Further evidence for the babysitting theory of education
Bryan Caplan will feel vindicated:
This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents’ earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents’ labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children’s academic performance. During children’s pre-kindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children’s academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar quality but with shorter days. In contrast, parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents’ earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents’ earnings gains. This return is large compared to other labor market policies. Conversely, excluding earnings gains for parents, each dollar of net government expenditure yields only $0.46 to $1.32 in benefits, lower than many other education and children’s health interventions. We conclude that the economic returns to investing in UPK are high, largely because of full-day UPK’s effectiveness as an active labor market policy.
Here is more from Note by the way that these externalities end up internalized in higher wages for the parents, so at least in this data set there is no obvious case for public provision of a subsidized alternative.
Monday assorted links
The decline in retail sales jobs
It is steeper than I had thought:
The final labor market trend we uncovered was a very rapid decline in retail sales jobs, show in the figure below. Retail sales hovered at around 7.5 percent of employment from 2003 to 2013 but has since fallen to only 5.7 percent of employment, a decline about 25 percent in just a decade. Put another way – the U.S. economy added 19 million total jobs between 2013 and 2023 but lost 850 thousand retail sales jobs. The decline started well before the pandemic.
And STEM jobs truly are on the rise, even though that is what they may be telling you in school:
The figure also shows rapid employment growth in business and management jobs. The fastest growing occupations in that category are science and engineering managers, management analysts, and other business operations specialists. This is especially striking because STEM employment declined slightly between 2000 and 2012.
With a good picture at the link. That is all from David Deming, with further interesting material throughout.
Northern Ireland fact of the day
The NHS in Northern Ireland is the worst in the UK. During the quarter April/June 2021, over 349,000 people were waiting for a first appointment, 53 percent for over a year, an increase of 39,000 for the same period in 2020. Adjusted for population size, waiting lists in Northern Ireland are 100 times greater than those in England, a country 50 times its size.
That is from the truly excellent Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, by Padraig O’Malley. Imagine a detailed, thoughtful 500 pp. book on political issues you probably don’t care all that much about — is there any better way to study politics and political reasoning? Every page of this book offers substance.
Elsewhere, of course, we are told that reluctance to give up their health care system is a major reason why Irish reunification is not more popular in the North, and that holds for Catholics too.
This one will make the best non-fiction of the year list.
What I’ve been reading
Fiona Maddocks, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile. Captures the spirit of the man and his music, and a good addition to the growing literature on European cultural exiles in America. Readable and to the point.
Kurt Weyland, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat. This book has useful data, and perhaps it is a useful corrective to the most extreme fears out there. But overall it does more to persuade me of the opposite conclusion, namely that populism is a real threat. the author himself writes: “In fact, wide-ranging statistical studies find that only in about one-third of cases have populist chief executives done substantial damage to democracy. and they have truly suffocated liberal pluralism only in approximately one-quarter of all instances…”
Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. This very well-reviewed book does not seem to have either new data or new theory, as yes it does show a lot of the Nazis were “pretty ordinary people.” Yet it is so well-written and well-presented that it deserves a high recommendation nonetheless.
Tim Lankester, Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, The Failure, The Legacy, the author was on the scene in the Thatcher government.
Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths. Michael is a very smart philosopher, but this book seemed like a waste of time to me. Will it persuade anyone? Do we need Michael writing seven-page essays rebutting various claims of the BLM movement and the like?
Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History is too chatty/friendly a book for me, but for many readers it is probably worthwhile.
Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English is great fun, either to read or to browse. I do for instance use some of these words: one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky.
Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish, is a series of essays in honor of Dana and a very good introduction to his life and work. Here is my earlier CWT with Dana, information billionaire and aspiring information trillionaire.
Weep, Shudder, and Die: On Opera and Poetry, is Dana’s forthcoming book on opera. He claims that Sweeney Todd is one of the two greatest American operas.
The value of books on tractors
In addition, there were no textbooks to be found, except in libraries, where the numbers who tried to get in were so immense that readers could only access the building for one hour, according to surname. An enterprising Shanghai publisher began reprinting textbooks from the early 1960s, which soon were worth their weight in gold. Young people in faraway places were pleading to relatives to send the books to them. Soon there was a black market. Printers sold imperfect copies outside the printworks. Textbooks were resold at phenomenal prices. In one part of the country, manuals on tractor repairs, normally in high demand, were exchanged twenty to one for physics textbooks. When the doors to the examination halls were finally opened, few prospective students were surprised that one topic set for Chinese composition was “An unforgettable day.” In the end, 278,000 students were admitted for college starting in the fall of 1978. One student, enrolled at Yan’an University in Shaanxi, wrote home to his family about how surprised he was that people in the city were nearly as poor as those in his village. But his admission to college opened a new world for him, with new kinds of people.
That is from the new and interesting Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road to Reform.
Sunday assorted links
1. Do people exposed to generative AI become more pessimistic about inequality?
2. The economics of WordPress? I don’t understand this well at all.
4. James Broughel and I debate sovereign wealth funds on NPR.
A country run by schoolteachers?
One disgruntled veteran at a FF annual meeting in 2016 was heard to complain, ‘They’re all fucking schoolteachers now.’ He was partly right. In the thirtieth Dáil in 2007 there were 3 university lecturers, 14 primary school teachers and 14 secondary school teachers; there were also 16 lawyers, 5 doctors, 3 nurses and 14 farmers; 22 TDs described themselves as business people and 26 ‘now qualify for the bus pass’; 31 were the children of former TDs. By 2011, the number of TDs from a business background had only increased from 22 to 25, while the number of primary and secondary teachers was 30, making teaching still the largest profession represented in the Dáil, although the number of TDs who were offspring of former TDs was reduced to 15.
That is from the new and highly useful Diarmaid Ferriter book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020.
The polity that is Russia
Russia’s parliament, the State Duma, is working on a law that aims to ban so-called child-free ideology which it sees as harmful to traditional values.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, announced recently that fines for “propaganda of childlessness” will amount to up to 400,000 rubles ($4,300; €3,879) for individuals and up to 5 million rubles for companies.
This legislation is based on a 2022 law banning “LGBTQ+ propaganda.”
…The first draft of this new law to ban “child-fee ideology” was discussed in the State Duma in September 2022. The following year, special “family lessons” were introduced in schools. According to officials, their aim is to “form a healthy society” and increse the “popularization of large families.” Several parliamentarians have even raised the idea of imposing taxes on childless families.
At the same time, access to emergency contraception and abortion has been limited in Russia. New Health Ministry guidelines instruct medics on how best to dissuade woman from having an abortion, while many private clinics have lost their license to carry out abortions. Ten regions in Russia have imposed fines for “inducing” women to have abortions.
Here is the full story. Via Rasheed Griffith.
Scott Alexander on Milei
Monthly inflation went from 25% to about 4%. This is obviously great, but there are two small notes of concern.
First, the 25% number was just one really bad month. Inflation had been at a baseline of about 4% for most of the last five years. The immediately-pre-Milei government really cranked up the money printer in its last few months, increasing the numbers to 10% for a few months, and finally 25% for one really bad final month. Milei was able to get it down to its usual baseline of 4%, but I think he was hoping to get it lower. So far it’s been stubborn and stayed at the 4% level through the spring and summer.
Second, even 4% monthly inflation is awful. 4% monthly = 60% yearly. Remember, the United States briefly had 9% yearly inflation after COVID and people were livid. Argentina’s “good” “improved” inflation is still 7x that.
Saturday assorted links
1. Another meta-study on smart phone use and mental illness.
2. Ross Douthat has a serialized fantasy novel.
5. Why is “the Silent Generation” so well-cited in philosophy?
6. Henry Oliver on the new Sally Rooney and neurodiversity.
7. Rebecca Lowe Substack: “philosophical takes on what’s happening, particularly in politics, from a (classical) liberal point of view. bonus pieces on cool stuff like space, fiscal decentralisation, and whether we’re obligated to bring back the dinosaurs.”
How much does hard work matter?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Economists from Princeton, Vanderbilt and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have estimated just how much hard work contributes to inequality in lifetime earnings. While the answer depends on context, they arrived at an average for the US workforce: About 20% of the variance in lifetime earnings can be explained by differences in hours worked…
The decision to work harder operates on at least two levels. First, you put in more total time, which leads to higher lifetime earnings. Second, you invest more in your human capital, which makes you more productive. Between one-third and one-half of the higher income for the harder workers stems from this human capital channel. One lesson is that if you are going to work hard, you should do so relatively early in your life, so as to reap the human capital benefits for future years.
Another crucial point is that those who work harder do so because they want to. There can be different kinds of heterogeneity in ability, including in learning capability or initial human capital. But in the researchers’ model, 90% of the variation in earnings due to hard work comes from a simple desire to work harder.
And this:
The study focuses on the US, but it has implications for Europe as well. In France, for instance, work is limited to 48 hours per week, with a standard week of 35 hours. That reduces average earnings and inequality in earnings, since it is harder for the top achievers to keep making more money. This research finds that the losers from this regulation are found at all parts of the wage distribution, not only at the top.
How different are Trump judges?
Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking “good” judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges. Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.
That new paper is by Stephen J. Choi and Mitu Gulati, who seem to be academic “normies” (NYU and UVA, respectively), not MAGAland crazies.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The case why culture is not stuck
From the excellent Katherine Dee, here is just one excerpt:
TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital vaudeville: a song, a short sketch, a physical feat, slapstick, animal acts and satire, one after another, in a personalized variety show on your phone.
And:
It’s a spectrum. At one end, we have Internet Personalities, with their cults of devotion. In the middle, we find fan culture, where some fans become prominent figures within their fandoms, stars in their own right. These Big Name Fans occasionally break out to create their own media kingdoms, as was the case with E.L. James, who authored Fifty Shades of Grey, itself originally Twilight fanfiction, and Cassandra Clare, who began in the Harry Potter fan community, before going on to write several popular fantasy series. At the other end of the spectrum are anonymous creators, whose approach to authorship is almost medieval: their projects are not about them as individuals, but the meme, the project, the aesthetic, the vision. They are less like the expressive individualists of Modern art, than the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages.
Much has been said about memes as art and the collective labor and imagination that goes into their creation, but it extends further than that. It’s not just memes. Creating mood boards on Pinterest or curating aesthetics on TikTok are evolving art forms, too. Constructing an atmosphere, or “vibe,” through images and sounds, is itself a form of storytelling, one that’s been woefully misunderstood and even undermined as shallow. Many of these aesthetics have staying power, like “coquette” and “cottagecore.” They’re not passing fads or stand-ins for personalities or subcultures. They are more than ever-evolving vectors for consumerism. They’re a type of immersive art that we don’t yet have the language to fully describe.
But that is the case with so much of what’s new. We won’t understand it until it’s in the rearview mirror.
Interesting throughout. Of course AI-aided creations will be the next step in this process. Maybe you don’t like a lot of these new forms, perhaps because they do not have the nobility and grandeur of say Bach. One simple point is that it is not optimal for every period in culture to focus on exactly what you want from it. This point is rarely recognized. Diversity across time is valuable as well!
Friday assorted links
1. Bitcoin documentary on HBO. Claims they will unmask Satoshi.
2. GPT Canvas, for writing and research writing, interactive. And more here.
3. Inaugural World Bank Business Ready report (successor to the Doing Business which ended in 2021 over political rigging) is now out. Hungary, Estonia, and Singapore take the top spots.
4. More Scott Sumner on movies.
5. Toyota to invest $500mn in flying taxi start-up Joby (FT).
6. Writing Examples, from David Perell, to learn from the best writing in history.
7. The shift toward protectionism, starting in 2017, has failed.
8. U.S. obesity rate fell in 2023.
9. Miles Brundage speaks: “With very rare exceptions, the economics profession is completely discrediting itself by either ignoring or badly misunderstanding AI”