Depression and religion in adolescence
Depression is the leading cause of illness and disability in adolescence. Many studies show a correlation between religiosity and mental health, yet the question remains whether the relationship is causal. We exploit within-school variation in adolescents’ peers to deal with selection into religiosity. We find robust effects of religiosity on depression that are stronger for the most depressed. These effects are not driven by the school social context; depression spreads among close friends rather than through broader peer groups that affect religiosity. Exploration of mechanisms suggests that religiosity buffers against stressors in ways that school activities and friendships do not.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Sriya Iyer, and Anwen Zhang, forthcoming in the JPE. I find this to be one of the most underemphasized benefits of religion, perhaps because religious people themselves do not wish to come off as overly neurotic. And the effect seems to be large:
…a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by 11 percent. By comparison, increasing mother’s education from no high school degree to a high school degree or more only decreases the probability of being depressed by about 5 percent.
And for the most depressed individuals, religiosity seems to be more effective than cognitive-based therapy “one of the most recommended forms of treatment.”
Thursday assorted links
Spain Debates Whether Left Hand or Right Hand Should Pay Tax
Spain is currently embroiled in tremendous debate over who should pay the AJD tax, a tax on the creation of a mortgage. Should the buyers (consumers) or the sellers of the mortgage (the banks) pay the tax? The Supreme Court, the President, and the legislature have all stepped in.
At the beginning of this year, the civil division of Supreme Court clearly ruled that the tax on mortgages should be paid by consumers and not banks. However, on the 18th of October the Contentious-Administrative division pronounced the other way, that banks should pay. So two divisions of different jurisdictions of the Supreme Court (civil and administrative) have issued conflicting sentences producing a legal mess…
that was the situation as of October 24. But then on Tuesday:
The Spanish Supreme Court has done a U-turn again: it is the clients who must pay for a controversial mortgage tax, and not the banks
…The decision was reached on Tuesday evening in the Administrative Division of the Supreme Court after two days of intense debate, and with just two votes of difference: 15 justices were in favor of making the client pay the levy, and 13 voted to confirm a groundbreaking decision reached by this same court in mid-October that it should be the banks who pick up the tab.
Leaders are up in arms and street protests are threatened:
Leaders of the anti-austerity Podemos party have already announced protests over a decision that “calls into question” the court’s independence and undermines democracy, in the words of party leader Pablo Iglesias. …Alberto Garzón, head of the United Left coalition, went even further: “Private banks are thieves, they are the main enemy of democracy and they are responsible for gutting our economies. A majority of the Supreme Court sides with them, ratifying that justice has a price and that the system is rotten and spent,” he tweeted.
Under pressure, the socialist Prime Minister announced “a Royal Decree would be approved ‘so that Spaniards will never pay this tax again’,” and the Prime Minister pledged that the new law would be in place by Friday!
What’s amazing is that the Spanish uproar is over a decision that Econ 101 says does not make a whit’s worth of difference to anything of importance. Whether the buyers send the check to the government or the sellers does not change the true incidence of the tax. As Tyler and I say in Modern Principles, “Who pays the tax does not depend on the laws of Congress but on the laws of supply and demand.” The tax simply drives a wedge between what the buyers pay and what the seller receives. Since sellers typically post prices, when the sellers must send the check the posted price will include the tax but the price the sellers receive will be the posted price minus the tax. If buyers must send the check to the government the posted price will not include the tax but the buyers will have to pay the posted price plus the tax. Either way, the seller, buyer, and government all end up net the same amount. It’s little different than debating whether the right or left hand must pay the tax. See Tyler in the video below for the diagram and further details.
Thus, the whole Spanish imbroglio has been caused by a failure to understand Econ 101.
Addendum: Bank shares fluctuated as the tax jumped back and forth which might suggest non-neutrality but that is because an earlier proposal would have had the banks pay consumers “back” for taxes the consumers paid years ago. A retroactive tax would indeed be bad for banks because while the tax would be retroactive the price would not. Going forward, however, the price adjusts with the placement of the tax so there is little beyond convenience and transaction cost to prefer one system to the other. In fact, once it was established that the tax would not be retroactive, bank share prices recovered.
Hat tip: Mauricio Drelichman.
Acquisition Talk: A daily blog on the theory and practice of weapons system acquisition
That is a new blog by Eric Lofgren, an Emergent Ventures recipient. Here is an excerpt from one post:
The story was from 1938. It sounds astounding to modern ears. Congress did not earmark money for special projects. Pitcairn was a bit of a political entrepreneur by convincing his representative to get a project funded that funneled money back to his own district.
Back then, the Army and Navy were funded according to organization and object. Project earmarking only started becoming routine with the implementation of the program budget in 1949 (and really not until the rise of the PPBS in 1961).
I often say that the budget should be the most important aspect of defense reform, not the acquisition or requirements processes.
By the way, the French parliament doesn’t earmark defense funding. There’s actually quite a bit to learn from the French experience.
Here is his post on cost disease in weapons acquisition, and more on that here: “It’s clear that defense acquisition costs are growing at least as fast, and probably much faster, than education and healthcare costs. Defense platform unit costs grow nominally from 7-11% per year. Doing some adjustments, DOD production costs probably grow twice the rate of inflation.”
Here is his general post on acquisition reform and the limits of decentralization, maybe the best introduction to his overall point of view.
Forecasting tournaments, epistemic humility and attitude depolarization
People often express political opinions in starkly dichotomous terms, such as “Trump will either trigger a ruinous trade war or save U.S. factory workers from disaster.” This mode of communication promotes polarization into ideological in-groups and out-groups. We explore the power of an emerging methodology, forecasting tournaments, to encourage clashing factions to do something odd: to translate their beliefs into nuanced probability judgments and track accuracy over time and questions. In theory, tournaments advance the goals of “deliberative democracy” by incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, thus depolarizing unnecessarily polarized debates. We examine the hypothesis that, in the process of thinking critically about their beliefs, tournament participants become more moderate in their own political attitudes and those they attribute to the other side. We view tournaments as belonging to a broader class of psychological inductions that increase epistemic humility and that include asking people to explore alternative perspectives, probing the depth of their cause-effect understanding and holding them accountable to audiences with difficult-to-guess views.
That is a new paper from Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, and Hal R. Arkes, via the excellent Kevin Lewis and Michelle Dawson. One very general implication is that there are mental, writing, and practical exercises that really can improve your habits of thought.
My Conversation with Eric Schmidt
Self-recommending, here is the audio and video. Here is the video, here is one excerpt from the dialogue:
COWEN: So you receive an offer to run Google. Why were you so skeptical about Google at first?
SCHMIDT: Well, I assumed that search wasn’t very important, and I assumed the ads didn’t work. I was so concerned about the ads that, after I accepted the offer — because it just seemed like it was interesting, and a lot of luck comes from doing things that are interesting, and sort of creating your own luck — I hauled the then–sales executive, whose name was Tim Armstrong, who you all know well, and I said, “Tim, prove to me that these ads work.”
So they showed me a set of ads, and they looked pretty foolish to me. So I said, “Well, let’s go find the finance person,” of which there was one, and the accounting system was done on QuickBooks. I said, “Prove to me that people are paying for these ads,” and they did.
We then did an ads conversion in the first year, which was called Project Drano, where we basically took three different ads databases, which were simple compared to today’s databases, and merged them into one. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified that the ruse that we had — because we had fixed pricing on our ads — that people would discover that our ads were not worth anything.
So I organized what I called the cash restriction period, where the only thing you could do if you wanted to spend money, is you could only spend money on Friday at 10 AM, and you had to come to me to justify it, which very much shuts down spending.
So we get to this conversion, we turn the thing over, and of course, we didn’t bother to build into the tools. We had no metrics. We didn’t know what was going on. I’m going, “Oh my God, the company is bankrupt. My first year, I’ve done a terrible job. What will the board think?” I did my best to notify everybody we were going to go kaput.
The auction produced a price that was three times higher than the previous prices. Very interesting. So much for the cash restriction period, and the rest is history.
And from Eric:
We did all sorts of things. My favorite example is that we would interview people to death. We interviewed this one gentleman sixteen times, and we couldn’t decide. So I picked a random number, which was half, and I said, “We should have a max of eight, and if we can’t decide after eight . . .” We’ve since done a statistical analysis, and the answer today is four to five interviews.
And here is my bit on Eric:
COWEN: Now early on, you were an intern at Bell Labs, and also PARC, which belonged to Xerox, and I think of those two institutions as stemming from earlier glory years of American science.
Is it fair to think of your career as in some sense, you’re the person who spans those two eras, the Bell Labs-PARC era of doing things, and then the tech era of manipulating information, and that your ability to bring expertise from those two areas together is what has made you a unique figure? Is that a fair assessment of how you fit into the picture?
And there is this bit:
COWEN: How did it influence you having a father who was a famous economist? He wrote on balance of payments crises. What did you draw from him? Did that have a role in using so much economics in Google?
SCHMIDT: Well, what’s interesting is, I asked my father, “If you’re such a good economist, why are we not rich?”
I very much enjoyed doing this event, which was for Village Global, a new venture capital firm. Here is a Village Global post on lessons from the event.
The elections
From Matt Yglesias on Twitter:
Very normal Democrats won all kinds of House races without reviving “blue dog” antics but also a bunch of reality checks for the capital-l Left in these results.
Not just a couple of House races where insurgent candidates fizzled, but the California rent control initiative the Washington “green new deal” initiative and the MD-Gov race all show limited appetite for ambitious left policy in even blue states.
Conversely, the more modest economic progressive agenda of Medicaid expansion and minimum wage increases continues to triumph even in very conservative states.
“over the past 21 midterm elections, the President’s party has lost an average 30 seats in the House, and an average 4 seats in the Senate” NY Times sez it’s R – 26 in House and + 2-5 in Senate. Yet they call it “A rebuke to Trump”. That’s kind of just wishful thinking.
Somehow — miraculously — democracy did not die, I am still writing blog posts for tomorrow morning, fascism has yet to arrive, and life goes on!
p.s. the youth vote was not up much. And at least one Kremlin mole has been ousted.
The Mobbing Game
Klaus Abbink and Gönül Dogan have a horrific new paper. Horrific because despite being in a safe, experimental setting the results are all too realistic:
We introduce the experimental mobbing game. Each player in a group has the option to nominate one of the other players or to nominate no one. If the same person is nominated by all other players, he loses his payoff and the mob gains. We conduct three sets of experiments to study the effects of monetary gains, fear of being mobbed, and different types of focality. In the repeated mobbing game, we find that subjects frequently coordinate on selecting a victim, even for modest gains. Higher gains make mobbing more likely. We find no evidence that fear of becoming the victim explains mobbing. Richer and poorer players are equally focal. Pity plays no role in mobbing decisions. Ingroup members – introduced by colours – are less likely to be victims, and both payoff difference and colour difference serve as strong coordination devices. Commonly employed social preference theories do not explain our findings.
In short, the authors give experimental participants an opportunity to nominate a victim and redistribute towards themselves. Willingness to do this is common even in cases where the victims lose a lot and the bullies gain only a little. In some cases, the redistribution increases social welfare but these are also the cases where the bullies get a lot. Overall, it’s pretty clear that motivation is greed rather than increased social welfare but it would have been good to have an experiment that distinguished better the greed and social welfare cases. Importantly, distinguishing one of the players by making them poorer/richer/yellow also increased mobbing of that player.
I loved this footnote:
The labels [M,T, G, P] are also a hidden homage to the inmates Mather, Travers, Greenhill and Pearce, who escaped from a Tasmanian prison camp in a group of eight in 1822, only to get lost in the forest. When food ran out, the four conspired to apply the Custom of the Sea to the others. When no-one else was left, they turned to killing and eating one another, until only Pearce survived. All victims were chosen in decidedly non-random ways. This story is one of the great Australian foundation myths, and it was an inspiration for this study (for a dramatic reconstruction, see Van Diemen’s Land (2009)). We are confident that none of our Northern European subjects made that connection.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen.
China sentences of the day
With the Internet, too much information leaks out about the failings of governments. Thus, they are unable to “rule by persuasion” and are increasingly reduced to relying on sheer force. As a provocative example, Gurri believes that the Chinese government now is more dependent on force than it would be without the Internet.
That is from Arnold Kling reviewing Martin Gurri’s forthcoming The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
Emergent Ventures grant recipients, the first cohort
Here is the first round of winners of the new Emergent Ventures initiative at Mercatus, led by me. The list is ordered roughly in the order grants were made, and reflects no other prioritization. All project descriptions are mine alone and should not be considered literal attributions of intent to the project applicants. Here goes:
Anonymous grant for writing in Eastern Europe.
Pledged grant to San Francisco’s Topos House, conditional on finding a “social science prodigy” to live in the house for a while and interact with the other Topos fellows. Topos is a San Francisco house where several tech prodigies live and periodically seminars and larger group interactions are held there or connected to the house.
Travel grant made to 18-year-old economics prodigy, to travel to San Francisco to meet with members of the “rationality community.” The hope is to boost her career trajectory.
Grant to support the work of Mark Lutter and his Center for Innovative Governance Research, on charter cities and also an attempt to create a new charter city.
Grant to Harshita Arora to help her pursue work in brain science, including brain-computer interfaces to help disabled people manipulate and move objects. Harshita is a 17-year-old Indian prodigy, who first received attention for her programming work in the app space. Harshita made her bio and proposal public: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j5Zf2RIiKVUUZzJb6qGQdx2WmG7q4NS9/view
Leonard Bogdonoff has a project to scrape Instagram and create a searchable concordance of street art around the world. His website is here and his blog is medium.com/@rememberlenny. One use of this project is to amplify the voice of “protest art” against the constraints of censorship from autocratic governments, but it is also a new way to glean usable information from Instagram.
Travel and conference grant to Juan Pablo Villarino, from Argentina, sometimes called “the world’s greatest hitchhiker.”
Ben Southwood, public intellectual from England, support for his writing and research on why progress in science has slowed down.
Eric Lofgren has worked at the Pentagon for seven years and now will spend a year at Mercatus/George Mason to develop the skills, including blogging and podcasting, to become the nation’s leading public intellectual on defense procurement.
A two-year pledge to Gaurav Venkataraman, at University College of London, to support his doctoral work on the idea of RNA-based memory. This research also has exciting implications for the design of artificial intelligence.
Joy Buchanan, economist, a grant to conduct research on why people become entrepreneurs and initiate start-ups, using the methods of experimental economics.
Michael Sonnenschein, Masters student at MIT in development economics (and a television screenwriter) a grant for research to reform and improve the Haitian lottery system, and turn it into a means to combat poverty.
Stefan Roots is writing and editing an on-line and also paper newspaper to cover local news in Chester, Pennsylvania, aimed at the African-American community.
Jeffrey Clemens, professor at UC San Diego, a grant to help him develop his on-line writing in economics.
Kelly Smith has a project to further extend and organize a parent-run charter school system in Arizona, Prenda, using Uber-like coordinating apps and “minimalist” educational methods.
David Perell, to encourage and support his work in podcasting and social media.
We are in the midst of processing several other awards as well, so do not worry if you are not yet mentioned.
I am delighted to welcome this very prestigious and accomplished “entering class” of Emergent Ventures fellows. If you are considering applying, please note that we are interested in other topics and methods as well.
Will a low price actually prove good for crypto?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Now the time has come for crypto to go on a diet. No more easy money. No more thoughts about ICOs leading to quick riches. The rhetoric is shifting toward a more cautious or even apologetic tone. The corresponding reality can perhaps be one of greater focus and relevance.
We’re at the point where crypto finally has to prove its social worth. But what might that mean? Imagine using crypto as a medium of micropayments to pay for media on the internet. Or perhaps you’ll use the blockchain to verify your identity, rather than telling some stranger on the phone the last four digits of your Social Security number. Or how about a system for self-executing, zero-cost contracts? (For example: I will give $10,000 to a charity if 10 other people do.) Maybe the burgeoning field of virtual reality will rely on crypto to support some of its transactions, starting with virtual sex, which the major banks might stay away from. Alternatively, I might use crypto assets to send money to Mexico, avoiding the steep charges from current money transfer systems. In the more utopian visions, crypto leads to the rise of entirely self-governing systems, powered by the blockchain.
And this:
By the way, if you are confused by the terms “proof of stake” and “sharding” (and others), that is probably a good thing. As the tech guru Stewart Brand is reported to have said, the proliferation of terminology in crypto is a sign that new ideas and possibly important new technologies are afoot.
Stay tuned…
Tuesday assorted links
1. “Love it or hate it, Brutalism is definitely back.” But it’s not your grandpa’s brutalism…
2. Goldilocks fiscal! Can’t ever say that “austerity” is good.
3. Laetitia Ky, from Ivory Coast.
5. Memory experts are most skeptical of the notion of repressed memories.
Why Is the Fight for Free Speech Led by the Psychologists?
Jeffrey Sachs (not the economist) asks, Why are psychologists so prevalent in the free speech movement?:
If any academic field is associated with the contemporary debate surrounding free speech, it’s psychology. Haidt, Pinker, Peterson, Saad, Jussim, even Lehmann. All specialize or have backgrounds in academic psych.
The Scholar’s Stage offers a good answer:
I attribute this all to three things.
1. The conclusions academics reach tend to rankle the right. There are exceptions. If your research draws on evolutionary psychology, focuses on innate behavioral differences, or touches any sort of psychometrics (e.g., IQ), the angry tide does not sweep in from the right. The wave these men and women fear crashes in from leftward side. Moreover, the sort of leftist opposition that the academic consensus on these topics face leaves little room for rational debate or compromise: controversies over psychometrics or evolutionary psychology are usually framed in terms of good and evil, not right and wrong. The scientists involved are to be conquered, not reasoned with.
So that is point one: the people who want to shut controversial psychologists up are overwhelmingly creatures of the left.
2. Psychology, especially social psychology, is itself an overwhelmingly leftist discipline. We actually have data on this, and it is pretty grim: a recent survey of American tenure-track professors reveals that there 17.4 registered Democrat psychologists for every single registered Republican.[2] If there is a field of people who ought to be sympathetic to social justice railroading, these people are it.
3. Despite this, behavioral scientists have not yet adopted the rhetorical techniques or methodology of inquiry of “critical theory.” In contrast, see how these modes of inquiry have swallowed up the fields of anthropology and communications, and established creeping colonies in history, sociology, and area studies. Given the left-leaning sympathies of almost all in the profession, the threat that the same might happen to the study of human behavior is real.
…Haidt et. al. are confident they can win the debate if they are allowed to debate. For the heterodox anthropologist or sociologist the game is already over: their discipline has already been conquered. For the economist, the threat is too remote to take seriously. Behavioral science exists in that rare in-between: methodologically, it has the tools to fight back against the excesses of the activist. Socially, it provides a compelling reason for its practitioners to use them.
What should I ask Rebecca Kukla?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is her home page:
Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University
Also: amateur powerlifter and boxer and certified sommelier
I live in the middle of Washington, DC, with my 13-year-old son Eli and my two Portal-themed cats, Chell and Cube. My research focuses on social epistemology, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of language.
This interview is an excellent entry point into her thought and life, here is an excerpt from the introduction:
[Rebecca] talks about traveling the world with her nomadic parents, her father who was a holocaust survivor and philosopher, hearing the Dream argument in lieu of bedtime stories, chaotic exposure to religion, getting a job at and apartment at the age of 14, the queerness of Toronto, meeting John Waters and Cronenberg, her brother who is the world’s first openly transgender ordained rabbi, getting into ballet, combating an eating disorder, the importance of chosen family, co-authoring an article with her dad, developing an interest in philosophy of mathematics, the affordability of college in Canada, taking care of a disabled, dramatically uninsured loved one, going to University of Pitt for grad school, dealing with aggravated depression, working with Brandom, McDowell, the continental/analytic distinction, history of philosophy, how feminism and women—such as Tamara Horowitz, Annette Baier, and Jennifer Whiting–were treated at Pitt, coping with harassment from a member of the department, impostor syndrome, Dan Dennett and ‘freeedom’, her sweet first gig (in Vermont), dining with Bernie Sanders, spending a bad couple of years in Oregon, having a child, September 11th, securing tenure and becoming discontent at Carleton University, toying with the idea of becoming a wine importer, taking a sabbatical at Georgetown University which rekindled her love of philosophy, working on the pragmatics of language with Mark Lance, Mass Hysteria and the culture of pregnancy, how parenting informs her philosophy, moving to South Florida and the quirkiness of Tampa, getting an MA in Geography, science, philosophy and urban spaces, boxing, starting a group for people pursuing non-monogamous relationships, developing a course on Bojack Horseman, her current beau, Die Antwoord, Kendrick, Trump, and what she would do if she were queen of the world…
And from the interview itself:
I suspect that I’m basically unmentorable. I am self-destructively independent and stubborn, and deeply resentful of any attempt to control or patronize me, even when that’s not really a fair assessment of what is going on.
So what should I ask her?
How much do the experts wish to discount the future by?
…we find that expert opinion is particularly varied on the rate of time preference. The modal value is zero, in line with many prominent opinions. But with a median (mean) of 0.5 percent (1.1 percent)…
And:
…while we find that experts recommend placing greater weight on normative than positive issues when determining the SDR, most believe that the SDR should be informed by both.
That is from the latest issue of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, “Discounting Disentangled” by Drupp, Freeman, Groom, and Nesje. You will of course find a lengthy discussion of these issues in my own Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.