Has the wage-education locus for women been worsening?
That question is the focus of some recent research by Chen Huang.
Women’s labor force participation rate has moved from 61% in 2000, to 57% today. It seems two-thirds of this change has been due to demographics, namely the aging of the adult female population. What about the rest? It seems that, relative to education levels, wages for women have not been rising since 2000:
I discover that the apparent increase in women’s real wages is more than accounted for by the large increase in women’s educational attainment. Once I condition on education, U.S. women’s real wages have not increased since 2000 and may even have decreased by a few percentage points. Thus, the locus of wage/education opportunities faced by U.S. women has not improved since 2000 and may have worsened. Viewed in that light, the LFPR decrease for women under age 55 becomes less surprising.
You can consider that another indicator of the Great Stagnation.
Asian-American admissions at Harvard
Here is basic NYT coverage of the case:
University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent.
Here is the plaintiff’s brief by Peter S. Arcidiacono. Here is David Card’s brief in defense of Harvard and Asian-American admissions. Here is Arcidiacono’s response to Card.
Gabriel Rossman noted on Twitter: “Once you control for lacrosse, founding an NGO in high school, legacy status, alumni evaluation of personality, woke personal essays, and a 23&me test for EDAR, there’s no effect”
My take is simple. Harvard is risk-averse with respect to the stream of future donations, as are many other schools. Asian-American admissions don’t have the same donating track record as the white students traditionally cultivated by Harvard and other top universities. Either Asian-Americans may seek out “diaspora philanthropy,” or they simply may have a more cynical attitude toward top institutions that they basically have never had any control over.
Furthermore, there is a common fear — repugnant to me I should add — that if a student body becomes “too Asian,” many white students will be less interested in going there. I taught at UC Irvine for several years and found it to be a delightful experience, but this is exactly what many schools are afraid of (the UCI student body is disproportionately Asian, and the honors class I taught in my first year had only one non-Asian student in it).
And so they come up with every excuse possible — sometimes cemented in by self-deception — for maintaining a “balanced” student body.
It is incorrect to call it “racism,” but it is non-meritocratic and we should move away from those attitudes as quickly as possible.
In related news, the University of Chicago is moving away from the use of SAT scores in admissions. The cynical might suggest this is so they are more insulated from potential lawsuits and also so they have more discretion in admissions. If Chicago feels the need to do this, perhaps the system really is buckling under the strain of all these outside pressures.
Nonetheless, I predict ultimately the status quo will not change very much. I just don’t see a strong enough popular or judicial constituency for righting the wrongs done to Asian-Americans. Some kind of partial concession will be made, various terms and standards will be somewhat redefined, and we’ll be back to “rinse and repeat.” Meritocracy: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
I am pleased to report that none of this tomfoolery goes on at my home institution, which is highly and truly diverse.
Raj Chetty is returning to Harvard
That is the word on Twitter. Does he want grandchildren more than he used to? You may remember my Conversation with him, a short while after he moved to Stanford:
CHETTY: So if you’re in your mid-30s, only something like a quarter or less of girls growing up in the Bay Area are married, and we show in our paper that every extra year you spend growing up in the Bay Area, you’re less likely to get married. I remember telling my wife, “I don’t think we need to worry. Our daughter will be fine in terms of earnings. It’s just that she might not be married if we move to California.”COWEN: So, you’ve lowered your expectations for grandchildren?CHETTY: Yes. [laughs]
Friday assorted links
1. The culture that is Dutch there is no great stagnation in bicycle scarf making.
3. Total vertebrates: that was then, this is now.
4. What is a security? Is an orange a security? An ICO?
5. The culture that is Washington, D.C.? Or, the regional distribution of psychopaths in the United States.
What’s really wrong with Wikileaks?
From Theodore Dalrymple in 2010, also known as Prophets of the City Journal:
The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.
The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the means.
For the pointer I thank Robert Dietrich.
Which system should be redesigned from scratch?
Here is another question I didn’t get to answer from last night:
Your blog talks about making small marginal improvements, but if you could redesign one system entirely from scratch, which one would it be, and how would it look compared to what is currently in place?
One answer would be “blogging, I would have much more of it.” But my main answer would be higher education, especially those tiers below the top elite universities. Completion rates are astonishingly low, and also not very transparent (maybe about 40 percent?). I would ensure that every single student receives a reasonable amount of one-on-one tutoring and/or mentoring in his or her first two years. In return, along budgetary lines, I would sacrifice whatever else needs to go, in order to assure that end. If we’re all standing around in robes, arguing philosophy under the proverbial painted porch, so be it. At the same time, I would boost science funding at the top end.
I also would experiment with abolishing the idea of degree “completion” altogether. Maybe you simply finish with an “assessment,” or rather you never quite finish at all, since you might return to take a class when you are 43. Why cannot this space be more finely grained, especially in an age of information technology?
At lower ages, I would do everything possible to move away from having all of the children belong to the exact same age group. The Boy Scouts are a better model here than “the 7th grade.”
The NBA is one institution that I feel is working really well at the moment. and I don’t just say that because I root for Golden State. Though that doesn’t hurt any, either.
*Blockchain and the Law*
The authors are Primavera De Filipp and Aaron Wright, and the subtitle is The Rule of Code and it is published by Harvard University Press. I am sent many books on crypto and blockchains, but this is the one I feel is useful to an educated readership. It’s not for specialists, but if you have a good general economics and also law background, as one would expect from MR readers, but don’t “get” crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you. It sees merit and potential in crypto, without buying into any particular claim just for the sake of hype.
It is striking that crypto learning and debate really has not occurred through books much at all, nor in the mainstream media. It has been through white and yellow papers, various on-line fora, Medium essays, Twitter, Reddit threads, and a variety of other venues. I believe this is a paradigmatic example of how knowledge spreads these days and it should be studied very seriously as such, because it is the most extreme case of the new methods I know.
Where do our best ideas come from?
A correspondent writes to me:
Isn’t it weird that the best ideas we have just…. pop into your head? I have no idea how to trace them. They just show up.
@Tyler any research into this area?
Dean Keith Simonton springs readily to mind, noting he has a new book coming out this year on genius. Here are some overview pieces on simultaneous discovery, and of course those tend to stress environmental factors. Here are some approaches to the multiplicative model of creative achievement. I am a fan of that one. What else?
Thursday assorted links
1. Claims about Tether and Bitcoin (speculative). And the paper.
2. How the internet has changed sex work (more than just the usual).
3. Why business cycles are worse in more complacent economies.
4. “Right now, Second Life resembles a city swiftly evacuated following a radioactive threat.”
5. The plague and the Long Divergence?
6. “Country Time will cover illegal lemonade stand fines and fees this summer.”
Trampoline question
I gave a talk yesterday, and did not have time to get to this question, from Eric S., which we discussed during the dinner hour:
Who could launch themselves higher on a trampoline? LeBron James or Simone Biles?
She is a world class female gymnast, and much lighter (and less strong) than LeBron. The question is assuming that both parties are motivated to win the competition, and have sufficient time to train to achieve their maximum potential in the contest.
Ultimately I settled on Simone as the better answer, mumbling something about small ants being very powerful for their size, and that magnification and extension of muscle spans ends up producing problematic results. The power gain from the extra weight might be more than offset by the “drag” loss on the way up. But I genuinely do not know. Your view?
Addendum: This is an interesting article on animals and elastic springs. And Jason Kottke adds comment, amazing photo too.
Towards An International Court of Smart Contract Arbitration
Firms involved in international commerce routinely contract that disputes are to be resolved by private courts of arbitration such as the International Court of Arbitration, the London Court of International Arbitration or the Singapore International Arbitration Center. These courts of arbitration compete for clients and thus have an incentive to resolve disputes fairly, quickly and inexpensively. Courts compete, for example, to provide arbiters who are experts not simply in the law but in the relevant area of commerce. The New York Convention of 1958 says that private arbitration decisions will be enforced by the national courts of any of the 159 signatories; thus private arbitration leverages national enforcement but is otherwise not tethered to national law (e.g. in US see, Mitsubishi v. Soler Chrysler, National Oil v. Libyan Sun). Over time private courts of international arbitration have developed a system of law that transcends nations, an anational law–this is the new lex mercatoria.
I propose that courts analogous to the courts of arbitration that govern international commerce be created to govern smart contracts in virtual space. Arbitration of smart contracts will develop a new private law that will evolve to meet the needs of virtual commerce, a true lex cryptographia. At first, it might seem contradictory to advocate for courts of smart contracts and the development of lex cryptographia. Isn’t the whole point of smart contracts that no courts or lawyers are needed? Similarly, lex cryptographia is usually understood to refer to the smart contracts themselves–code is law–rather than to law governing such contracts. In fact, it is neither desirable nor possible to divorce smart contracts from law.
Smart contracts execute automatically but only simple contracts such as those involving escrow are really self-enforcing. Most contracts, smart or dumb, involve touchstones with the real world. Canonical examples such as the smart contract that lets you use an automobile so long as the rent has been paid illustrate the potential for disputes. Bugs in the code? Disputes over the quality of the car? What happens when a data feed is disputed or internet service is disrupted? Smart contracts applied to the real world are a kind of digital rights management with all of DRMs problems and annoyances.
Some of these problems can be dealt with online using decentralized mechanisms. But we don’t yet know which decentralized mechanisms are robust or cost-effective. Moreover, when marveling at the wisdom of crowds we should not forget the wisdom of experts. Nick Szabo once remarked that if contract law was suddenly forgotten it would take hundreds of years to recover the embedded wisdom. Contract law, for example, is filled with concepts like mistake, misrepresentation, duress, negligence and intention that are not easily formalized in code. Contract law is a human enterprise. And the humans who write contracts want law with terms like negligence precisely because these terms fill in for gaps which cannot be filled in and formalized in contracts let alone in code.
I am enthusiastic about smart contracts on blockchains. Smart contracts will significantly reduce transaction costs and thus let people create valuable, new private orderings. But it will be more profitable to integrate law and code than to try to replace law with code. Integration will require new ways of thinking. The natural language version of a contract–what the parties intend to agree to–may not map precisely to the coded version. Arbiters will be called in to adjudicate and thus will have to be experts in code as well as in law. Smart contracts can be made by anonymous parties who may want a dispute resolved not just privately but anonymously. Smart contracts can be designed with escrow and multisignatory authority so arbiters will also become decision enforcers. All of these issues and many more will have to be understood and new procedures and understandings developed. The competitive market process will discover novel uses for smart contracts and the competitive market process among arbiters will discover novel law. Law will adjust to business practice and business practice to law.
In short, the best way to create a vital new lex cryptographia is through competitive, private arbitration built on the model that already governs international commerce.
Maybe British common law wasn’t so great for colonies after all
Siwan Anderson
More than one-half of all people living with HIV are women, and 80 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current-day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the “feminization” of AIDS), explaining much of its prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa.
That is from the latest American Economic Review. Here is an earlier version and related material.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Has delegation in American government become much worse?
2. Tankie.
4. The video made for Kim. It’s very effective. And Ross Douthat on North Korea.
Yale Politic interview with me
I enjoyed this one, lots of real questions from Eric Wallach, not “tell us about your book” and the usual snoozefest. Here is one bit:
So you like the idea of pardons– how do you work through that one?
I don’t even firmly believe that punishment is justified morally. Maybe it’s necessary, maybe you just can’t do without it. But the mere fact that someone has wronged another, I don’t think causes them to forfeit their rights in the way that was claimed in classic, early modern political philosophy. Once you think wrongdoers still have their human rights, on what grounds do you punish them? Could be that you simply have to– either the public won’t accept another option and they would overthrow your non-punishment regime and bring in fascism, and something with a lot more punishment would come about.
I get that– I’m not saying you can just toss away the keys to all these jails. But insofar as you have options of not punishing people – who in the cases I’ve read about it seems they’re not going to go out there and continue their serial killing sprees – I think we just simply ought not to punish them. Martha Stewart, again, that seems to me a very clear case. Undo the wrong. If I were a president, I’d consider just only pardoning people and then resigning. I know I couldn’t get away with it forever, but it’s one way to think about the job.
There are other points of interest, new and interesting throughout.
Come on, *Financial Times*…please…?
You know, I love you FT, please do not go this route in your subheaders:
Can new proposed regulation curb the power of big tech companies that now control roughly 80 per cent of corporate wealth?
Here is the link itself, maybe gated for you, but I can assure you it provides no support for this “factoid” whatsoever. There is a reference to “IP-rich companies” controlling all that wealth globally — come on, that “IP-rich” designation could mean anything, and it does not correspond to how most people understand the phrase “Big Tech”…and where does that stat come from anyway? Which large companies would it not count?