Pigouvian in-kind time horn tax in Mumbai
For the Mumbai’s perpetual honkers, who love to blare the horns of their vehicles even when the traffic signal is red, the Mumbai Traffic Police has quietly come up with an unique initiative to discipline them in order to curb the alarming rise in the noise pollution levels in the country’s commercial capital.
From Friday (January 31, 2020), it has installed decibel meters at certain select but heavy traffic signals to deter the habitual honkers through a campaign named ‘The Punishing Signal’.
Joint Police Commissioner (Traffic) Madhukar Pandey said that the decibel monitors are connected to traffic signals around the island city, and when the cacophony exceeds the dangerous 85-decibel mark due to needless honking, the signal timer resets, entailing a double waiting time for all vehicles.
Here is the full story, and for the pointers I thank Sheel Mohnot and CL. Here is a relevant ad for the policy. Here is Alex on honking as signaling.
Sunday assorted links
*A Treatise on Northern Ireland*, by Brendan O’Leary
This three-volume set is quite the remarkable achievement, and it would have made my best books of 2019 list (add-ons here) had I known about it earlier. It starts with “An audit of violence after 1966,” and then goes back to the seventeenth century to begin to dig out what happened. It has more detail than almost anyone needs to know, yet at the same time it remains unfailingly conceptual and relies on theoretical social science as well, rather than merely reciting names and dates. How about this?:
The breakdown of hegemonic control in Northern Ireland [mid- to late 1960s] exemplifies Tocqueville’s thesis that, when a bad government seeks to reform itself, it is in its greatest danger.
Here is an excerpt from volume II:
The thesis advanced here is that hegemonic control was established between 1920 and 1925 by the UUP, and, aside from a few exceptional moments, exercised successfully until 1966. After 1925 opportunities for effective opposition, dissent, disobedience, or usurpation of power were minimal. The major possibilities of disruption came from the outside, from independent Ireland or from Great Britain, from geopolitics, or the world economy. Eventually, when external forces of disruption combined with major endogenous changes, hegemonic control would be contested, and would shatter. But at no juncture did Northern nationalists or Irish Catholics in the North internalize the UUP’s rhetoric, or become significantly British by cultural designation. When the civil-rights movement learned to exploit the claim to be British citizens entitled to British rights, the regime’s days were numbered.
I will continue to spend time with these volumes, which will not be surpassed anytime soon. Unlike in so many history books, O’Leary is always trying to explain what happened, or what did not. You can order them here.
As a side note, I find it shocking (and I suppose deplorable) that no American major media outlet has reviewed these books, or put them on its best of the year list, as far as I can tell. We are failing at something, though I suppose you can debate what. And I apologize to O’Leary for missing them the first time around.
Is it harder to become a top economist?
Mathis Lohaus writes to me:
Thanks for doing the Conversations. I greatly enjoyed Acemoglu, Duflo, and Banerjee in short succession after the Christmas break. Your question about “top-5 journals” and the bits about graduate training reminded of something I’ve had on my mind for a while now:
For the average PhD student, how hard is it to become a tenured economist — compared to 10, 20, 30, 40 … years ago? (And how about someone in the top 10% of talent/grit?)
Publication requirements have clearly become tougher in absolute terms. But how difficult is it to write a few “very good” papers in the first place? On twitter, people will sometimes say things like “oh, it must have been nice to get tenure back in 1997 based on 1 top article, which in turn was based on a simple regression with n = 60”. I wonder if that criticism is fair, because I imagine the learning curve for quantitative methods must have been challenging. And what about the formal models etc.? Surely those were always hard. (I vaguely remember a photo showing difficult comp exam questions…)
More broadly, early career scholars now have tons of data and inspiring research at their fingertips all the time. Also, nepotism and discrimination might be less powerful than in earlier decades…? On the other hand, you have to take into account that many more PhDs are awarded than ever before. I suspect that alone is a huge factor, but perhaps less acute if we focus only on people who “really, really want to stay in academia”.
A different way to ask the question: When would have been the best point in time to try to become an econ professor (in the USA)?
I would love to hear about your thoughts, and/or input from MR readers.
I always enjoy questions that somewhat answer themselves. I would add these points:
1. The skills of networking and finding new data sets are increasingly important, all-important you might say, at least for those in the top tier of ability/effort.
2. Fundraising matters more too, because the project might cost a lot, RCTs being the extreme case here.
3. Managing your research team matters much more, and the average size of research team for influential work is much larger. Once upon a time, three authors on a paper was considered slightly weird (the claim was one of them virtually always did nothing), now four is quite normal and the background research support is much higher as well.
Recently I was speaking to someone on the job market, wondering if he should be an academic. I said: “In the old days you spent a higher percentage of your time doing economics. Nowadays, you spend a higher percentage of your time managing a research team doing economics. You hardly do economics at all. So if you are mainly going to be a manager, why not manage for the higher rather than the lower salary?”
That was tongue in cheek of course.
On the bright side, learning today through the internet is so much easier. For instance, I find YouTube a good way to learn/refresh on new ideas in econometrics, easier than just trying to crack the final published paper.
What else?
Saturday assorted links
Behind the Data
Here’s a nice video from Dean Karlan’s Innovations for Poverty Action group and EconFilms emphasizing the work that goes on behind the scenes collecting data in often difficult parts of the world in order to produce better, more effective programs targeting poverty.
The dynamics of motivated beliefs
A key question in the literature on motivated reasoning and self-deception is how motivated beliefs are sustained in the presence of feedback. In this paper, we explore dynamic motivated belief patterns after feedback. We establish that positive feedback has a persistent effect on beliefs. Negative feedback, instead, influences beliefs in the short run, but this effect fades over time. We investigate the mechanisms of this dynamic pattern, and provide evidence for an asymmetry in the recall of feedback. Finally, we establish that, in line with theoretical accounts, incentives for belief accuracy mitigate the role of motivated reasoning.
That is from the new AER by Florian Zimmerman. And from the paper proper:
We find that negative feedback is indeed recalled with significantly lower accuracy, compared to positive feedback, which suggests that the dynamic belief pattern we have identified is indeed driven by the selective recall of information. Next, we make use of additional outcome variables and a placebo condition to delve into how selective recall operates. In a nutshell, the following patterns emerge. Our results suggest that participants are able to suppress the recall of unwanted memories. Furthermore, participants appear to suppress the recall of not only negative feedback but also the IQ test more broadly. Our results lend direct support to key modeling assumptions in Bénabou and Tirole (2002, 2004). From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that policy interventions aimed at correcting self-servingly biased misperceptions via information or feedback are unlikely to be effective in the long run due to people’s ability to forget or suppress information that threatens their desired views.
The paper also shows that incentives matter and can improve the problem. For instance, if you tell people that they will have to recall the information at some point in the future, and will receive a monetary reward for accuracy, there is considerably less selective forgetting.
The smart phone as pacifier
In light of consumers’ growing dependence on their smartphones, this article investigates the nature of the relationship that consumers form with their smartphone and its underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to obvious functional benefits, consumers in fact derive emotional benefits from their smartphone, in particular, feelings of psychological comfort and, if needed, actual stress relief. In other words, in a sense, smartphones are not unlike “adult pacifiers.” This psychological comfort arises from a unique combination of properties that turn smartphones into a reassuring presence for their owners: the portability of the device, its personal nature, the subjective sense of privacy experienced while on the device, and the haptic gratification it affords. Results from one large-scale field study and three laboratory experiments support the proposed underlying mechanisms and document downstream consequences of the psychological comfort that smartphones provide. The findings show, for example, that (a) in moments of stress, consumers exhibit a greater tendency to seek out their smartphone (study 2); and (b) engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater stress relief than engaging in the same activity with a comparable device such as one’s laptop (study 3) or a similar smartphone belonging to someone else (study 4).
That is by Shiri Melumad and Michel Tuan Pham, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
CEO ages at hire
This is a profound trend. The average age of incoming CEOs for S&P 500 companies has increased about 14 years over the last 14 years.
From 1980 to 2001 the average age of a CEO dropped four years and then from 2005 to 2019 the averare incoming age of new CEOs increased 14 years!
This means that the average birth year of a CEO has not budged since 2005. The best predictor of becoming a CEO of our most successful modern institutions?
Being a baby boomer.
Here is more from Paul Millerd.
Friday assorted links
1. Pee-Wee Herman comeback in the works. And building a modern Congressional Technology Assessment Office.
2. Keeping a business running during a pandemic.
3. NBA loses possibly $100 million or more in China revenue. And: “Our findings suggest that nationalist propaganda can manipulate emotions and anti-foreign sentiment, but does not necessarily divert attention from domestic political grievances.”
4. 25 greatest classical pianists of all time? A good list, except for Rachmaninov at #1, and I am pleased to have heard virtually all of the moderns in concert. I would add Leif Andsnes and take off Lang Lang and Clara Haskil. And come on people — Pollini has to be top ten (he is not on the list at all), in spite of his recent age-related decline. And Grosvenor is a fine pianist, but I wouldn’t quite put him in this exalted territory, replace with Rudolf or even Peter Serkin? And if you are looking for peaks, Michelangeli surely belongs as well. Solomon?
5. Ryan Bourne on state capacity libertarianism. I will note that a possible coronavirus pandemic would likely boost the plausibility of state capacity libertarianism.
7. John Cochrane on woke academia, recommended, and horrifying.
The economist as scapegoat
Russ Roberts defends Milton Friedman (and many others, implicitly), excerpt:
What about spending for public schools? Has that been reduced in this allegedly draconian neoliberal era?
In 1960, per pupil expenditure for elementary and high school students was just under $4000. In 1980, when the neoliberal ideology allegedly began its ascendance, it was a little less than $8000. The latest numbers from 2015–2016 are just under $15,000. All numbers are corrected for inflation (in 2017–2018 dollars). So under this time of alleged cutbacks and resource starvation, per pupil expenditures rose dramatically.
What about transportation infrastructure? Total spending is up in real terms. What about as a percentage of GDP? There has been a decline since 1962 as a percentage of GDP but the numbers are basically flat since 1980…
What about investment in non-defense research and development, and health? Up dramatically since 1980 in real terms.
There is much more at the link, including excellent visuals.
Toward a more general theory of task complexity
That is a theme running throughout my latest Bloomberg column, here are some excerpts:
Why so many of America’s best and brightest college graduates go into management consulting, finance or law school is a perennial question. There are some compelling theories, which I will get to, but first I would like to turn the question around: Why are so many people in top positions, whether in the public or private sector, so old?
I submit that these two trends — and a third, declining productivity growth — are related: Many tasks have become increasingly complex in America, often more complex than people can learn in just a few years. By the time you have experience enough to perform them, you are less interested in taking risks. In your young adventurous years, by contrast, the only jobs you can get are those that don’t reward (or allow) adventure. The result of all this is a less audacious America.
And:
…the smart graduates of America’s top universities will seek relatively thick, liquid job markets, with high upside but also protection on the downside. Management consulting is perfect. If you are intelligent and hard-working, you can signal that quickly, and the entry-level tasks are sufficiently anodyne that few very specific skills are required. These jobs are designed to attract talent, so the consulting companies have an eventual option on promoting the best candidates. The same is true of law and the less quantitative parts of finance.
In the short term, this system seems to work for everyone. If you don’t like those vocations after a few years of trying, you still have elite connections and credentials that you can take somewhere else.
On net, America is selling its talented young people insurance value — but at the expense of long-term innovation. It might be better for the country if more of these individuals started businesses, tried their hand at chemistry or materials science, or worked in obscure corners of manufacturing in the Midwest. Of course, rates of failure or stagnation are higher in those areas, while glamour is often lower. Who wants to work on mastering a complex task for 10 or 15 years, with no real guarantee of commercial success?
And:
The slower rates of growth in scientific progress are part of this picture. Older scientists are more likely to be in charge, but they also make fewer conceptual breakthroughs. Younger scientists are more temperamentally inclined to be revolutionaries, but that is hard when it may take you until your late 20s just to learn the basics of your field. Most areas are too complex for a 23-year-old to make new scientific advances, no matter how brilliant he or she may be.
Tech of course is an exception. And please do note that de-bureaucratization could do a great deal to lower this task complexity, while other parts of it are inescapable — I didn’t have the space for that point in the column but will return to it and what might be done. Finally, I thank a number of people who contributed ideas and examples to my argument.
China, Texas fact of the day
When officials at the Texas A&M University System sought to determine how much Chinese government funding its faculty members were receiving, they were astounded at the results—more than 100 were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed their participation.
A plant pathologist at the Texas system, where the median annual salary for such scientists employed by the state is around $130,000, told officials that the researcher had been offered $250,000 in compensation and more than $1 million in seed money to start a lab in China through one of the talent programs. The researcher ultimately rejected the offer, according to the Texas system’s chief research security officer, Kevin Gamache, who led the recent 18-month review that has garnered praise from U.S. officials.
That is from Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe at the WSJ. As for Harvard:
Charles Lieber, a pioneer in nanotechnology, allegedly signed a contract with Chinese counterparts under which he would be paid around $50,000 a month, plus another $150,000 a year for personal expenses; he was also promised—and received—more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology, according to prosecutors.
He is specifically charged with deliberately lying to U.S. government investigators when asked if he received Chinese talent-plan funding, rather than simply omitting the information on forms.
Loo markets in everything
If you need a toilet while on the go, trust Toto Ltd. to come up with a solution. Just summon one up with your smartphone, the company says.
The toilet manufacturer unveiled the “mobile toilet concept” at the CES tech show held in Las Vegas in early January. The company intends to develop an exclusive app that brings a portable restroom trailer to a spot near the location the call is made.
Here is the full story, via Nigel B.
Graduate student fellowships at George Mason/Mercatus
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is currently accepting applications for our graduate student programs for the 2020-2021 academic year, including several graduate student fellowships for students in any discipline and from any university. The application deadline is March 15, 2020.
The Adam Smith Fellowship is a one-year, competitive program for doctoral students interested in political economy and is co-sponsored with Liberty Fund, Inc. Fellowships are awarded to students attending PhD programs from any university and in any discipline, including economics, philosophy, political science, and sociology.
The Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship is a one-year, competitive program for graduate students interested in applying political economy to pressing public policy issues. Fellowships are awarded to students attending master’s, juris doctoral, and doctoral programs at any university and in any discipline, including economics, law, political science, and public policy.
The Oskar Morgenstern Fellowship is a one-year, competitive fellowship program awarded to doctoral students with training in quantitative methods who interested in applying these methods to issues in political economy. Fellowships are awarded to students attending PhD programs from any university and in any discipline, including economics, political science, and sociology.
Here is the overall fellowships page.