All Hail Chris Blattman
The very excellent Chris Blattman discusses his work in Medellin Colombia bringing criminal gangs into civil society.
23 sentiments named
From a tweet of Niclas Berggren. Recommended.
Vellichor is “the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.”
I feel very strongly ellipsism: “a sadness that you’ll never know how history turned out.” Of course, the only thing worse than ellipsism is…non-ellipsism.
Via Daniel Klein.
Saving regret
We define saving regret as the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life. We measured saving regret and possible determinants in a survey of a probability sample of those aged 60-79. We investigate two main causes of saving regret: procrastination along with other psychological traits, and the role of shocks, both positive and negative. We find high levels of saving regret but relatively little of the variation is explained by procrastination and psychological factors. Shocks such as unemployment, health and divorce explain much more of the variation. The results have important implications for retirement saving policies.
That is from Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Michael D. Hurd, and Susann Rohwedder, in the NBER working paper series.
Saturday assorted links
1. MIE: “The San Francisco air quality is so bad that Uber drivers are selling masks out of their cars.”
2. When do botox appointments surge?
3. NIMBY vs. disability rights: “Historic Old Town Building Would Look ‘Horrible’ With Accessible Garage For Teen In Wheelchair, Neighbors Say.”
4. Transgender Instagram (NYT).
5. An IVF/IQ test.
*Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy*
By Mary L. Hirschfeld, here is the opening passage from the Preface:
My rather peculiar intellectual journey began with my pursuit of a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, granted in 1989, and culminated in a second Ph.D. in theology, from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. Economics and theology are two very different sets of discourses, and this book is the result of my effort to sort out the resulting cacophony in my own head. When I began my career, I would never have imagined writing such a book. For starters, I was an ordinary somewhat spiritually inclined but definitely not religious type when I began my academic career at Harvard in the fall of 1983.
Definitely recommended, and not just for Ross Douthat. It is exquisitely written as well. I enjoyed this sentence in the acknowledgements:
It is because of Tyler that I am a convinced Thomist, though that outcome would undoubtedly horrify him.
I am not easily horrified these days! Thus there are doubts, always doubts.
Buy the book here.
All Hail Dalton Conley
Conley describes his early academic work as “lefty sociology.” His Ph.D. thesis was on the black-white wealth gap and he dedicated his early career to studying the transmission of health and wealth between parents and children.
At N.Y.U., Conley kept getting into disagreements with geneticists, arguing that their methods were dangerously naïve. It seemed to him implausible that studying only twins — the gold standard of genetics research — was enough to teach us the difference between nature and nurture. But over time, he decided that it wasn’t enough to just argue. Conley is an academic, and even within that tortured group he is something of a masochist. At that time he was a tenured professor, the kind of gig most people see as the endgame of an academic career, and yet he decided to go back and grind out another Ph.D., this time in genetics. He went into his program believing that our social environment is largely the cause of our outcomes, and that biology is usually the dependent variable. By the end of his time, he says, the causal arrow in his mind had pretty much flipped the other way: “I tried to show for a range of outcomes that the genetic models were overstating the impact of genetics because of their crazy assumptions.” He sighs. “But I ended up showing that they’re right.”
From the New York Times piece on Geno-Economics (Tyler linked to it yesterday also).
Teacher expectations matter
From Nicholas W. Papageorge, Seth Gershenson, and Kyung Min Kang:
We develop and estimate a joint model of the education and teacher-expectation production functions that identifies both the distribution of biases in teacher expectations and the impact of those biases on student outcomes via self-fulfilling prophecies. Our approach leverages a unique feature of a nationally representative dataset: two teachers provided their educational expectations for each student. Identification of causal effects exploits teacher disagreements about the same student, an idea we formalize using lessons from the measurement error literature. We provide novel, arguably causal evidence that teacher expectations affect students’ educational attainment: Estimates suggest an elasticity of college completion with respect to teachers’ expectations of about 0.12. On average, teachers are overly optimistic about students’ ability to complete a four-year college degree. However, the degree of over-optimism of white teachers is significantly larger for white students than for black students. This highlights a nuance that is frequently overlooked in discussions of biased beliefs: less biased (i.e., more accurate) beliefs can be counterproductive if there are positive returns to optimism or if there are socio-demographic gaps in the degree of teachers’ optimism; we find evidence of both.
This is the most important thing I will have to tell you today. Here is commentary from Vera.
The new movement of geno-economics
By Jacob Ward at The New York Times. Do read the whole thing, here is just one small bit:
The geno-economists seem confident that human genes have a measurable influence on human outcomes. But publicizing whatever predictive power does lie in our genes runs the risk of misleading the rest of us into believing that control of our genes is control of our future. They’re adamant that their motives are in forestalling the dystopian implications of the work, in fighting off misinformation and misguided policies. “The world in which we can predict all sorts of things about the future based on saliva samples — personality traits, cognitive abilities, life outcomes — is happening in the next five years,” Benjamin says. “Now is the time to prepare for that.”
Via Garett Jones.
Friday assorted links
Everyone is upset at Amazon, but…
When we reported last month on the approximately $4.5 billion that city taxpayers are spending on the “dynamic neighborhood” of Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that our breakdown of the costs featured a tilde (~) before the $750 million figure for tax breaks for commercial developers — indicating that “this figure is our best guess.”
Now, a draft paper by two New School researchers has conducted an even more comprehensive trawl for Hudson Yards public costs, and while it generally confirms our analysis, it finds a couple of items we missed: A total of $1.1 billion worth of items, in fact, bringing the public price tag to a staggering $5.6 billion, with hundreds of millions of dollars still to flow from city coffers.
Ho hum! It’s not a tech company, so who cares? Here is the article, via Alex X. As for FoxConn and Wisconsin: “Remember: Wisconsin is giving Foxconn more $$$ and incentives than New York, Virginia and Tennessee combined gave Amazon. And the real kicker? Foxconn will create far fewer jobs (13,000) than Amazon (55,000)”
Science is getting less bang for its buck
By Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen in The Atlantic:
…we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades…
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn’t survey those prizes.
However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don’t look so good, that’s bad news for physics…
Why has science gotten so much more expensive, without producing commensurate gains in our understanding?
There is much more evidence and argument at the link. This appendix provides more detail on their empirical work. Self-recommending, if there ever was such a thing.
Do we need a Journal of Controversial Ideas?
That is the topic of my latest column for Bloomberg, here is one excerpt:
Now enter a newly announced project, called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. It will publish one issue per year, devoted to ideas that otherwise may not receive a fair hearing, and it will allow for anonymous or pseudonymous publication. Princeton philosopher Peter Singer is one of the names associated with the journal, which does not yet have an agreement with a publisher.
I am skeptical though not hostile toward this enterprise. It is sad that such a journal is seen as necessary. But I would suggest instead putting forth your ideas on a blog, on Twitter or on YouTube. Many politically incorrect figures have done just that. A Jordan Peterson YouTube lecture might range from the Bible to Jung to a critique of contemporary feminism, none of it refereed, but he has attracted millions of viewers. At the end of it all you get the Jordan Peterson worldview, which I suspect has more resonance than any particular empirical claim Peterson might make along the way.
In an internet-centered intellectual world, what persuades people is reading or hearing a charismatic personality, year in year out, promoting a particular view of the world. A lot of controversial ideas will have to ride that roller coaster, for better or worse.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is intended to be open access, though without a publishing contract we can’t know if it will have an open online comments section. It would be odd if not (would we have to create a companion Journal of Controversial Comments?), but with open comments you have to wonder whether a prestige publisher will take on the associated libel and reputational risks, and how high status the journal actually will be. It would not be practical to referee the comments, but that may mean the truly open internet, with its free-for-all atmosphere, will remain the dominant source for controversial ideas. “Controversial for me but not for thee” hardly seems like a winning slogan for such a revisionist enterprise.
Overall, I think controversial ideas will do best on the non-refereed internet, but I am not opposed to giving this venture a try. Refereeing is supposed to boost status, but will anyone put a publication here on their tenure vita? And:
To make a controversial idea stick through the academic process, maybe you do have conquer the biases and beat the odds against you, as Harvey Mansfield, Robert P. George and Oded Galor have done (to name just three). You also might pursue a “Straussian” approach, embedding subversive messages in your paper and covering them up with flowery rhetoric, hoping that some but not too many people notice what you are really saying.
Do read the whole thing.
Thursday assorted links
Coasean Skies
Air taxis and delivery drones may soon make the airspace between 200 and 5000 feet above ground level much more valuable. How is this airspace to be regulated? In a very good new paper Brent Skorup draws on Coase, Demsetz, and Ostrom and the law, economics and history of regulated commons to suggest new approaches.
[T]he technological shock—the commercialization of air taxis—will create novel urban airspace scarcity and collective action conflicts. When intended uses conflict, how should airspace be allocated? This is an old problem: the transformation of a common-pool resource in the face of intensive new uses for that resource.
…For traditional aviation, air traffic management is centralized and relies on complex collaboration between airlines, the general aviation industry, air traffic controllers, and regulators. Aircraft routes, payload, slot fees, airport locations, billing, and safe separation between aircraft are all highly regulated components of this interconnected system. Massive economic distortions result from the regulated rationing of airspace and terminal access. Low-altitude airspace (i.e.,200 feet to 5000 feet above ground level) offers a relatively blank slate to explore new models for air transport and to avoid command-and-control mistakes made in the past in aviation.
…Section IV introduces a different idea: that the FAA instead delimit geographic tracts of low-altitude airspace and assign exclusive use licenses to those tracts via auction for a term of years. Flight path, speed, terminal locations, aircraft size, UTM technologies, and pricing choices would largely be delegated to the tract licensees. Finally, Section V explains why this approach, which draws on real-world examples from spectrum auctions and other federal asset markets, may offer more competitive UTMs and dynamic efficiencies for low-altitude air transit. This auction approach also allows aviation regulators to focus less on scientific management of airspace and UTM interoperability and more on aircraft safety, dangerous weather, and inspections.
How much did the housing shock drive political polarization?
From Henry van Straehlen, a job market candidate from Northwestern:
This paper studies the effect of economic conditions on political polarization using micro-data on house prices, mortgages, and individual political contributions. I argue that shocks to housing wealth — the largest asset for most households in the U.S. — lead to political polarization. Using the housing market bust of 2007-2011 as an empirical laboratory, I show that negative shocks to housing wealth increase political polarization. The richness of the data enables me to use individual heterogeneity in housing location and timing of home purchase to disentangle changes in personal wealth from other factors that might be at play in determining political polarization. The effect of housing shocks on polarization is stronger during the crisis, and cannot be attributed to reverse causality or changing neighborhood composition. Survey evidence comparing homeowners and renters shows that only homeowners polarize in response to house price shocks, while renters do not — suggesting that house price shocks are not merely a proxy for other economic shocks. Furthermore, extreme politicians benefit electorally from negative house price shocks to their contributor network, whereas moderate politicians are hurt by negative house price shocks. Financial crises destabilize politics, which then can feed back into the crisis. These results provide insight into the difficulty of adopting structural economic reforms following financial crises.
Work in progress by Henry argues: “I show that when the common ownership between two firms increases through mutual fund acquisition of their stock, the firms converge in political donation behavior and lobbying activity.”