Results for “daniel klein” 117 found
Pluralist Economics Review
You will find it here, it seems to be a monthly compendium of economics on-line. Thanks to Daniel Klein for the pointer.
How free market are economists?
…a group of economists at George Mason University, and other
prominent researchers, say this notion of a free-market mainstream is
oversimplified at best and inaccurate at worst.“There’s really not any data, and there’s a caricature, that
economists are extremely free market,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of
economics at George Mason who is popular in free-market and libertarian
circles. “I think the differences are overdrawn.”
My colleague Daniel Klein, the central focus of this article, has shown that economists’ views are quite mainstream and often closely aligned with the Democratic Party:
And Klein has numbers to back up his claims. Some of those numbers come in the form of party donations, similar to studies (some of which have also been done by Klein at George Mason) purporting to show political bias among professors in academe: For example, one Econ Journal Watch study
found a 5.1 to 1 ratio between contributors to the Democratic versus
Republican party among a sample of 2,000 members of the AEA. Klein
found similar lopsidedness in the authors and editors of journals
(including the Journal of Economic Literature) and even within the groups of people listed in authors’ acknowledgments in journal articles.
Read the whole thing, which also includes a debunking of the notion of heterodox economics. Often the real dissent in economics comes from the free market side; left-wing heterodoxy is more aligned with the mainstream than it cares to admit. The piece closes with some me:
“So, everyone in a debate always wants to call the other side
ideologues, essentially, and the critics of economics are doing that
here,” Cowen explained. “They like to think they’re on the outside,
there’s something new, they’re warring against some powerful authority.”About theories that run counter to the neoclassical model, he said, “It’s a view that’s been with us for centuries.”
Queen fact of the day
Queen guitarist and songwriter Brian May, who gave up studying the stars to become one, will soon complete his doctorate in astrophysics.
May, 60, will submit a thesis titled Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud next week at Imperial College London.
Here is the story. Thanks to Daniel Klein for the pointer. It’s long been my view that most rock stars are very very smart people.
Addendum: Read Dubner on smart rock stars.
Efficient rent-seeking
I wish to thank the many loyal MR readers (buyers!) who pre-ordered my Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. On Amazon.com it went from non-existent in the rankings to a peak of #220, hovering most of the day in the mid-200s.
The offer of access to my secret blog still stands; pre-order the book and write to [email protected].
By the way, here is Daniel Klein on the use of tying to produce public goods. Or think of the economics this way: ex post copyright brings monopoly rents to some producers. Some of those profits are competed away by advertising, except in this case "the ad" is intended to provide real (not just persuasive) benefits to the consumers. Here are books and papers on efficient rent-seeking.
Addendum: I’ve now been adding new posts to it, but of course I can’t tell you their topics!
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Catch it here, edited by Daniel Klein. It includes a discussion of freedom and economic growth, a critique of Robert Frank on positional goods, possible bias against The Economic Report of the President, economists in Sweden, and what economists believe on rail transit.
Private vs. government funding of science
Arthur Diamond offers this abstract:
Regression analysis is used to test the effects of funding source (and of various control variables) on the importance of the article, as measured by the number of citations that the article receives. Funding source is measured by the number of prizes and the number of government grants mentioned in the acknowledgements section. The importance of an article is measured by an "early" count of citations…and a "late" count. Using either measure of article importance, the evidence suggests that private funders are more successful than the government at identifying important research.
This paper is worth a look, but I have some worries. First, private funding may have a better chance of picking the "cream" of private researchers, but without helping them much. Second, if you are famous it is easier to run up your number of private funders than to run up your number of government funders. Third, even most cited research has no real impact. We should be concerned with the extremes of the distribution, not mean citations. Fourth, private foundations may take greater care to seek out measurable outputs. Whether this helps or harms the quest for the extreme successes is hard to say.
A separate question is not which form of science funding is better, but rather how the two can best fit together. I put this and related questions into the "grossly underexplored but extremely important" category.
Here is the paper, and thanks to Daniel Klein for the pointer. Here is Art Diamond’s blog.
Addendum: Jonathan van Parys recommends this paper on the topic; the abstract is right on the mark and the authors are excellent.
Economic Journal Watch — new issue
Comments: Miscounting Money of Colonial America: Ronald W. Michener and Robert E. Wright argue that Farley Grubb, writing in Explorations in Economic History, has mistaken the unit of account for the medium of exchange and grossly misestimated the money supply of colonial America. Farley Grubb responds vigorously to them, and not for the first time.
The Intellectual Tyranny of the Status Quo: Previously, Richard Timberlake criticized the “golden fetters” interpretation of the Great Contraction, and argued that the failing stemmed, rather, from the Fed’s adherence to the Real Bills Doctrine. While endorsing Timberlake’s vindication of the gold standard, Per Hortlund argues that Timberlake and others misfire with respect to the Real Bills Doctrine. Also in the previous issue, Kurt Schuler’s Argentina article indicted more than 90 economists for mistakes in understanding and description—among them, David Altig and Brad Setser, who here criticize Schuler’s charges. Schuler responds.
Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on pressing policy issues? Adrian T. Moore and Ted Balaker exam the case of taxi policy.
Economics in Practice: William J. Baumol explains why modern textbook theory is entrepreneurless.
Character Issues: In 1981, as the Thatcher government got its legs, 364 economists signed a letter protesting the direction of monetary and fiscal policy in Britain. Geoffrey Wood examines how well the letter has stood up.
Does the American Economic Association lean Democratic? William A. McEachern investigates the 2004-election cycle campaign contributions of AEA members, committee members, officers, editors, referees, authors, and acknowledgees.
Daniel Klein explores Gunnar Myrdal’s plea for disclosure of one’s ideological sensibilities, surveys the research into the ideological character of the AEA, and reports new findings on AEA membership rates by voter category.
Correspondence: E. Roy Weintraub remarks on History of Political Economy’s being dropped from the Social Science Citation Index. How can a journal show high SSCI citation productivity when the cluster of journals that cite it are excluded from SSCI?
Do right-wing or left-wing academics have a “narrower tent”?
This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.
That is by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, here is the paper.
Scream this from the rooftops
Ed Glaeser writes in his new abstract:
Does bounded rationality make paternalism more attractive? This Essay argues that errors will be larger when suppliers have stronger incentives or lower costs of persuasion and when consumers have weaker incentives to learn the truth. These comparative statics suggest that bounded rationality will often increase the costs of government decisionmaking relative to private decisionmaking, because consumers have better incentives to overcome errors than government decisionmakers, consumers have stronger incentives to choose well when they are purchasing than when they are voting and it is more costly to change the beliefs of millions of consumers than a handful of bureaucrats. As such, recognizing the limits of human cognition may strengthen the case for limited government.
Yes, some NBER Working Paper Abstracts should be screamed from the rooftops. Here is the paper itself. Glaeser also offers some arguments against "soft paternalism":
1. Soft paternalism is an emotional tax on behavior which yields no government revenues.
2. Soft paternalism can cause bad decisions just as easily as hard paternalism.
3. Public monitoring of soft paternalism is much more difficult than public monitoring of hard paternalism.
4. While hard paternalism will be limited by public opposition, soft paternalism is particularly attractive because it builds public support.
5. Soft paternalism can build dislike or even hatred of subgroups of the population.
6. Soft paternalism leads to hard paternalism.
7. Soft paternalism complements other government persuasion.
Get this:
Soft paternalism requires a government bureaucracy that is skilled in manipulating beliefs. A persuasive government bureaucracy is inherently dangerous because that apparatus can be used in contexts far away from the initial paternalistic domain. Political leaders have a number of goals, only some of which relate to improving individual well-being. Investing in the tools of persuasion enables the government to change perceptions of many things, not only the behavior in question. There is great potential for abuse.
Thanks to Daniel Klein for the pointer.
Big Blogger(s) is watching you
In Korea, a woman’s dog [****] on the train. When people on the train
asked her to clean up the mess, she became belligerent.
Then bloggers, including one with a camera, got to work:
Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-****-girl)
and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her
identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her
parents and relatives started popping up and people started to
recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her
watch, clearly visible in the original picture.
Here is the link. Here is Daniel Klein on reputation. Here is a relevant image.
Are economic graduate students conservative?
Economists are often thought of as conservative, but that was not the case in the previous study [1985] nor in this one. In this study, 47 percent of the students classified themselves as liberal, 24 percent as moderate, 16 percent as conservative and 6 percent as radical. (Six percent stated that politics were unimportant to them.) These percentages are very similar to the last study, although the share of those identifying themselves as radicals declined (from 12 percent). The students perceived their views as slightly more liberal than those of their parents, 40 percent of whom they classified as liberal, 36 percent as moderate, 16 percent as conservative and 3 percent as radical.
By the way, Chicago graduate students are now less conservative than those at Stanford; Chicago is rapidly losing its uniqueness.
Do note that "liberal" economists are often fairly conservative, at least relative to the left as a broader political class. Economics gives plenty of reasons (whether you agree with them or not) to defend government intervention. At the same time the ideas of cost and constraint remain prominent.
I view most Ivy League economics graduate students as highly peer conscious. They want to fit into the views of the intelligentsia surrounding them, and above all they would find membership in the Republican party a source of great social embarrassment. They are fiscally conservative Democrats who are liberals on social issues, but don’t really much toy with the idea of becoming libertarian. They prefer to put themselves in the class of "good-thinking people," without always engaging in or welcoming the necessary debates.
The above quotation is taken from David Colander’s article in the Winter 2005 Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The definitive work on the policy views of social scientists is being done by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, read more here. And I am pleased to announce that Dan will be joining us at George Mason next year as a new member of the faculty.
Econ Journal Watch II
The second issue of Econ Journal Watch is now out. EJW is fast becoming one of my favorite journals (I am an advisor but cannot claim responsibility for the excellent content). Lots of good stuff including:
Economics in Practice: Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey examine all the American Economic Review articles from the 1990s, and present systematic evidence of the abuse of statistical significance.
William Davis uses survey evidence to argue that a large portion of professional economists falsify their preferences about economics.
Daniel Klein establishes that Journal of Development Economics authors and editors have extensive ties to the World Bank, the IMF, the UN etc., and asks how such ties affect the character of the field.
New trends in self-publishing
Why not go with Borders, the people who sell you the books?
“It’s easy to publish your own book!” the “Borders Personal Publishing” leaflets proclaim. Pay $4.99. Take home a kit. Send in your manuscript and $199. A month or so later, presto. Ten paperback copies of your novel, memoir or cookbook arrive.
Fork over $499, and you can get the upscale “Professional Publication” option. Your book gets an International Standard Book Number, publishing’s equivalent of an ID number and is made available on Borders.com, and the Philadelphia store makes space on its shelves for five copies.
Borders is the latest traditional bookseller or publisher to branch into self-publishing using print-on-demand or P.O.D. technology. P.O.D., inheritor of the vanity press and survivor of the dot-com implosion, makes it feasible – technologically and economically – to produce one copy of a book.
Unlike e-books, which also appeared in the late 1990’s, P.O.D. self-publishing has developed into a real business, attracting involvement from the likes of Random House, Barnes & Noble and now Borders.
Forty percent of all self-published books are sold to the authors, and most of the other sixty percent are sold on-line. One company, iUniverse, has 17,000 published titles. 84 have sold more than 500 copies, and a half dozen have made it to Barnes and Noble shelves. But then again, traditional vanity presses charge you at least 8 to 10K to publish a book, with no guarantees.
Here is the full story. As Clay Shirky notes, the world is moving from the paradigm of “first filter, than publish” to “first publish, then filter.”
But does self-publishing have a bright future? Yes and no. Soon self-publishing won’t be worse than going with a mediocre press. The value of the very best certifiers will go up (in the academic market this is Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and MIT presses, for a start), if only because the proliferation of writing makes their sorting function more important. At the same time the relative value of the middling certifiers will fall. It will become apparent they don’t offer a better product than writers operating on their own. At some point you have to ask whether the press is lending reputation to the author, or vice versa.
By the way, here is one self-published memoir which I love, the author Thelma Klein was the mother of well-known economist Daniel Klein. Yes they still have copies if you want to buy one, and they only cost a few dollars.
A New Proposal for Cleaner Air
Most auto emissions come from the dirtiest ten percent of the cars on the road. Why should we ignore this fact? Daniel Klein suggests using infra-red beams to measure the quality of auto exhaust from particular cars, as they drive by the sensors. Identify the minority of gross polluters by photographing their license plates, and then get them off the road, force them to fix their cars, or tax them. Note that your annual or bi-annual auto emissions test is easy to fake or prepare for. Under Klein’s scheme the government measures the quality of auto exhaust, and lets the car owner invest in a better result however he or she wishes to do. My main worry concerns privacy issues, but perhaps privacy is headed out the window in any case. To read about related essays on economic policy and technology, from the same book, see my previous post on electricity.
Getting off the grid
In a few short months we have had major blackouts in New York City, England, Italy, and Scandinavia, see Lynne Kiesling’s blog for a running analysis of energy and electricity events. In each case critics have charged that ill-conceived deregulations have led to underinvestments in power grids.
To what extent could we avoid these problems by decentralizing electricity supply altogether? Why not just pull off the grid and have your own generator? How practical will this be in the future? More than ten percent of the American power supply is already produced this way.
These are exactly the kind of engineering questions that I have little sense of. But I have just read the most detailed case for decentralization to date. The authors argue:
Dispersed [electricity] generation has long been economically viable, with technology making it even more so. Natural monopoly is a myth.
The authors also give numerous details about how current regulations hinder such a decentralized market solution.
One of the authors, Alvin Lowi, is an engineer with numerous patents to his name and forty years experience. The article is in a Cato book edited by Fred Foldvary and Daniel Klein, The Half-Life of Policy Rationales, or click here for the Amazon.com link. Here is the Cato press release about the book, which looks about how new technologies can make government interventions unnecessary. Again, I cannot evaluate the arguments, but this is definitely an advance in the debate.