gu is projecting that by March infections will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the current rate. The drop will catch people by surprise just like the increase. We are not good at exponentials. The economy will boom in Q2 as infections decline.
Those US predictions look quite good. March infections were a little more than half what they were around Jan. 20. May infections at 1/10th the rate may be a bit optimistic but it’s early.
I was reminded of this by Kevin Drum’s excellent post on shortage porn and the chip shortage in particular which seems to be due to little more than a mistaken belief that the pandemic in the US would last into the summer and beyond:
Last night, for example, 60 Minutes ran a segment about the shortage of chips for cars and videogames and whatnot. And why is there a shortage of chips? Is it because we’ve outsourced everything to the wily Chinese folks on Taiwan? You’d think so after inhaling Lesley Stahl’s inane reporting, except for the fact that she inadvertently allowed the chairman of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC a brief moment to give the game away: “In March, 2020, as COVID paralyzed the U.S., car sales tumbled, leading automakers to cancel their chip orders. So TSMC stopped making them.”
Oh. So it has nothing to do with Taiwanese fabs vs. American fabs or global supply constraints or any of that. Nor is it related to a possible invasion of Taiwan or the fact that Intel may or may not have made good decisions about its future business. It’s because American car companies cancelled their chip orders and never bothered to reinstate them. Then in December, when car sales “unexpectedly” began to rebound, they panicked and realized what they had done. You’d think these guys had never done an economic forecast or used an MRP system before in their lives.
Anyway, be prepared for hundreds of stories like this. For each one, be careful to ignore the details and instead focus on the big picture. In about 90% of them, it will be the same: they didn’t plan for the pandemic to ever end, and now they’re paying the price.
The rise of research teams in economics
Solo authorship represented 80 percent of economics papers in 1960 and 65 percent in 1990, but then solo-authorship fell out of the majority in 2005 and represents only 26 percent of economics papers today (as measured by the right-hand axis). To put it another way, in 1950, there were 1.2 authors per economics paper. Average team size reached 2.0 for the first time in 2010. By 2018, team size averaged 2.7 (as shown on the left-hand axis). The jump in average team size in economics papers over the last ten years is greater than the jump over the prior half-century.
Here is more from Benjamin F. Jones. For higher impact papers, the trend is even more striking.
Concentration in product markets
Here are some new results:
This paper uses new data to reexamine trends in concentration in U.S. markets from 1994 to 2019. The paper’s main contribution is to construct concentration measures that reflect narrowly defined consumption-based product markets, as would be defined in an antitrust setting, while accounting for cross-brand ownership, and to do so over a broad range of consumer goods and services. Our findings differ substantially from well established results using production data. We find that 42.2% of the industries in our sample are “highly concentrated” as defined by the U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines, which is much higher than previous results. Also in contrast with the previous literature, we find that product market concentration has been decreasing since 1994. This finding holds at the national level and also when product markets are defined locally in 29 state groups. We find increasing concentration once markets are aggregated to a broader sector level. We argue that these two diverging trends are best explained by a simple theoretical model based on Melitz and Ottaviano (2008), in which the costs of a firm supplying adjacent geographic or product markets falls over time, and efficient firms enter each others’ home product markets.
That is a new NBER working paper by C. Lanier Benkard, Ali Kurukoglu, and Anthony Lee Zhang. It is very supportive of recent research by Estaben Rossi-Hansberg (here and here, with co-authors) that market concentration simply has not been going up in recent times.
New results on Work From Home
By Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, there are several points of note, with emphasis added by this author:
COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before. We develop evidence on five reasons for this large shift: better-than-expected WFH experiences, new investments in physical and human capital that enable WFH, greatly diminished stigma associated with WFH, lingering concerns about crowds and contagion risks, and a pandemic-driven surge in technological innovations that support WFH. We also use our survey data to project three consequences: First, employees will enjoy large benefits from greater remote work, especially those with higher earnings. Second, the shift to WFH will directly reduce spending in major city centers by at least 5-10 percent relative to the pre-pandemic situation. Third, our data on employer plans and the relative productivity of WFH imply a 5 percent productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements. Only one-fifth of this productivity gain will show up in conventional productivity measures, because they do not capture the time savings from less commuting.
Here is the link to the NBER working paper.
Monday assorted links
1. Stapp and Dourado criticizing bitcoin. Better than the usual b.s.
3. How old are you? Recommended for all those above a certain age, but which age might that be? There is only one way to find out.
5. Johnny Rogan, one of the best biographers, has passed away.
6. “We find that the shutdown of Google News reduces overall news consumption by about 20% for treatment users, and reduces page views on publishers other than Google News by 10%. This decrease is concentrated around small publishers.” Link here.
Solve for the education equilibrium
https://twitter.com/nalanpog/status/1388545154852741120
Via Ilya Novak.
What should we regulate *more*?
Since the Biden team does not seem too favorably disposed to deregulation, perhaps it is worth asking in which areas we should be pushing for additional regulation. Here are a few possible picks, leaving pandemic-related issues aside, noting that I am throwing these ideas out and in each case it will depend greatly on the details:
1. Air pollution. No need to go through this whole topic again, carbon and otherwise. Remember the “weird early libertarian days” when all air pollution was considered an act of intolerable aggression?
2. Noise pollution. There is good evidence of cognitive effects here, but what exactly are we supposed to do? Can’t opt for NIMBY now can we!?
3. Something around chemicals? How about more studies at least?
4. Housing production. You can look at this as more or less regulation depending on your point of view. But perhaps cities of a certain size should be required by the state government to maintain sufficient affordability.
5. Mandates for standardized reporting of data? For example, the NIH requires that scientists report various genomic data in standardized ways, and this is a huge positive for science. What else might work in this regard?
6. Federal occupational licensing, in lieu of state and local.
7. Software as a service from China?
8. Animal welfare and meat production.
9. Is there a useful way to regulate to move toward less antibiotic use?
10. Should we have more regulation of AI that measures human emotions? How about facial and gait surveillance in public spaces?
11. How about regulating regulation itself?
What else?
I thank an MR reader for some useful suggestions behind this post.
Positive externalities through family member incarceration?
This result surprised me, but perhaps there are gains from getting the bad apples out of the household?:
Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the US. Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality. While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity.
That is new from Samuel Norris, Matthew Pecenco, and Jeffrey Weaver, forthcoming in the AER. Via Ilya Novak. Here is Noah on this study, here is a related result from Sweden.