Wednesday assorted links
1. Heartlessness as a female intellectual strategy? (The article seems like odd framing to me, still the content is interesting.)
2. Do even misanthropes believe that human beings are good deep down? And the stock price of United airlines has recovered.
3. Some U. Chicago professors list their favorite books.
4. The great cat and dog massacre.
5. Tyrone makes a guest appearance in this new MRU video on sticky wages.
Reviving productivity
That is a new series on Bloomberg View, here are the beginnings of the symposium. Here is Clive Crook on productivity as a moral imperative. Here is Noah Smith on the easy ways to boost productivity. Here is my piece on the human constraints behind the productivity problem, here is one excerpt:
The logic of the usefulness of face-to-face contact also shapes the geographic distribution of economic activity…
Given all this, at least three answers to the productivity problem suggest themselves. First, we can make online communities more vivid. E-sports, a diverse set of online competitions, have hundreds of millions of viewers. Through the development of internet fandoms and communities, many people now find these activities more exciting to watch than the World Series. Even chess on the internet has proved popular, as commentary and chat rooms make it more exciting for the viewers. The community-building tactics used by e-sports could be applied elsewhere.
Second, we can make face-to-face communities more effective. I am struck by the occasional scorn shown to ex-President Barack Obama for his past as a community organizer. Yet building communities is a critical skill for boosting business productivity in a service economy.
Third, individuals should read and cultivate Stoic philosophy in themselves, whether explicitly or as they might pick up from a best-seller. More self-reliance and less dependence on social cues for doing the right thing will increase economic performance.
There are more installments coming in the series.
Is rising consumer confidence coming from the elderly and the less educated?
Americans with degrees have been getting steadily less optimistic since mid-2015…
Americans without degrees are as optimistic now as they’ve ever been since the survey began nearly four decades ago. Only the peak of the tech bubble compares. By contrast, Americans with degrees are about as confident in the future as they were in September 2007, when the credit crisis had already begun…
Since the start of 2015, the outlook among the young has deteriorated sharply, albeit from a high base. Meanwhile, the expectations of Americans ages 55 and older have soared in the wake of the election to their highest level in more than fifteen years…
And this in sum:
The groups responsible for the aggregate change in sentiment are the least likely to experience big real wage increases and therefore the least likely to boost their spending. Moreover, they appear unwilling to translate their vague optimism about the future into specific expectations about behaviour.
So even if those expectations were reliable guides to the actual choices people make — something strongly debated among forecasters — there is little reason to believe the “Trump bump” in consumer sentiment is a harbinger for sharply rising real spending.
That is all from Matthew C. Klein. I would stress the broader point that in a polarized time such survey results may not be very reliable at all, and perhaps we should dismiss the pessimistic responses of the young as well.
What is the relevant uncertainty for climate change policy?
A number of people have climbed onto Twitter and outlined (correctly) how increased uncertainty about the impact of climate change increases the value of doing something about it. There is downside risk, and of course we wish to buy insurance against that in the form of a more active climate change policy. Still, that is not looking deeply enough. I see some of the relevant uncertainties as embodied in the following scenario, which is more about policy means than climate change science:
Following a Trump debacle, finally the Democrats win all branches of government and pass a climate change bill. There is a carbon tax, and further anti-coal measures, but it isn’t enough to shift energy regimes in a transformational sense (besides, truly transformational technologies require luck and “the right time” far more than price incentives). Instead the United States becomes more like Western Europe, with higher levels of conservation but no ground-breaking new energy source. Solar goes up by ten percentage points, and wind by two or three, given NIMBY opposition. Fracking becomes more efficient yet, which nudges fossil fuels back a bit onto center stage. Nuclear is closed down altogether, and hydroelectric also goes in reverse or stagnates. China is as China does, and they slowly move away from their installed coal base, in the meantime taking steps to control their particulate matter but not so much their carbon, copying America in this regard. India starts a shift from coal to natural gas but still has rising carbon emissions. Africa and Vietnam exceed growth expectations, with a lot of solar power to be sure, but not enough to counteract their growing industrialization. The carbon tax causes a mild recession in America, and environmentalism becomes less popular. The global boost in temperature continues, unchecked. The people who die each year from regular air pollution — six to seven million at last count — diminish in number with economic growth, but we react largely with indifference to that problem, because it doesn’t fit into domestic political struggles very neatly.
Now, to me something like that is the single most likely scenario, albeit with a lot of uncertainty. I am still happy to try remedial policy measures, and to try them now, if only out of non-complacency or perhaps just desperation. But come on, let’s be honest. If all you are doing is trying to combat uncertainty about the science, you are unwilling to look the actual problem square in the eye, just like the climate deniers, the very people you so much decry.
How much of educational political polarization is due to feminization?
The shrinking of the middle is largely due to a recent rise in the share of women (who also represent a majority of college students) who identify as either liberal or far left. The share of female respondents, but not male respondents, who describe their political views this way was at an all-time high (41.1 percent for women, 28.9 percent for men). Left-wing views peaked for men way back in 1971, at 43.6 percent.
That is from the always interesting Catherine Rampell. The “political gender gap” across men and women, in these numbers, never has been higher, see the link for a picture and details but by one measure it is 12.2 percentage points.
Given the distribution of the “political correctness movement” across majors, how much it is simply the result of the increased feminization of education itself?
The Viewpoint Diversity Experience
That is a new project by Jonathan Haidt and the Heterodox Academy, here is a partial summary:
Heterodox Academy announces a simpler, easier, and cheaper alternative: The Viewpoint Diversity Experience. It is a resource created by the members of Heterodox Academy that takes students on a six-step journey, at the end of which they will be better able to live alongside—and learn from—fellow students who do not share their politics.
It’s a very flexible resource that can be completed by individuals before they arrive on campus, presented in an orientation-week workshop, or expanded into a full semester course that students can take during their first year. (It could also be helpful in high schools, companies, religious congregations, and any other organizations that are experiencing sharp political divisions and conflicts.)
…The site is still under development: we welcome feedback and criticism. We particularly seek out professors, high school teachers, and diversity trainers who will partner with us to develop detailed teaching plans and activities. We will have a larger public launch of the project in August, complete with assessment materials that will allow you to measure whether the curriculum actually increased political knowledge and cross-partisan understanding.
Do click on the site itself for a fuller explanation, and please help out if you can.
Tuesday assorted links
2. There is no great stagnation: “McDonald’s Invents a ‘Frork’ Utensil Made of French Fries“. Furthermore:
A limited supply of Frorks will be available with the purchase of a Signature Crafted Recipes sandwich on May 5 at participating restaurants. These sandwiches sell for between $4.99 and $5.19.
In true infomercial style, the ad features a toll-free number that gives callers a chance to get a free Frork or a coupon for a free Signature Crafted Recipes sandwich.
3. How many of the greatest philosophers had philosophy degrees?
4. Sent to jail by a software program? (NYT)
5. The Chinese factory workers who write poems on their phones. Recommended.
Why the gains from e-commerce are spreading across the country
Here is one reason:
We find that Amazon saves between $0.17 and $0.47 for every 100 mile reduction in the distance of shipping goods worth $30. In the context of its distribution network expansion, this estimate implies that Amazon has reduced its total shipping cost by over 50% and increased its profit margin by between 5 and 14% since 2006. Separately, we demonstrate that prices on Amazon have fallen by approximately 40% over the same period, suggesting that a significant share of the cost savings have been passed on to consumers.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jean-François Houde, Peter Newberry, and Katja Seim.
*Dreaming the Beatles*
The author is Rob Sheffield and the subtitle is The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World. So far this year this is my favorite book, in part because it stretches genres in a creative way. In addition to being a study of fandom, celebrity, 1960s history, “how boys think about girls,” and of course the music itself, it is most of all a splendid take on small group cooperation, management, and the dynamic between John and Paul. I enjoyed every page of this book, and learned a great deal, despite having read many other books on the Beatles. Here is a typical passage”
The Beatles invented most of what rock stars do…They invented breaking up. They invented drugs. They invented long hair, going to India, having a guru, round glasses, solo careers, beards, press conferences, divisive girlfriends, writing your own songs, funny drummers. They invented the idea of assembling a global mass audience and then challenging, disappointing, confusing this audience. As far as the rest of the planet is concerned, they invented England.
A few of the more specific things I learned were:
1. For a while Stanley Kubrick was planning on making a movie version of Lord of the Rings with Paul as Frodo, Ringo as Sam, and John as Gollum. George was to be Gandalf.
2. When the cops raided Keith Richards’s mansion in 1967 and found cocaine, they threw it away because they had never seen it before and didn’t know what it was.
3. When Paul McCartney played an acetate of “Tomorrow Never Knows” for Bob Dylan, Dylan’s response was “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore.”
4. The French title for “A Hard Day’s Night” was Quatre Garcons Dans Le Vent, which translates roughly as “Four Boys in the Wind.”
The book is funny too:
I always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: “The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which just doesn’t work.” So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing — just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible.
And:
Paul has a compulsive need to feed his enemies all the ammunition they could want. The software of “don’t take the bait” was never installed in his system. No celebrity has ever been easier to goad into gaffes. I love that.
And:
As Lennon snapped in 1980, after getting asked one too many times if they [he and Paul] still spoke, “He’s got 25 kids and about 20,000,000 records out. How can he spend time talking? He’s always working.”
On the revisionist upswing in this book are Rubber Soul, “I’m so Tired,” “It Won’t Be Long,” and John Lennon’s “God.” On the revisionist downswing is Let It Be and Paul McCartney’s “My Love.”
Not for the unconverted, but I’m glad to see people writing books with me as the intended audience. Here is a quite insightful review, in which Chris Taylor writes: “…it may be the first book to encompass the entire Beatlegeist. If aliens land tomorrow, and demand to know why we keep on pumping this particular brand of music into space, this is the first book you would hand them.”
Monday assorted links
Loving winning vs. hating losing
Loving winning and hating losing are two fairly distinct motivations. For instance, a fairly joyless person may nonetheless be motivated by the humiliation of a loss, or a non-envious, non-spiteful type could receive great pleasure from being number one, while not minding if someone later climbs higher yet.
If you both love winning and hate losing that is especially useful in one-on-one, zero-sum competitions, such as chess and tennis, and also in most team sports and perhaps securities trading as well. Such people are more motivated, and motivated from more sides of their being, and if one of the emotions flags a bit the other is there to step in and maintain the pace and focus.
In venture capital, I suspect that hatred of losing may be a disadvantage. No matter how successful you may be, most of your individual investments will lose money and hatred of losing may make you too risk-averse. It might be better to have the ability to simply forget your losses and put them behind you.
For academics, it is more important to love gains than to hate losses. Provided they don’t embarrass you, your forgotten articles just aren’t that big a deal and everybody has them, including Nobel Laureates. A single key piece can make your career, however.
Is hatred of loss also unnecessary for book authors and music stars? Ideally, you would think they should take lots of chances, but the exact tracking of sales makes them more risk-averse and thus boosts the relative status of the loss haters. If they release a clinker book or album, the intermediaries are less keen to promote them next time around. To the extent intermediaries become more important, that boosts the loss-hating performers, because intermediaries themselves are somewhat loss-hating.
What is the correct mix of gain-loving and loss-hating for a Navy Seal? For a journalist? A lawyer, programmer, or engineer?
In a job interview, what question should you ask to discern if someone is a gain lover or a loss hater or both? Or neither!
Who’s complacent?, Ivy League edition
A group of Yale University graduate students announced Tuesday evening that they would be undertaking a hunger strike to pressure the administration into granting them better union benefits. The strike is taking place in front of University President Peter Salovey’s home.
“Yale wants to make us wait and wait and wait … until we give up and go away,” the eight members of the graduate student union Local 33 announced. “We have committed ourselves to waiting without eating.”
Yale doctoral students currently earn a stipend $30,000 a year, receive free health care, and have their $40,000 tuition paid in full, according to Yale News.
And yet there is an apparent catch:
As it turns out, the hunger strike might not put anyone’s health in peril. According to a pamphlet posted on Twitter by a former Yale student, the hunger strike is “symbolic” and protesters can leave and get food when they can no longer go on.
If you read through the whole link, you will see that the final story has yet to come out, so take this with…a grain of salt. Unless of course you are on the hunger strike. After reading through further accounts, my personal sense is indeed that no one at Yale is going to pull a Bobby Sands anytime soon. In the meantime, the Yale Republicans have set up a barbecue right next to the strikers.
For the pointer I thank Supersonic Eli Dourado.
Various New York Times columns, with reference to Stephens and Douthat
I few of you asked me about the Bret Stephens column. I would have preferred something more specific and detailed on climate change uncertainty, but my main reaction was encapsulated by Chris Blattman on Twitter:
Bad sign for science if my impulsive thought is “so glad I don’t work in this area”
And yes, I blame both sides for that.
A related question is: how good is the social science in this area? I would say “not so great.” Try looking for good public choice treatments of how climate intentions end up translated into climate policy. That is a remarkably important question, and yet it is understood poorly.
Or “how many of the people who make proclamations in this area have a decent understanding of Chinese energy and climate policy?”, and the answer is hardly any, even though that may be the most important topic in the area. And I ask that question not only of the casual tweeters but also of the academics who work on climate change. Follow Christopher Balding if you don’t believe me, and by the way praise to the highly rated but still underrated Matt Kahn.
In other words, yes we should do something but still yap less, study more.
How about Ross Douthat on Marine Le Pen?
The way I see it, the case for Le Pen is simply that it might force the (supposed) outsiders to “own” the euro and European Union, and that might be better for liberalism in the long run than having a France limp along under the probably not so popular Macron. In my view, Le Pen has neither the means nor the inclination to actually pull France out of the EU or eurozone, and the whole thing has been a campaign stunt. Of course I find it hard to estimate the probabilities here, and personally I reserve my political “rooting” for my classical liberal mood affiliations and also the Washington Wizards; I won’t support a candidate for reasons of n-dimensional chess, given that I am never the decisive voice. So I’m not rooting for Le Pen, but if someone holds that “strategic” point of view I do think it is defensible, though I hope they are holding it with plenty of humility on the epistemic side.
I thought Ross’s column had the desired and necessary caveats, and furthermore he did not tell people to vote for her or root for her. Rather than try to smear his piece with Nazi associations and the like, it is better to focus on why so many political parties in the West are falling apart. And as for the unsavory associations, keep in mind that oft-praised American presidents have owned slaves, exterminated native Americans, turned back ships of Holocaust victims, and napalmed Vietnam. That doesn’t provide an excuse for bad current behavior, but it does provide some context for the “how could you possibly…?” tendencies we all have.
I would not myself have written either column, but overall I say kudos to The New York Times. It’s their readers I worry about.
There was no great submarine stagnation
Recall the development of the Polaris nuclear-missile system in the late 1950s. The whole package—a nuclear submarine, a solid-fuel missile, an underwater launch system, a nuclear warhead and a guidance system—went from the drawing board to deployment in four years (and using slide rules).
Today, according to the Defense Business Board, the average development timeline for much less complex weapons is 22.5 years. A case in point is the Ford-class aircraft carrier. The program is two years delayed and $2.4 billion over budget.
That is from John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan.
Advice vs. choice
I do not consider this to be a confirmed result, still the basic mechanism is of interest, especially to analyses of complacency:
Despite the near universality of the maxim that one should treat others as one ought to be treated, even well-intended advisers often advise others to act differently than they choose for themselves. We review several psychological factors that contribute to biased advice. Absent pecuniary motives to the contrary, advice tends to be paternalistically biased in favor of caution. Policies that would intuitively promote quality advice — such as making advisers accountable, taking advice from advisers who value the relationship, or having advisers disclose potential conflicts of interest — can perversely lower the quality of advice.
That is from a paper by Jason Dana and Daylian M. Cain, via Rolf Degen. Here is further commentary from Degen.