Results for “age of em” 17243 found
My Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard
Here is the audio and transcript, this was one of my favorite Conversations. Here is the CWTeam summary:
Knausgård’s literary freedom paves the way for this conversation with Tyler, which starts with a discussion of mimesis and ends with an explanation of why we live in the world of Munch’s The Scream. Along the way there is much more, including what he learned from reading Ingmar Bergman’s workbooks, the worst thing about living in London, how having children increased his productivity, whether he sees himself in a pietistic tradition, thoughts on Bible stories, angels, Knut Hamsun, Elena Ferrante, the best short story (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), the best poet (Paul Celan), the best movie (Scenes from a Marriage), and what his punctual arrival says about his attachment to bourgeois values.
Here is one excerpt:
KNAUSGÅRD: You have this almost archetypical artist putting his art before his children, before his family, before everything. You have also Doris Lessing who did the same — abandoned her children to move to London to write.
I’ve been kind of confronted with that as a writer, and I think everyone does because writing is so time consuming and so demanding. When I got children, I had this idea that writing was a solitary thing. I could go out to small islands in the sea. I could go to lighthouses, live there, try to write in complete . . . be completely solitary and alone. When I got children, that was an obstruction for my writing, I thought.
But it wasn’t. It was the other way around. I’ve never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home, after I kind of established writing in the middle of life. It was crawling with life everywhere. And what happened was that writing became less important. It became less precious. It became more ordinary. It became less religious or less sacred.
It became something ordinary, and that was incredibly important for me because that was eventually where I wanted to go — into the ordinary and mundane, even, and try to connect to what was going on in life. Life isn’t sacred. Life isn’t uplifted. It is ordinary and boring and all the things, we know.
And:
COWEN: So many great Norwegian writers — Ibsen, Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun — there’s nationalism in their work. Yet today, liberals tend to think of nationalism as an unspeakable evil of sorts. How do we square this with the evolution of Norwegian writing?
And if one thinks of your own career, arguably it’s your extreme popularity in Norway at first that drove your later fame. What’s the connection of your own work to Norwegian nationalism? Are you the first non-nationalist great Norwegian writer? Is that plausible? Or is there some deeper connection?
KNAUSGÅRD: I think so much writing is done out of a feeling of not belonging. If you read Knut Hamsun, he was a Nazi. I mean, he was a full-blooded Nazi. We have to be honest about that.
COWEN: His best book might be his Nazi book, right? He wrote it when he was what, 90?
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: On Overgrown Paths?
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: To me, it’s much more interesting than the novels, which are a kind of artifice that hasn’t aged so well.
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah.
COWEN: But you read On Overgrown Paths, you feel like you’re there. It’s about self-deception.
KNAUSGÅRD: It’s true, it’s a wonderful book. But I think Hamsun’s theme, his subject, is rootlessness. In a very rooted society, in a rural society, in a family-orientated society like Norway has been — a small society — he was a very rootless, very urban writer.
He went to America, and he hated America, but he was America. He had that in him. He was there in the late 19th century, and he wrote a book about it, which is a terrible book, but still, he was there, and he had that modernity in him.
He never wrote about his parents. Never wrote about where he came from. All his characters just appear, and then something happens with them, but there’s no past. I found that incredibly intriguing just because he became the Nazi. He became the farmer. He became the one who sang the song about the growth. What do you call it? Markens Grøde.
COWEN: Growth of the Soil.
And:
COWEN: Arnold Weinstein has a book on Nordic culture, and he argues that the sacrifice of the child is a recurring theme. It’s in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. It’s in a number of Ibsen plays, Bergman movies. Has that influenced you? Or are you a rejection of that? Are you like Edvard Munch, but with children, and that’s the big difference between you and Munch, the painter?
I told you we ask different questions.
KNAUSGÅRD: Yeah, yeah. You just said different. You didn’t say difficult.
Knausgaard showed up for the taping carrying a package of black bread, which he forgot to take with him when leaving. So for the rest of the day, I enjoyed his black bread…
How Much Did Physicians Drive the Opioid Crisis?
It’s well known that the opioid crisis started with prescription abuse but how much abuse was driven by patients who fooled their physicians and how much was driven by physicians who responded to monetary incentives with a nod and a wink? Molly Schnell provides some evidence which even a hard headed rationalist like myself found startling.
In August of 2010, Purdue Pharma replaced old OxyContin with a new, anti-abuse version of OxyContin. The new version was just as good at reducing pain as the old but it was more difficult to turn it into an injectable to produce a high. If physicians are altruists who balance treating their patient’s pain against their fear of patient addiction and downstream abuse then they should increase their prescriptions of new Oxy. From the point of view of health, the new Oxy is simply a better drug and with less abuse to worry about altruistic physicians should be more willing on the margin to prescribe Oxy to reduce pain. So what happened? Prescriptions for Oxy fell immediately and dramatically when the better version was released.
Now, to be fair to the physicians, patients who wanted to abuse Oxy stopped demanding it after the new version was released and physicians might not have realized how many of their prescriptions were being abused or sold on the secondary market. The aggregate data, which is a combination of supply and demand shifts, can mask individual physician behavior. Schnell, however, has data on the prescribing behavior of about 100,000 individual physicians who prescribed opioids.
Schnell finds that nearly a third of physicians behaved exactly as the altruism theory predicts. Namely, when new Oxy was released these altruistic physicians increased their prescriptions of Oxy and they maintained or reduced their prescriptions of other opioids. In fact, the median altruistic physician doubled their prescriptions of the new and improved Oxy. But almost 40% of physicians in Schnell’s sample behaved in a decidedly non-altruistic manner. Beginning in August of 2010, these non-altruistic physicians halved their prescriptions of new and improved Oxy and increased their prescriptions of other opioids. It’s difficult to see how attentive and altruistic physicians could decrease their demand for a better drug.
Schnell also finds that some parts of the country had fewer altruistic physicians and the consequences are evident in mortality statistics:
…. these differences in physician altruism across commuting zones translate into significant differences in mortality across locations…a one standard deviation increase in low-altruism physicians is associated with a 0.33 standard deviation increase in deaths involving drugs per capita. While this association is reduced conditional on observable commuting zone characteristics (including race, age, education, and income profiles), a significant and large association between the share of low-altruism physicians and drug-related mortality remains. Furthermore…this relationship persists even conditional on the number of opioid prescriptions, suggesting that the association is driven by the allocation of prescriptions introduced by low-altruism physicians rather than simply the quantity.
The less-altruistic physicians increased prescriptions for other opioids after new Oxy was introduced but perhaps even this was better than the non-prescription alternatives like heroin and street fentanyl. Indeed, Alpert, Powell and Pacula show that the introduction of improved Oxy led to more deaths because people switched to more dangerous, illegal alternatives. So was it a bad idea to introduce a better drug? Maybe, but if new Oxy had been introduced earlier perhaps fewer people would have been addicted, leading to less demand for illegal markets later. Thus, static and dynamic effects may differ. The economics of dual use goods is complicated.
Big business isn’t big politics
That is my recent essay, adapted in Foreign Policy, from my new book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. Here is the opening:
The basic view that big business is pulling the strings in Washington is one of the major myths of our time. Most American political decisions are not in fact shaped by big business, even though business does control numerous pieces of specialist legislation. Even in 2019, big business is hardly dominating the agenda. U.S. corporate leaders often promote ideas of fiscal responsibility, free trade, robust trade agreements, predictable government, multilateral foreign policy, higher immigration, and a certain degree of political correctness in government—all ideas that are ailing rather badly right now.
To be sure, there is plenty of crony capitalism in the United States today. For instance, the Export-Import Bank subsidizes U.S. exports with guaranteed loans or low-interest loans. The biggest American beneficiary is Boeing, by far, and the biggest foreign beneficiaries are large and sometimes state-owned companies, such as Pemex, the national fossil fuel company of the Mexican government. The Small Business Administration subsidizes small business start-ups, the procurement cycle for defense caters to corporate interests, and the sugar and dairy lobbies still pull in outrageous subsidies and price protection programs, mostly at the expense of ordinary American consumers, including low-income consumers.
…overall, lobbyists are not running the show. The average big company has only 3.4 lobbyists in Washington, and for medium-size companies that number is only 1.42. For major companies, the average is 13.9, and the vast majority of companies spend less than $250,000 a year on lobbying. Furthermore, a systematic study shows that business lobbying does not increase the chance of favorable legislation being passed for that business, nor do those businesses receive more government contracts; contributions to political action committees are ineffective too.
If you are looking for a villain, it is perhaps best to focus on how corporations sometimes help poorly staffed legislators evaluate and draft legislation. But again, national policy isn’t exactly geared to making businesses, and particularly big business, entirely happy.
References and further support are available in the book,
Is day care bad for kids, especially well-off kids?
Exploiting admission thresholds to the Bologna daycare system, we show using RDD that one additional daycare month at age 0–2 reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.7% of a s.d.) at age8–14 in a relatively affluent population. The magnitude of this negative effect increases with family income. Similar negative impacts are found for personality traits. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis from psychology that children in daycare experience fewer one-to-one interactions with adults, with negative effects in families where such interactions are of higher quality. We embed this hypothesis in a model that lends structure to our RDD.
Here is the forthcoming JPE article by Margherita Fort, Andrea Ichino and Giulio Zanella. And here are various ungated versions. (Do any of you have the links handy for other papers with similar results? They do exist.)
Quick quiz, we should:
a. Subsidize day care heavily
b. Not subsidize day care, or
c. Wait and see until more evidence is in.
Who is passing and failing this quiz? How about you?
Which countries are best for creating and encouraging women chess players?
Via David Smerdon, here is the picture:
To oversimplify only a wee bit, it is the countries with less gender equality which have more female chess players, relative to male chess players. Here is some description:
Denmark is the worst country in our list of participation, with only one female player to roughly 50 males, while the rest of Scandinavia as well as most of western Europe also languish at the bottom.
On the other hand, some of the best countries show evidence of the effect of female role models, and would be no surprise to players familiar with women’s chess history. Georgia (ranked 5th) and China (ranked 4th) both featured multiple women’s World Champions. There are also some high rates from a few unexpected sources: Vietnam (1st), the United Arab Emirates (2nd), Indonesia (8th), and even Kenya (12th) really buck the trend. Interestingly, a lot of the best countries for female chess players are in Asia. Besides Vietnam, there are five other countries in the best ten, and if I am a little more lenient with the chess population cut-offs, Mongolia and Tajikistan would also be in there.
Here is one cited hypothesis:
Could it be that, deep down, women just don’t like chess as much as men?
I consider that to be possible, but unconfirmed. In any case, the lesson is that gender imbalance in a particular field can be correlated with greater equality of opportunity overall.
Saturday assorted links
1. “Employing a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of hate crime across Germany, we first demonstrate that hate crime rises where men face disadvantages in local mating markets. Next, we deploy an original four-wave panel survey to confirm that support for hate crime increases when men fear that the inflow of refugees makes it more difficult to find female partners. Mate competition concerns remain a robust predictor even when controlling for anti-refugee views, perceived job competition, general frustration, and aggressiveness. We conclude that a more complete understanding of hate crime must incorporate mating markets and mate competition.” Link here.
2. Bryan Caplan on *Big Business* and crony capitalism.
3. Iceland fact of the day: “Sixty-four percent of students are women, the highest percentage of any European nation.”
4. How to get to ngdp targeting.
5. I’ve read so many bad or even absymal critiques of Facebook, but Bret Stephens (NYT) wrote a good one.
The progressive nature of big business
That is my new opinion piece for The Washington Post, derived from my Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. Here is one excerpt:
Yet big business often has been a strong progressive force in U.S. history, not only by providing jobs but also by spreading emancipatory practices and norms.
For instance, McDonald’s, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and many of the big tech companies offered health care and other legal benefits for same-sex partners well before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. In addition to dramatically improving the lives of thousands of Americans, the companies’ moves put a mainstream stamp of approval on the notion of same-sex marriage itself.
And:
The larger the business, the more tolerant the institution is likely to be of employee and customer personal preferences. A local baker might refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple for religious reasons, but Sara Lee, which tries to build very broadly based national markets for its products, is keen on selling cakes to everyone. The bigger companies need to protect their broader reputations and recruit large numbers of talented workers, including from minority groups. They can’t survive and grow just by cultivating a few narrow networks as either their workers or customers.
There are further arguments at the link.
What does a continually improving labor market imply about monetary policy?
Not as much as many people think. As you may know, yesterday’s job market was quite good (NYT) and it is now many years of labor market recovery. Does this mean the Fed should have been easier with money say two or three years ago? No, that doesn’t follow. Let’s talk through a few points:
1. Aggregate demand shocks are major causes of recessions, and when they come you want the central bank to lean against them very, very hard, even if that means higher than average price inflation.
2. The early problems are mostly nominal. For whatever reasons (morale? long-term implicit contracts?), firms lay off some workers rather than cutting their nominal wages. This is a big reason why downturns involve so much unemployment, but to the extent the central bank can keep up nominal demand, at least some of this unemployment can be avoided or at least smoothed out over time.
3. Once those workers are unemployed, nominal stickiness starts to cease to be the major problem. Real rigidities and stickiness become progressively more important with the passage of time. First, the unemployed don’t even have a nominal wage to be sticky in the first place, and yes some of them are excessively stubborn with their reservation wages for accepting new jobs but that looks suspiciously like voluntary unemployment, albeit with some behavioral irrationality mixed in. But no, the main problem still is not voluntary unemployment, I am saying if the only rigidities were nominal it would be a problem of voluntary unemployment, a very different claim. I’ll come back to this shortly.
4. In the very early stages of a recession, there might simply be no jobs available, period, due to uncertainties and liquidity shocks. But usually within a year or two, a whole host of jobs open up, they just may not be good jobs for many of the unemployed. Often they are bad jobs, for reasons which relate to real rigidities, not nominal rigidities. Individuals need to be rematched to new jobs, and that process may or may not go well.
5. Here is a typical real rigidities story (but not the only one): you aspire to be an upper to mid level manager, and you are offered a job as a cashier at Walmart, or you could get such a job if you tried. You don’t take the job, because you fear its presence on your resume will shunt you onto a permanently lower career track. That is indeed a problem, and it is a real rigidity, not a nominal one. It can keep you unemployed, even if you might otherwise prefer to have the work on a temporary basis.
6. As the economy grows in real terms, the quality of jobs available will be upgraded, and eventually the unemployed are offered jobs which are worth taking. This process can be fast or slow, but in the recent recovery it has been relatively slow.
7. As more people are taking jobs, yes demand is rising but supply is rising also. The two are rising together. It is not wrong to say “greater demand is reemploying people,” but it is misleading. It is more accurate to say “real demand is rising, coincident with growing output, job quality is improving, uncertainty is being resolved, and the economy is doing a successively better job at solving the matching problem in its labor markets.”
8. In that same setting, simply boosting nominal demand with lower interest rates and higher price inflation won’t necessarily help employment much. You might get a slight labor supply increase through the not very impressive Lucas supply curve (people confusing nominal and real changes).
8b. To be sure, there is likely no harm from the easier monetary policy since price inflation has been slightly below target. I do not hate these proposed monetary easings, I just don’t think they are likely to matter much. Telling me that “higher demand has been reemploying workers” doesn’t impress me. Telling me “the labor market recovery has been underway for a long time” also does not impress me. Neither claim implies that a nominal push to demand will do the trick, if anything they might imply the contrary.
9. If the labor market recovery has been underway for a long time, that is a sign the coordination problem has been a real one rather than a nominal one. It is a sign that earlier Fed easing simply may not have mattered much.
10. You might notice that outside of emergency situations, such as 1929 or 2008 (see point #1), economists struggle mightily to demonstrate that money matters at all. I think Christina Romer has shown that surprise deflationary shocks do matter and are bad. After that, it is still up in the air, as indeed this analysis implies.
Everything I am writing is consistent with mainstream research economics, and the best and most sophisticated versions of Keynesian economics. I know it is not usually what you read on the internet. As a side note and exercise, it is worth pondering what this same framework might imply for the efficacy of fiscal policy, noting the answer will be “under what conditions?” rather than yes or no.
Sludge Audits
Consumers, employees, students, and others are often subjected to “sludge”: excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services. Because of behavioral biases and cognitive scarcity, sludge can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate. To protect consumers, investors, employees, and others, firms, universities, and government agencies should regularly conduct Sludge Audits to catalogue the costs of sludge, and to decide when and how to reduce it. Much of human life is unnecessarily sludgy. Sludge often has costs far in excess of benefits, and it can have hurt the most vulnerable members of society.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Cass Sunstein.
Thursday assorted links
Why Twitter Isn’t Good for Coups
Here is Naunihal Singh interviewed by FP on the uprising in Venezuela–very much in the tradition of Tullock’s classic on Autocracy which argued that so-called popular uprisings almost always mask internal coups and Chwe’s work on the importance of common knowledge for coordinating action.
Naunihal Singh: Here’s the thing: At the heart of every coup, there is a dilemma for the people in the military. And it goes like this: You need to figure out which side you’re going to support, and in doing so, your primary consideration is to avoid a civil war or a fratricidal conflict.
If done correctly, a coup-maker will get up there and make the case that they have the support of everybody in the military, and therefore any resistance is minor and futile and that everyone should, either actively or passively, support the coup. And if you can convince people that’s the case, it becomes the case.
But in order to do this, you need to convince everyone not only that you’re going to succeed, but that everyone else thinks that you’re going to succeed. And in order to do that, you need to use some sort of public broadcast.
What is important here is the simultaneity of it. It’s the fact that you know that everybody else has heard the same thing as you have. And social media—Twitter—doesn’t do that.
FP: And can you tell us why Twitter isn’t really going to cut it?
NS: What broadcasts do is they create collective belief in collective action. Coup-making is about manipulating people’s beliefs and expectations about each other.
If I’m commanding one unit, even if I see Juan Guaidó’s official Tweet, I’m not going to even know how many other people within the military have seen it. What’s more, I would have good reason to believe that the penetration of this tweet within the military will be pretty slight. I have no idea what internet access is like inside the Venezuelan military right now. But I imagine that most military people don’t follow Juan Guaidó’s feed, because doing so would expose them to sanctions from military intelligence, and in that context, it would very clearly mark them as a traitor. But the other thing is this—what we think of as viral tweets operate on a far slower time scale than a broadcast. And coups happen in hours.
…FP: Guaidó delivered his message to Venezuela this morning standing in front of men in green fatigues with helmets on, and armored vehicles in the background. Tell me about how Guaidó is drawing on familiar visual strategies of coups. What did he get right and wrong about the optics?
NS: It’s a dawn video, which is very classic. But there’s a problem: Guaidó does have military people there, but in order to be more credible he would have had a high-ranking military figure standing side by side with him. He can’t make it appear like there’s a military takeover. He also has to make it clear that this is a civilian action and that it’s within the constitution. As a result, he’s standing at the front and he’s got some soldiers in the back, but because they are low-ranking soldiers, it doesn’t mean very much, and it doesn’t carry very much weight.
Caplan, Weinersmith, and Open Borders
Caplan and Weinersmith, in their splendid forthcoming graphic novel, present some rebuttals to the “cultural critique” of open borders. For instance (and here I am presenting their views):
1. The average immigrant has political views which poll as pretty close to those of the average American. They don’t even by huge margins favor more immigration. (The author do admit that low-skilled immigrants do favor significantly less free speech, in any case on all of these points they do present actual numbers and visuals.)
2. Support for the welfare state remains strong in Western European nations, even as they have taken in many more migrants.
3. Open borders once before produced American political culture.
4. In “deep roots” terms, the United States already has a mediocre ancestry score, yet America has very high gdp and relatively strong political institutions.
5. There is an extended response to Garett Jones on IQ which I do not feel I can summarize well. Toward the end, it is noted that babies adopted from poorer countries into richer countries typically do very well later in life.
6. The end of this chapter proclaims: “Open borders won’t destroy our freedom. It’s going to bring freedom to all of mankind.”
I will again repeat my earlier point: the value and import of this new book does not very much depend on your actual opinion of open borders. Still, if you would like to hear my views, I’ll repeat my earlier discussion:
And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled. The simplest argument against open borders is the political one. Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get. Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work?
In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice. The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way. I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring. Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs. (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)
In any case, do buy the Caplan and Weinersmith book. I have now begun to think there should be a book like this, or two, for every major political issue of import.
Wednesday assorted links
1. How much depression is there in poor countries?
2. “Indeed, both studies revealed that while social liberals were overall more sympathetic to poor people than social conservatives, reading about White privilege decreased their sympathy for a poor White (vs. Black) person. Moreover, these shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person’s plight. We conclude that, among social liberals, White privilege lessons may increase beliefs that poor White people have failed to take advantage of their racial privilege—leading to negative social evaluations.” Link here.
3. Noah Carl has been sacked. And more information.
4. “What compelled you to put a waterfall of this size inside an airport?” (Singapore)
5. A review of neuroeconomic gameplay in psychiatric disorders.
The Peter Principle Tested
The Peter Principle is the observation that if people are good at doing their jobs they will be promoted. It follows that eventually everyone will be doing a job that they are not good at (otherwise they would have been promoted). The Peter Principle is tongue in cheek but it’s stuck around because it has an element of truth. Alan Benson, Danielle Li, Kelly Shue have put the principle to the test (summary here) by looking at promotions and performance of some 40,000 sales workers across 131 firms. Sales workers are a good place to look for the principle in action because it seems natural to promote the best sales people yet the best sales people do not necessarily make the best managers.
Figure One summarizes the main result: The best sales people as measured by sales revenue are more likely to be promoted (top) but their value added as managers actually declines in their (pre-promotion) sales revenues (bottom). The result isn’t difficult to believe, the best sales staff do not necessarily make the best managers, the best football players do not necessarily make the best coaches, the best professors do not necessarily make the best deans. But the result is deeper than this point because it raises questions about management. How can firms motivate top sales performers without promoting them to positions for which they may not be suitable? If sales revenue isn’t a good metric for manager potential, what is? The authors write:
We provide evidence that the Peter Principle may be the unfortunate consequence of firms doing their best to motivate their workforce. As has been pointed out by Baker et al. (1988) and by Milgrom and Roberts (1992), promotions often serve dual roles within an organisation: they are used to assign the best person to the managerial role, but also to motivate workers to excel in their current roles. If firms promoted workers on the basis of managerial potential rather than current performance, employees may have fewer incentives to work as hard.
We also find evidence that firms appear aware of the trade-off between incentives and matching and have adopted methods of reducing their costs. First, organisations can reward high performers through incentive pay, avoiding the need to use promotions to different roles as an incentive. Indeed, we find that firms that rely more on incentive pay (commissions, bonuses, etc.), also rely less on sales performance in making promotion decisions. Second, we find that organisations place less weight on sales performance when promoting sales workers to managerial positions that entail leading larger teams. That is, when managers have more responsibility, firms appear less willing to compromise on their quality.
Our research suggests that companies are largely aware of the Peter Principle. Because workers value promotion above and beyond a simple increase in salary, firms may not want to rid themselves entirely of promotion-based incentives. However, strategies that decouple a worker’s current job performance from his or her future career potential can minimise the costs of the Peter Principle. For example, technical organisations, like Microsoft and IBM have long used split career ladders, allowing their engineers to advance as individual contributors or managers. These practices recognise workers for succeeding in one area without transferring them to another.
Designing incentives is much more complicated than the carrot and the stick especially when workers contribute to firms in difficult to measure, multi-dimensional ways.
(fyi, our textbook, Modern Principles offers an introduction to incentive design).
*Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration*
That is the already-bestselling graphic novel by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, and I would just like to say it is a phenomenal achievement. It is a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. I picked it up not knowing what to expect, and was blown away by the execution.
To be clear, I don’t myself favor a policy of open borders, instead preferring lots more legal immigration done wisely. But that’s not really the central issue here, as I think Caplan and Weinersmith are revolutionizing how to present economic (and other?) ideas. Furthermore, they do respond in detail to my main objections to the open borders idea, namely the cultural problems with so many foreigners coming to the United States (even if I am not convinced, but that is for another blog post). Even if you disagree with open borders, this book is one of the very best explainers of the gains from trade idea ever produced, and it will teach virtually anyone a truly significant amount about the immigration issue, as well as economic analytics more generally.
There is more actual substance in this book than in many a purely written tome.
It will be out in October, you can pre-order it here.