Wednesday assorted links
1. Mr. Regret, of Bangalore. Though he finally succeeded.
2. Might the SNP reverse Brexit?
3. IV and 2SLS.
4. Catalini and Gans on the economics of blockchains.
My Conversation with Douglas Irwin, podcast
Because Doug’s book is just out, we are rushing out the podcast, here is the audio, most of all about trade, trade history, and trade policy. We covered how much of 19th century American growth was due to tariffs, trade policy toward China, the cultural argument against free trade, whether there is a national security argument for agricultural protectionism, TPP, how new trade agreements should be structured, the trade bureaucracy in D.C., whether free trade still brings peace, Smoot-Hawley, the American Revolution (we are spoiled brats), Dunkirk, why New Hampshire is so wealthy, Brexit, Alexander Hamilton, NAFTA, the global trade slowdown, premature deindustrialization, and the history of the Chicago School of Economics, among other topics.
Here you can buy Doug’s Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy.
Game of Theories: The Austrians
Here is the fourth video in our Game of Theories mini-class: The Austrians.
The polity that is Denmark, let’s root for Brooke Harrington
An American citizen who teaches in Denmark, she may be charged with a crime and kicked out of the country for violating the terms of her work visa, carrying a criminal record for the rest of her life. Her sin? Giving a talk to Danish Parliament:
Laws barring nonpermanent Danish residents from holding side jobs, paid or unpaid, have been in effect for some time. But Harrington said public scholarship is hardly a side job for an academic. Moreover, a separate Danish law mandates that university faculty members publicly share their research. Ironically, on the day Harrington learned of her criminal charges, she was notified that she’d received an award for research dissemination from the Danish Society for Education and Business.
And no matter that Parliament invited Harrington to speak — it’s facing scrutiny, too, for being unaware of laws preventing academics from speaking outside their universities without first obtaining explicit permission to do so from the Danish Agency for International Recruitment and Integration. That permission process is lengthy, by the way; Harrington said applying for a recent one-day work permit to give lecture to a political group took 15 hours.
Here is the full story.
Why isn’t “stereotype threat” stronger in the data?
From a recent survey by Pennington, Heim, Levy, and Larkin:
This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective (n = 6), cognitive (n = 7) and motivational mechanisms (n = 4). Empirical support was accrued for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat. Other research points to the assertion that stereotype threatened individuals may be motivated to disconfirm negative stereotypes, which can have a paradoxical effect of hampering performance. However, stereotype threat appears to affect diverse social groups in different ways, with no one mediator providing unequivocal empirical support. Underpinned by the multi-threat framework, the discussion postulates that different forms of stereotype threat may be mediated by distinct mechanisms.
Or from Wikipedia:
Whether the effect occurs at all has also been questioned, with researchers failing to replicate the finding. Flore and Wicherts concluded the reported effect is small, but also that the field is inflated by publication bias. They argue that, correcting for this, the most likely true effect size is near zero (see meta-analytic plot, highlighting both the restriction of large effect to low-powered studies, and the plot asymmetry which occurs when publication bias is active).[
Earlier meta-analyses reached similar conclusions. For instance, Ganley et al. (2013)[10] examined stereotype threat on mathematics test performance. They report a series of 3 studies, with a total sample of 931 students. These included both childhood and adolescent subjects and three activation methods, ranging from implicit to explicit. While they found some evidence of gender differences in math, these occurred regardless of stereotype threat. Importantly, they found “no evidence that the mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat”. In addition, they report that evidence for stereotype threat in children appears to be subject to publication bias. The literature may reflect selective publication of false-positive effects in underpowered studies, where large, well-controlled studies find smaller or non-significant effects:
Personally, I find stereotype threat to be a very intuitive idea with a fair amount of anecdotal support. So why aren’t these meta-results more convincing?
The North Korean defector
Lee said he had never seen such an extreme case of parasitic infection. The soldier had worms not seen in South Korea since the 1970s, but they appeared to be somewhat common north of the border. In a 2014 study, South Korean doctors sampled 17 females who escaped North Korea and found that seven of them were infected with parasitic worms, according to the BBC. They also had higher rates of diseases such as hepatitis B and tuberculosis.
What was just as curious were the raw corn kernels found in Oh’s [the defector’s] stomach, which shocked many South Koreas. North Korean soldiers typically have a higher ranking on the food-rationing list, so it was alarming that the soldier had been eating uncooked corn.
Some reports claim that North Korean soldiers have been ordered to steal corn from farmers to fend off hunger.
Here is further information.
Sex Offender Hysteria
Illinois Public Radio has an astounding story on sex offenders who have completed their sentences but are still behind bars because they can’t find a place to live. How hard can it be to find a place to live? Sex offenders in Illinois cannot live close to:
- Elementary and High Schools
- Day Care Centers
- Public Parks
- Pools
- Libraries
- Malls
In addition, they can’t live in a house with a minor. One convicted offender could not return to his mother’s house because his sister was 17 (his conviction did not involve the sister). Sex offenders also cannot live in houses with devices that can access the internet including computers, smartphones and televisions.
Contrary to popular belief, sex offenders have low rates of recidivism relative to many other crimes. It’s almost impossible, however, to argue against a law that is supposed to protect the public from sex offenders. What kind of monster could argue against a law preventing a convicted sex offender from living near a day care center? And who would want a pervert at the mall? Add up every semi-reasonable law, however, and the result is unreasonable and unconscionable. Many people remain in prison for years after their sentences are complete because they cannot find a place to live that satisfies all of the restrictions. Madness.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Are young, secular people becoming more utilitarian in their attitudes to moral sacrifice?
2. Do our outer space treaties require revision? (NYT)
3. How the sandwich consumed Britain.
4. Will China achieve quantum ghost imaging?
5. Bringing Old Quebec to China.
6. The “Lord of the Rings” of Chinese literature is finally being translated into English.
American health equality is rising
Recent research shows increasing inequality in mortality among middle-aged and older adults. But this is only part of the story. Inequality in mortality among young people has fallen dramatically in the United States converging to almost Canadian rates. Increases in public health insurance for U.S. children, beginning in the late 1980s, are likely to have contributed.
Here is the full article, by Janet M. Currie, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The costs of street harassment of women, with respect to India
This paper examines the impact of perceived risk of street harassment on women’s human capital attainment. I assemble a unique dataset that combines information on 4,000 students at the University of Delhi from a survey that I designed and conducted, a mapping of the potential travel routes to all colleges in the students’ choice set using an algorithm I developed in Google Maps, and crowd-sourced mobile application safety data. Using a random utility framework, I estimate that women are willing to choose a college in the bottom half of the quality distribution over a college in the top quintile for a route that is perceived to be one standard deviation (SD) safer. Alternatively, women are willing to spend an additional INR 18,800 (USD 290) per year, relative to men, for a route that is one SD safer – an amount equal to double the average annual college tuition. These findings have implications for other economic decisions made by women. For example, it could help explain the puzzle of low female labor force participation in India.
That is the excellent job market paper by Girija Borker at Brown University, this is one of the most novel and important works I have seen this job market season.
Corporate income tax rates in Nash equilibrium
This is from the job market paper of Yang Shen, a candidate at Brown University:
I calibrate a three-country version of the model to data on trade, MP, and corporate tax rates for Germany, Ireland, and the United States. I then compute the Nash equilibrium corporate tax rates and calculate the associated welfare changes. The United States would undertake the largest tax cut in the Nash equilibrium, in an attempt to widen market entry of marginal firms. All three countries would experience welfare gains under the Nash tax rates.
In her model, the United States should cut its corporate tax rate by eleven percentage points. Shout it from the rooftops, as they say…
Monday assorted links
1. Unpopular ideas about blockchains?
2. GMU economics job market candidates.
3. “Even so, Yudkowsky endorses anti-modesty for his book readers, who he sees as better than average, and also too underconfident on average.” From our very own Robin Hanson.
4. What happened to the Notre Dame economics department?
5. American gun culture as stemming in part from Native Americans.
Logical Thought==Efficient Markets
A remarkable new paper on logical induction by Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Andrew Critch, Nate Soares, and Jessica Taylor dramatically extends Ramsey’s Dutch book arguments in support of Bayesian epistemology and in so doing demonstrates deep connections between logical thinking and efficient markets. The research was supported by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
We present a computable algorithm that assigns probabilities to every logical statement in a given formal language, and refines those probabilities over time. For instance, if the language is Peano arithmetic, it assigns probabilities to all arithmetical statements, including claims about the twin prime conjecture, the outputs of long-running computations, and its own probabilities. We show that our algorithm, an instance of what we call a logical inductor, satisfies a number of intuitive desiderata, including: (1) it learns to predict patterns
of truth and falsehood in logical statements, often long before having the resources to evaluate the statements, so long as the patterns can be written down in polynomial time; (2) it learns to use appropriate statistical summaries to predict sequences of statements whose truth values appear pseudorandom; and (3) it learns to have accurate beliefs about its own current beliefs, in a manner that avoids the standard paradoxes of self-reference. For example, if a given computer program only ever produces outputs in a certain range, a logical inductor learns this fact in a timely manner; and if late digits in the decimal expansion of π are difficult to predict, then a logical inductor learns to assign ≈ 10% probability to “the nth digit of π is a 7” for large n. Logical inductors also learn to trust their future beliefs more than their current beliefs, and their beliefs are coherent in the limit (whenever φ → ψ, P∞(φ) ≤ P∞(ψ), and so on); and logical inductors strictly dominate the universal semimeasure in the limit.These properties and many others all follow from a single logical induction criterion, which is motivated by a series of stock trading analogies. Roughly speaking, each logical sentence φ is associated with a stock that is worth $1 per share if φ is true and nothing otherwise, and we interpret the belief-state of a logically uncertain reasoner as a set of market prices, where Pn(φ) = 50% means that on day n, shares of φ may be bought or sold from the reasoner for 50¢. The logical induction criterion says (very roughly) that there should not be any polynomial-time computable trading strategy with finite risk tolerance that earns unbounded profits in that market over time. This criterion bears strong resemblance to the “no Dutch book” criteria that support both expected utility theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944) and Bayesian probability theory (Ramsey 1931; de Finetti 1937).
The authors are quick to acknowledge that their algorithm holds only in the limit which makes it impractical to implement. Nevertheless, the first fully rational beings on the planet will surely be artificial intelligences.
Job market papers of 2017-2018
As you may have noticed, I’ve been surveying various job market papers from this year. So far, here are my subjective impressions of what is going on overall. The number of money and macro papers is way down. Development economics is still flourishing and expanding, even relative to a few years ago, though I worry I am not seeing many generalizable results and that the fixed costs of continuing to do this kind of research throughout your career are quite high. Purely applied areas such as water and transportation are making their way into job market papers at the top schools. MIT and Harvard are still the two best graduate programs with the best students. Papers from business and public policy schools, on the technical side, are coming closer and closer to economics, and they may be more interesting, so consider those places for your hiring. I’m seeing Turkish, Korean, and Chinese graduate students working on the big picture institutional and political economy questions. The total number of candidates seemed slightly down, though that could be my imagination.
The best films of 2017
I thought the year started very slowly, but later picked up, here were my favorites. There are reviews behind the linked items, or occasionally a link to outside information. With the foreign films, as always, I classify these according to the year I saw them, not the year of their initial overseas release. Here goes:
Toni Erdmann (rollicking German satire about parents and children)
After the Storm (Japanese complacent class, plus pending doom)
Magnus (the chess prodigy)
Tower (animated with graphics, about the Texas tower shooting in Austin, history of violence and how people respond to it)
Dunkirk (uses angles better than any movie ever)
Get Out (racial discrimination, plus a satire on both horror and Sidney Poitier)
Columbus (architecture in the Indiana town, when to leave home)
Two Trains Runnin’ (history of rediscovering the blues)
The Florida Project (the Brazilians and Cubans find American lower income groups tough to deal with)
Faces, Places (Agnes Varda, travel, memories, art, and the transience of it all)
The Square (European intellectual mainstream is bankrupt)
For visuals and the staging of scenes, the winner was Dunkirk. For social science, Get Out and The Square and Paths to the Soul (pilgrimage) were the richest. If I had to pick a single winner, it would be the Chinese-Tibetan Paths to the Soul, replete with tales of signaling, social cooperation, journeying, and life and death, especially when seen on the large screen.