Results for “cohort” 216 found
Great News for Female Academics!
For decades female academics have been told that the deck is stacked against them by discrimination in hiring, funding, journal acceptances, recommendation letters and more. It’s dispiriting to be told that your career is not under your control and that, no matter what you do, you face an unfair, uphill battle. Why would any woman want to be a scientist when they are told things like this:
A vast literature….shows time after time, women in science are deemed to be inferior to men and are evaluated as less capable when performing similar or even identical work. This systemic devaluation of women women results in an array of real consequences: shorter, less praise-worth letters of recommendation, fewer research grants, awards and invitations to speak at conferences; and lower citation rates for their research…
The good news is that this depressing and dispiriting story isn’t true! In an extensive survey, meta-analysis, and new research, Ceci, Kahn and Williams show that the situation for women in academia is in many domains good to great. For example, in hiring for tenure the evidence is strong that women are advantaged. Moreover, women are advantaged especially in fields where they have relatively low representation (GEMP: geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science).
Among political scientists, Schröder et al. (2021) found that female political scientists had a 20% greater likelihood of obtaining a tenured position than comparably accomplished males in the same cohort after controlling for personal characteristics and accomplishments (publications, grants, children, etc.). Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments.
…In summary, all of the seven administrative reports reveal substantial evidence that women applicants were at least as successful as and usually more successful than male applicants were—particularly in GEMP fields.
…In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance. Specifically, women’s rank in male-dominated fields increased by up to 40% of a standard deviation. In contrast, male candidates in fields dominated by women (literature, foreign languages) were given a small boost over expectations based on blind ratings, but this difference was small and rarely significant.6
The situation is also very good in grant funding and journal acceptance rates which are either not biased or biased towards women. Similarly, “no persuasive evidence exists for the claim of antifemale bias in academic letters of recommendation.”
There is evidence of bias in student evaluations. Both female and male students rate male professors higher, even in situations where names are known but actual gender is blinded. Male students are more likely to write nasty comments. Most research universities, in my experience, don’t put much weight on student teaching evaluations, beyond do you pass a fairly low bar, but it can be disconcerting to get nasty comments.
There is also mild evidence of differences in salary, although less so when productivity is taken into account.
Some critics will say, but the real discrimination happens before a women applies for a tenure track job! Maybe so but that is a shifting of goal posts and we should take pride in the fact that in the United States today (and most developed countries) there is very little bias against women in high stakes, important decisions in tenure track hiring, journal acceptances, grant funding and so forth. This is a major accomplishment.
It should be noted that the Ceci, Kahn and Williams paper is an adversarial collaboration; Ceci and Williams have published previous work showing that women are, generally speaking, not discriminated against in academia while:
Kahn has a long history of revealing gender inequities in her field of economics, and her work runs counter to Ceci and Williams’s claims of gender fairness. Kahn was an early member of the American Economics Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Articles of hers in the American Economics Review (Kahn, 1993) and in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Kahn, 1995) were the first publications on the status of women in the economics profession. She was the first to identify gender inequities as a concern in economics, something she has revisited every decade since then in her publications. In 2019, she co-organized a conference on women in economics, and her most recent analysis in 2021 found gender inequities persisting in tenure and promotion in economics (Ginther & Kahn, 2021). In short, gender bias in academia has been a long-standing passion of Kahn’s. Her findings diverge from Ceci and Williams’s, who have published a number of studies that have not found gender bias in the academy, such as their analyses of grants and tenure-track hiring in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Williams & Ceci, 2015).
The Ceci, Kahn, and Williams paper covers much more material than I can cover here and is nuanced so read the whole thing but do also shout the good news from the rooftops!
The One-Child Policy and Intergenerational Mobility in China
We examine whether and how the world’s largest population planning program, the One-Child Policy, has shaped intergenerational mobility in China. Using a dataset with 2,096,798 childparent(s) pairs combined from various rounds of ten separate national household surveys, we leverage exogenous variation in fine rates imposed for One-Child Policy violations across provinces to study causal impacts of the One-Child Policy on intergenerational persistence. Using a continuous difference-in-differences approach, we find that for cohorts born between 1980 and 1996, the One-Child Policy reduced persistence in intergenerational income, education, and social class, comparing to those born prior to 1979. We estimate that the overall effect of the One-Child Policy fines was to reduce persistence in intergenerational income, education, and social class by 28.1%, 48.7%, and 24.8%, respectively. Analyzing mechanisms, we find that the One-Child Policy boosted China’s intergenerational mobility by diminishing elite family heirship, concentrating resources for lower-income families, and decreasing returns to education. The One-Child Policy has brought about a significant socioeconomic reshuffle that has reshaped the role of China’s longstanding class solidification.
That is from a recent paper by Shanthi Manian, Qi Zhang, and Bin Zhao. Via Linghui Han. Might some similar results be true for any other low-fertility societies? Or are the environments too disparate?
Measuring the benefits of the biomedical revolution
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Note that for most economic gains, total gdp and per capita gdp give roughly the same answers. But when it comes to lifesaving, that may no longer be the case. Here is one excerpt:
Take the vaccines against Covid. Of course the most important fact about them is that they reduce the amount of death and suffering. But what is their economic impact? The vaccines have been most helpful to the most vulnerable, namely the elderly or those with preexisting medical conditions. These are not the most productive cohorts of the economy. So the effectiveness of the vaccines might have actually lowered various social averages, such as per-capita GDP or per-capita productivity.
The extra life is a pure benefit. But to capture that benefit in numbers requires looking at the totals, not just the averages. Labor productivity per hour, for example, won’t necessarily increase. But total labor supply and total population will.
And this:
And what about those subpar returns on biomedical investments? That is a sign that most of the gains from innovation are being reaped by patients, users and consumers — not capitalists. Is that not exactly what everyone has been asking for?
There is much more at the link. The bottom line is that many of the gains will come through “n,” not per hour productivity.
Surely Right
Sure is on fire. From the comments to my post, Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans.
As a crazy person who argued for skipping phase III and going directly to an open label, voluntary phase IV study I think the real problem came with the mandates.
The right has a very strong personal independence streak and above all they despise it when some mandarin explains that the government, but also major corporations and academics, can bring the full force of law to bear to compel compliance (particularly in a world where any attempt to do so for right-coded things like abortion is suddenly the coming of the apocalypse). It is one thing to have a guy like me point out the historical track record for the side effects of vaccines (pretty much universally among the lowest for any type of medical intervention ever tested), it as another to have organized campaigns where people get fired. And it is particularly galling when the basic science shows these sorts of mandates are woefully wrong. Job loss doubles the risk of suicide, which means that for any cohort outside of the elderly and severely immune compromised, a vaccine mandate enforced by recission of employment is expected to kill more people than could have been reasonably avoided with even wildly effective vaccine mandates.
And it was further made much, much worse when the public health folks doubled down on medically illiterate standards….And of course any comparison about how people making decisions that fostered disease transmission with Covid and HIV is going to be very hard to avoid a bunch of cultural diktat that rubs conservatives the wrong way.
As in many cases, vaccines ran afoul of the ability of folks to increase their petty empires. They became a way for the goodthinking folks to exercise control and dominion over the ignorant. And exactly as predicted by culturally competent medicine or any cursory study of human nature, these high-handed methodolotrous actions will not induce much compliance, but will instead polarize the medicine and risk one of the greatest medical achievements of all time – childhood vaccinations.
So where do we go from here? I would submit that it is going to require some clear and objective limitations on public health powers. It is going to require public apologies and maybe compensation for folks who made medically valid claims that their prior infection resulted in sufficient immunity to avoid vaccination or repeated boosters. Some public and high profile olive branches are going to need to be offerred to the resistant. And it is going to have to involve some tradeoff between the rights of corporations to dictate the terms of business they offer and the rights of individuals to make medical decisions free of compulsion going forward. At the very least we are going to need to have some semblance of similarity between how corporations can handle folks who are HIV+ (or likely to become so) and how they handle folks who are unvaccinated.
…But will not mandates work? Well empirically they failed massively with Covid.
…Well among health care workers in 2019 (i.e. before Covid mucked everything up), health care workers were ~80% vaccinated against influenza. And if you had a straight requirement to get vaccinated? It brought the number up to 97%. Which is fine, except for the fact that resistant healthcare workers self-select into non-mandatory positions (e.g. long-term care positions). Absent a safety valve into remunerating work, we see the same fracas that happened with Covid.
So adults, even among the most medically literate professions with the strongest mandates for uptake, still do not vaccinate enough to prevent epidemics.
So how did we get vaccination to work in the first place? We had a brief window in the mid 20th century when people remembered their kids dying from these diseases and were wildly more trusting and cooperative than ever before in American history (you back when we set records for church attendance, trust in politicians, and marriage rates). And we created a strong cultural norm that kids get vaccinated before going to school.
That is weird. It does not fit with normal American practice. And for the love of God do not muck with it. If the kids ever revert to the natural habits of their parents we are talking about very bad juju.
Which is precisely why the only sensible position is to advocate for early and widespread vaccine access, be highly critical of all the politicking about vaccine timing around the election, and to avoid mandates unless you intend to enforce them at gunpoint. Keep the damn vaccines out of politics because once they go in, it is damn hard to get them out. Give people as early of access as they want and be straight forward that we will continue phase IV safety studies even as we roll out access. And we will not do mandates absent a direct democratic initiative to give it all the legitimacy in the world.
Because we live in a world where the default is not to vaccinate, politics poisons everything it touches, and the childhood mandates are historical accidents that could very well fall to concerted political action.
Eat the horse a bite a time, educate the patients, and pay the danegeld to Trump to soften the blow. But going all high handed and making this political (at all, in any direction)? I can think of few stupider things to do.
For more on reactance see also Bardosh et al. The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good, an excellent piece I am still stunned was able to make it into the BMJ (kudos to them.)
Monday assorted links
2. The relative academic decline of American Jews. Update: Note there may be some confusion between “students” and “faculty” in the data behind the chart.
3. One set of instructions for how to cheat at chess (YouTube).
4. King Charles’s taste in art.
5. Tamil Nadu: “Two-thirds of this deficit was made up within 6 months after school reopening. Further, while learning loss was regressive, the recovery was progressive. A government-run after-school remediation program contributed ~24% of the cohort-level recovery, and likely aided the progressive recovery.”
Cognitive ability predicts economic extremism
Conservative economic attitudes have been theorized as symptoms of low cognitive ability. Studies suggest the opposite, linking more conservative views weakly to higher, not lower, cognitive ability, but with very large between-study variability. Here, we propose and replicate a new model linking cognitive ability not to liberal or conservative economics, but to economic extremism: How far individuals deviate from prevailing centrist views. Two large pre-registered studies in the UK (N = 700 & 700) and the British Cohort Study dataset (N = 11,563) replicated the predicted association of intelligence with economic deviance (β = 0.4 to 0.12). These findings were robust and expand the role of cognitive ability from tracking the economic consensus to influencing support for (relatively) extremist views. They suggest opportunities to understand the generation and mainstreaming of radical fringe social attitudes.
That is from a new paper by Chien-An Lin and Timothy C. Bates. I would frame it a little differently! For one thing, the extreme views are sufficiently complex that perhaps the smarter people are more likely to pick them up and understand them, whether those views are correct or not.
Via Michelle Dawson.
The Midlife Crisis
This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history. This is paradoxical and troubling. The finding is consistent, however, with the prediction – one little-known to economists – of Elliott Jaques (1965). Our analysis does not rest on elementary cross-sectional analysis. Instead the paper uses panel and through-time data on, in total, approximately 500,000 individuals. It checks that the key results are not due to cohort effects. Nor do we rely on simple life-satisfaction measures. The paper shows that there are approximately quadratic hill-shaped patterns in data on midlife suicide, sleeping problems, alcohol dependence, concentration difficulties, memory problems, intense job strain, disabling headaches, suicidal feelings, and extreme depression. We believe the seriousness of this societal problem has not been grasped by the affluent world’s policy-makers.
That is from a new NBER working paper by .
A college degree ain’t what it used to be
Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of ‘matched jobs’ that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. Using a structurally estimated model of child-parent decisions, in which coresidence improves college graduates’ quality of job matches, we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role.
That is from a new NBER paper by Stefania Albanesi, Rania Gihleb, and Ning Zhang.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The culture that is New Jersey.
2. The etymology of splooting.
3. “In this cohort study of 3191 patients with e-scooter or bicycle injuries, e-scooter injuries commonly occurred at nighttime and involved young adults who were not helmeted and most often intoxicated.” Link here.
4. Astaire-Reynolds.
5. The story of solo McCartney, volume I of a new biography.
6. The Japanese government is encouraging alcohol consumption, in a bid to boost tax revenue (FT).
7. Bitcoin’s longest-serving Lead Maintainer quits, naming no successor.
Is being bombed bad for your mental health?
We find that cohorts younger than age five at the onset of WWII or those born during the war are in significantly worse mental health later in life when they are between ages late 50s and 70s. Specifically, an increase of one-standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.8 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our analysis also reveals that this impact is most pronounced among the youngest children including those who might have been in-utero at some point during the war.
Here is more from Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, Erdal Tekin, and Belgi Turan.
Successful People are also Happy and Well-Adjusted
It’s perhaps a consequence of the just-world hypothesis that we think beautiful people can’t be smart, wealthy people must have few friends, and people with greatly successful careers must have sacrificed a happy home. There are, of course, many such examples but alas there are also many people who are ugly and dumb, poor and friendless and unsuccessful and dysfunctional. So, is there any correlation? Probably not.
We examined the wrecked-by-success hypothesis. Initially formalized by Sigmund Freud, this hypothesis has become pervasive throughout the humanities, popular press, and modern scientific literature. The hypothesis implies that truly outstanding occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being. Study 1 tested this hypothesis in three cohorts of 1,826 high-potential, intellectually gifted individuals. Participants with exceptionally successful careers were compared with those of their gender-equivalent intellectual peers with more typical careers on well-known measures of psychological well-being, flourishing, core self-evaluations, and medical maladies. Family relationships, comfort with aging, and life satisfaction were also assessed. Across all three cohorts, those deemed occupationally outstanding individuals were similar to or healthier than their intellectual peers across these metrics. Study 2 served as a constructive replication of Study 1 but used a different high-potential sample: 496 elite science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM) doctoral students identified in 1992 and longitudinally tracked for 25 years. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 in all important respects. Both studies found that exceptionally successful careers were not associated with medical frailty, psychological maladjustment, and compromised interpersonal and family relationships; if anything, overall, people with exceptionally successful careers were medically and psychologically better off.
Friday assorted links
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.
Formative experiences matter over long periods of time
Formative experiences shape behavior for decades. We document a striking feature about those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s—they drive less in the year 2000. The effect is not specific to these cohorts; price variation over time and across states indicates that gasoline price changes between ages 15–18 generally shift later-life travel behavior. Effects are not explained by recessions, income, or costly skill acquisition and are inconsistent with recency bias, mental plasticity, and standard habit-formation models. Instead, they likely reflect formation of preferences for driving or persistent changes in its perceived cost.
That is from a newly published paper (AEA gate) by Christopher Severen and Arthur A. van Benthem.
Announcing the Future Fund
We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Our areas of interest include the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biorisk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations, effective altruism, and more.
If you’d like to launch one of our proposed projects, or have another idea for a project in our areas of interest—please apply!Please submit your applications by March 21 to be considered in our first open funding round.
And the team is:
Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
Here is much more information, including for applying, and the links on top of the page have further detail yet. Emergent Ventures winner Leopold Aschenbrenner has been a driving force behind this, congratulations to Leopold! Also notable is this:
- Our Regranting Program. We’re offering discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. Our hope is that regrantors will fund great people and projects that weren’t on our radar! We’ve already invited the first cohort, and we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor.
Recommended.