Continuous voting
One interesting characteristic of lottery voting is there is no need that elections be simultaneous, or even take place at known predictable times. Suppose we had an electoral system that looked like this: Every month, 5% of the voting roll is randomly selected to cast a ballot for a representative. There’s no big election day: Any time during their month selected voters can come in and cast their vote. After the balloting period has passed, one ballot is randomly selected, and then a virtual coin is flipped that comes up heads only one time in 24. If the coin comes up heads, the current representative is replaced with the randomly selected ballot. If not, that month’s ballots are thrown away, and the representative’s term continues. Under this system, on average, a representative’s terms would be 24 months, but there would never be a period when a representative is more or less near an election. Whatever persuasion incumbents (or their political parties or PACs or dirty tricksters) want to engage in to see to their reelection, they’d have to do basically all the time. Challengers also could arise at any time, but would want to make their case continually. That would become a very different enterprise than existing elections, which engender an avalanche of marketing in sprints. People who wish to become representatives would want to become prominent and popular within their communities, or become endorsed by popular civic organizations (including but not just political parties), in ways that are sustainable over time. Is this a good idea? One might argue that it would just make elections more expensive to contest, and so increase the influence of money. But lottery voting by its nature is much less susceptible to vote buying. Your ads can win 60% of the vote and you still have a 40% chance of losing.
That is from Steve Randy Waldman.
My Bloomberg column on Harvard and Asian-American admissions
Here is the column, here is one bit:
I attended Harvard (for my doctorate in economics), and most of the people there are as well-meaning as any you might find in Idaho or West Virginia.
And:
Step back from the emotions of the current debate and start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another.
And:
The collateral damage on Asian-American applicants is psychologically minimized and explained away as a problem that can only be remedied over time.
And:
Few societies have methods of assuring cultural continuity that could be revealed transparently without causing at least some outrage or scandal… It is no accident that Harvard has strenuously resisted disclosing the methods of its admission processes.
Get the picture? By the way:
In the meantime, the elites will do everything possible to protect the system, co-opt the opposition, and make a mix of symbolic and real concessions…You will recognize these elites by their apologies, their attempts to shift the focus back to African-American issues, and their unwillingness to entertain fundamental change.
Thursday assorted links
1. My podcast on Economic Growth, Liberalism, and Philosophy, with Zack Baker of Berkeley.
2. Why Harvard (and David Card) is wrong: “But given that these factors are themselves correlated with race, Mr Card’s argument is statistically rather like saying that once you correct for racial bias, Harvard is not racially biased.”
3. One-day Fight Club for preschoolers, in St. Louis, captured on video.
4. Elena Ferrante and the HBO adaptation (NYT).
5. The new Rubb/Sumner Principles textbook, business orientation, consolidated micro/macro, if I understand correctly.
6. Dwarsliggers (NYT).
Blockchains in Space!
As far as I can tell, this is Not From the Onion.
Blockchain venture production studio ConsenSys, Inc. has acquired the pioneering space company Planetary Resources, Inc. through an asset-purchase transaction. Planetary Resources’ President & CEO Chris Lewicki and General Counsel Brian Israel have joined ConsenSys in connection with the acquisition.
…Ethereum Co-founder and ConsenSys Founder Joe Lubin said, “I admire Planetary Resources for its world class talent, its record of innovation, and for inspiring people across our planet in support of its bold vision for the future. Bringing deep space capabilities into the ConsenSys ecosystem reflects our belief in the potential for Ethereum to help humanity craft new societal rule systems through automated trust and guaranteed execution. And it reflects our belief in democratizing and decentralizing space endeavors to unite our species and unlock untapped human potential. We look forward to sharing our plans and how to join us on this journey in the months ahead.”
As Eli Dourado quipped, cryptocurrency mining, asteroid mining, pretty much the same thing, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The best job market paper I have seen so far this year
From Hyejun Kim at MIT”s Sloan School:
Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship
The process by which individuals become entrepreneurs is often described as a decisive moment of transition, yet it necessarily involves a series of smaller steps. This study examines how human capital and social capital are accumulated and deployed in the earliest stages of the entrepreneurial transition in the setting of “user entrepreneurship.” Using the unique dataset from Ravelry—the Facebook of knitters—I study why and how some knitters become entrepreneurs. I show that knitters who make the entrepreneurial transition are distinctive in that they have experience in fewer techniques and more product categories. I also show that this transition is facilitated by participation in offline social networks where knitters garner feedback and encouragement. Importantly, social and human capital appear to complement each other with social capital producing the greatest effect on the most skilled users. Broader theoretical implications on user innovation, the role of social capital, and entrepreneurship research are discussed.
Here is part of the concluding summary:
…the critical factor explaining why some creative knitters transition to designers is the feedback and encouragement they receive from fellow knitters and friends. With a carefully matched sample, difference-in-difference analysis verifies that the participation in an offline local networking group increases the likelihood of transition by 25%. Furthermore, the results suggest that social capital effect is largest among those with entrepreneurial human capital, as social capital complements human capital in knitters’ transition to
designers.
I have read through the entire paper and the whole thing is a gem.
Why people don’t vote
This New York magazine piece is one of the best articles I’ve read all year. Here is the account of Laura, age 21 from Florida:
In high school, I didn’t even know our vice-president’s name was Joe Biden. All my high-school classmates were Republicans. They were very vocal about it, especially during the whole Romney-and-Obama election. I realized I didn’t believe everything they were saying. Then I Googled “Republican versus Democrat,” and I like kinda both, kinda not. That’s why I’m an Independent. It wasn’t till the Trump-versus-Hillary election that I realized how important it is to vote. Maybe it had to do with, like, society and all. Everyone I was following was like, “Go out to vote.” I was in college in Massachusetts. I decided that I wasn’t gonna go through that long process for an out-of-state student to register to vote. I had a hectic schedule. I just didn’t have the time and energy. Also I didn’t know how my parents would feel about that whole thing, ’cause my brother does not vote either. So it wasn’t asked if they could help us out with the registration and mailing all the forms to us. My mom is a Republican, my dad is a Democrat, and I did not learn that until the 2016 election, after begging them to tell me at least what their party was.
I realized that I should’ve voted afterward. Ever since that election, I started turning on not just CNN but also Fox News on the iPhone news app. I plan to vote in 2020. I have a goal set to know more about politics by that time.
Here is Anna, age 21 from New York City:
I’m trying to register in my hometown of Austin, Texas. It’s such a tedious process to even get registered in Texas, let alone vote as an absentee. There’s no notification service about the status of my voter registration. There’s a small, outdated website where you can enter your information and check. When I was at the post office to register, this poor girl, clearly also a college student like me, didn’t know what “postmarked” meant and had no idea how to send an important document by mail. Most people my age have zero need to go to the post office and may have never stepped into one before. Honestly, if someone had the forms printed for me and was willing to deal with the post office, I’d be much more inclined to vote.
Strongly recommended, there is much more at the link. It’s Tim, age 27 from Texas, who has the best and smartest substantive answer.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes.
2. No Coase theorem: “Opinion polls show more than 50 per cent of Greeks oppose the June deal because the government controversially accepted the existence of Macedonian ethnicity and language in return for the change of name.” FT link.
3. Chocolate is older than we had thought.
4. The world’s Scrabble champion in French cannot speak French (NYT).
6. David Card vs. Peter S. Arcidiacono. Good piece, Card is wrong.
Do female department chairs matter?
Appointing female managers is a common proposal to improve women’s representation and outcomes in the workplace, but it is unclear how well such policies accomplish these goals. Using newly-collected panel data on academic departments, I exploit variation in the timing of transitions between department chairs of different genders with a difference-in-differences research design. For faculty, I find female department chairs reduce gender gaps in publications and tenure for assistant professors and shrink the gender pay gap. Replacing a male chair with a female chair increases the number of female students among incoming graduate cohorts by ten percent with no evidence of a change in ability correlates for the average student.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Langan, who is a job market candidate from Princeton this year. He has another paper with Leah Boustan, here is an excerpt from the abstract:
We find that schools with better outcomes for women also hire more women faculty, facilitate advisor-student contact, provide collegial research seminars, and are notable for senior faculty with awareness of gender issues.
In yet another piece he estimates the value of unpaid cooking time in Mexico, always higher than you think I would say.
Can You Outsmart an Economist?
Can You Outsmart an Economist? is an excellent book of puzzles put together by Steven Landsburg. Steve includes a lot of classics such as the Girl Named Florida Problem, the Potato Paradox and Newcomb’s paradox, the former two problems are presented in slightly different and in the first case improved forms so you might not recognize them on first reading. Steve also includes many economic puzzles, Bayes puzzles, common knowledge problems and more. Readers of this blog will certainly know some of the puzzles but will also find lots of novel problems and puzzles. Also included are philosophical paradoxes. For example, the headache problem.
A billion people are experiencing fairly minor headaches, which will continue for another hour unless an innocent person is killed, in which case the headaches will cease immediately. Is it okay to kill that innocent person?
The puzzle here isn’t the answer. The answer is obvious. The puzzle is that smart people can’t agree which answer is obvious.
Overall, this is the best and most diverse collection of puzzles that I know. It’s meant to be dipped into and sampled at leisure. My only complaint is that the puzzles are followed by answers which makes it too easy to fool yourself into thinking you always knew the answer! Answers in the back of the book would have been a minor form of commitment. Recommended.
Will the decline of galleries reshape art?
Heidi Mitchell reports (NYT):
“The gallery is a format that is struggling,” said the Argentine curator Ximena Caminos, formerly of the Malba museum in Buenos Aires and now chief creative officer of the Honey Lab cultural space in Miami’s Blue Heron hotel and residential project, which is now under development. “It’s transactional; the artist doesn’t have that much creative freedom, and there is a lot of pressure to make money in a short period of time.” Artists, she said, are seeking new places to showcase their work, especially if the pieces are large in scale.
If the number and relevance of galleries were to decline (continue to decline?), how might this affect artistic content? Here are a few hypotheses:
1. More artists will commission pieces for corporate lobbies and condominiums, as the article reports. That will tend to favor mainstream abstract art and disfavor political statements and obscenities.
Erica Samuels notes:
“There is a great responsibility on the real estate developers that maybe they don’t even realize, while at the same time, the stigma of an artist working with a rich developer is fading.”
2. Corporate-owned works are usually less liquid and may not be sold at all, short of bankruptcy or liquidity crunches, when they are sold under panic conditions. Artists therefore will be less likely to have dominant dealers who prop up their prices and cultivate markets for them. That will likely encourage greater artistic output, though also lower quality output, as might be defined by elites. The resulting art will have to appeal to buyers at first glance, as the artist cannot count upon “sophisticated” galleries to persuade or educate potential buyers.
3. Some artists will take their craft directly to the street, as is done in Belfast or Newark, New Jersey. They will paint for local community status, and for the joy of it, and for political self-expression, rather than for pay. They will use cheaper materials, brighter colors, and indulge in themes and images with strong local meaning. Political art and paid art will separate further.
4. Galleries pursue their own coherent reputations, which encourages carried artists to fit into slots which match gallery reputations. So there are “conceptual art galleries,” “Pop Art galleries,” and so on, and artists in turn target those styles, so as to achieve entry to galleries. When galleries are weaker, the slottable categories are created by some other set of intermediaries — might it someday be Instagram hashtags? eBay search terms? Something else? In any case, those new slots or styles might have to be less “you know it when you see it” and more “you can type those words into a search function.”
5. The decline of browsing has hit published books as well, especially fiction, which saw a big decline in sales over 2013-2017: “The most commonly shared view is that it has become extremely difficult to generate exposure for novels. Fiction, more than nonfiction, depends on readers discovering new books by browsing. Now, with the number of physical stores down from five years ago (despite a rise in ABA membership), publishers cannot rely on bricks-and-mortar stores providing customers with access to new books.” It is easier to type the topic of a non-fiction book into a search function. In this world it is harder to develop new authors [artists], and the link directly above, while about books, is a good way to start thinking about the galleries issue.
6. Most galleries, either intentionally or not, create a distinction between what is shown on the floor and what is held in the back room. Non-gallery art is less likely to be bifurcated in the same way, even if some pieces are more prominent on the home page than others. That may make internet-displayed art less “bubbly,” less subject to elite manipulations and prejudices and enlightenments, and also both fuzzier and lower in price.
7. If there are fewer galleries, perhaps more will be bought and sold at auction. The winning bidder will be less likely to be ripped off by say 3x on the price, so it will be easier to experiment with buying unfamiliar styles: “I liked the Persian carpet I saw at Sotheby’s, and figured the winning bid wouldn’t have too much winner’s curse in it.” You can’t say the same when you go to a gallery relatively uninformed.
8. Galleries offer high implicit returns to regular buyers, who end up getting a crack at the best works in advance, even before the show opens. That encourages buyer specialization, whereas internet and auction-based methods of selling do not.
9. What else?
Question of the day
Could ‘Oumuamua be debris from a technological civilization, a discarded lightsail?
Here is more.
The sushi restaurant in the D.C. Trump International Hotel
I offer a mostly sociological review in my latest Bloomberg column. When I went the restaurant was completely empty the entire time. D.C. really doesn’t like Trump, or being affiliated with him. But here is my assessment of the food and restaurant:
And what about the food? It may be the best restaurant in Washington right now — and it was the second-best sushi meal I’ve had in America, behind only Masa, the Michelin three-star temple in Manhattan. Sushi Nakazawa flies in lots of sushi from Hokkaido, a premier source of supply, and the presentation is impeccable.
If I have a complaint, it is about the décor and atmosphere: the tacky carpet, highly visible fire alarm and annoying muzak were all magnified by the absence of human beings in the main dining room. The room is ugly without being informal or relaxing or culturally interesting.
And here is my theory of tax incidence:
How much money did I funnel to the pockets of Trump? I don’t know the details of the restaurant’s contract with the hotel, but unless business picks up, I suspect I was merely limiting its losses. Still, there is a small chance that my single meal — or maybe this column — nudges its operators into extending their lease. Then again, if a sushi restaurant is a worse fit for the hotel than, say, another bar or steakhouse, I could just as easily be helping to keep the hotel’s profits down. I don’t feel I have committed a utilitarian sin.
Be there, or be square!
Tuesday assorted links
2. David Gelernter on stuff I don’t want you to discuss in the comments section.
3. Bytedance (the world’s most valuable start-up?, NYT).
4. More on Bolsonaro. Delusional in some ways, most of all in denial about Brazilian violence ex ante, but still interesting.
5. “We find that left-wing electoral victories cause significant and substantial short-term decreases in stock market valuations and in the US dollar value of the domestic currency, while the response of sovereign bond markets is muted.” Link here.
*Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom*
That is the forthcoming book by my excellent colleagues Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama, due out next January, you can now pre-order here.
Here is the Amazon summary:
Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood. Tracing the history of religious persecution from the Fall of Rome to the present-day, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama provide a novel explanation of the birth of religious liberty. This book treats the subject in an integrative way by combining economic reasoning with historical evidence from medieval and early modern Europe. The authors elucidate the economic and political incentives that shaped the actions of political leaders during periods of state building and economic growth.
I have read the entire thing (a slightly earlier draft), very definitely recommended.
Young “stars” in economics
We use a novel dataset of job flyouts for junior economists to investigate three aspects of the market for “stars”. First, what is the background of students who become stars? Second, what type of research does the top of the market demand? Third, where do these students take jobs? Among other results, we show that stars are more international and less female than PhDs overall, that theoretical and semi-theoretical approaches remain dominant, that American programs both produce the most stars and hire even more, that the private sector is largely uncompetitive, and that there is a strong shift toward stars having pre-PhD full-time academic research jobs.
That is the abstract of a new paper from Kevin A. Bryan, also known as A Fine Theorem. Via Beth Popp Berman.
And here is a point on the stickiness of academic rankings over time:
In economics, among the 13 programs with the most published pages in a Top 5 journal by their faculty between 2002 and 2009, all 13 were among the top 18 in the same ranking for publications between 1974 and 1978 (McPherson [2012])!
“!” is right! And this:
…almost 80% of the faculty at a top 10 economics department did their PhD in a top 10, compared to 58% in mathematics and 63% in literature.
!!