Results for “age of em” 17233 found
Friday assorted links
1. “…less than 3% of statues in Britain depict real, non-royal women…”
2. Armenian and Greek legacy in post-expulsion Turkey. And seafaring Neandertals?
3. “Fitness-faking technology, which delivers the cues of status and sexual popularity, is evolving much faster than our minds can evolve to contend with them.” Link here.
4. Who’s complacent? (Germans)
5. A hypothesis.
6. Do cyberwars make it easier to de-escalate? And Pakistan may soon have the world’s third largest nuke stockpile.
Thursday assorted links
1. Should Ethiopia be more democratic?
2. The John Cochrane critique of cryptocurrencies. And below the radar crypto innovation in China.
4. Muddle we must.
5. Theology majors marry each other a lot.
7. “Haynes thinks it likely that investigators used DNA markers posted on genealogy websites to identify a possible ancestor of the killer and then followed the ancestor’s family tree down to the present, looking for male descendants who fit the profile.” Link here.
My Conversation with Balaji Srinivasan
Here is the transcript and audio, and this is the intro:
Marc Andreessen has described Balaji as the man who has more good ideas per minute than anyone else in the Bay Area. He is the CEO of Earn.com, where we’re sitting right now, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, formerly a general partner. He has cofounded the company Counsyl in addition to many other achievements.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is the venture capital model so geographically clustered? So much of it is out here in the Bay Area. It’s spreading to other parts of the country. Around the world, you see Israel, in some ways, as being number two, per capita number one. But that’s a very small country. Why is it so hard to get venture capital off the ground in so many areas?
SRINIVASAN: That’s actually now changed with the advent of ICOs and Ethereum and crypto. Historically, the reason for it was companies would come to Sand Hill Road. One maybe slightly less appreciated aspect is, if you come to Sand Hill Road and you get VC financing, the VC who invests in your company typically takes a board seat. A VC does not want to fly 6,000 miles for every board seat if they’ve got 10 board seats and four board meetings a year per company.
What a VC would like in general, all else being equal, is for you to be within driving distance. Not only does that VC like it, so does the next VC in the B round and the next VC in the C round. That factor is actually one of the big things that constrains people to the Bay Area, is VC driving distance, [laughs] because VCs don’t want to do investments that are an entire world away.
With the advent of Ethereum and ICOs, we have finally begun to decentralize the last piece, which was funding. Now, that regulatory environment needs to be worked out. It’s going to be worked out in different ways in different countries.
But the old era where you had to come to Sand Hill to get your company funded and then go to Wall Street to exit is over. That’s something where it’s going to increasingly decentralize. It already has decentralized worldwide, and that’s going to continue.
COWEN: With or without a board seat, doesn’t funding require a face-to-face relationship? It’s common for VC companies to even want the people they’re funding to move their endeavor to the Bay Area in some way, not only for the board meeting. They want to spend time with those people.
We’re doing this podcast face to face. We could have done it over Skype. There’s something significant about actually having an emotionally vivid connection with someone right there in the room. How much can we get around that as a basic constraint?
And here is another:
COWEN: Right now, I pay financial fees to my mutual funds, to Merrill Lynch, all over. Anytime I save money, I’m paying a fee to someone. Which of those fees will go away?
SRINIVASAN: Good question. Maybe all of them.
And:
COWEN: Drones?
SRINIVASAN: Underrated.
COWEN: Why? What will they do that we haven’t thought of?
SRINIVASAN: Construction. There’s different kinds of drones. They’re not just flying drones. There’s swimming drones and there’s walking drones and so on.
Like the example I mentioned where you can teleport into a robot and then control that, Skype into a robot and control that on other side of the world. That’s going to be something where maybe you’re going to have it in drone mode so it walks to the destination. You’ll be asleep and then you wake up and it’s at the destination.
Drones are going to be a very big deal. There’s this interesting movie called Surrogates, which actually talks about what a really big drone/telepresence future would look like. People never leave their homes because, instead, they just Skype into a really good-looking drone/telepresent version of themselves, and they walk around in that.
If they’re hit by a car, it doesn’t matter because they can just rejuvenate and create a new one. I think drones are very, very underrated in terms of what they’re going to do.
Do read or listen to the whole thing.
How much do schools mediate the international transmission of income?
Not that much. From Jesse Rothstein:
Chetty et al. (2014b) show that children from low-income families achieve higher adult incomes, relative to those from higher income families, in some commuting zones (CZs) than in others. I investigate whether children’s educational outcomes help to explain the between-CZ differences. I find little evidence that the quality of schools is a key mechanism driving variation in intergenerational mobility. While CZs with stronger intergenerational income transmission have somewhat stronger transmission of parental income to children’s educational attainment and achievement, on average, neither can explain a large share of the between-CZ variation. Marriage patterns explain two-fifths of the variation in income transmission, human capital accumulation and returns to human capital each explain only one-ninth, and the remainder of the variation (about one-third) reflects differences in earnings between children from high- and low-income families that are not mediated by human capital. This points to job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets, rather than the education system, as likely factors influencing intergenerational economic mobility.
Here is the NBER working paper.
The role of ideological change in India’s economic liberalization
In an interesting paper, Nimish Adhia argues that in the 1980s Bollywood films began to shift from emphasizing collectivist duty towards individual happiness.
The injunction of performing one’s duty without regard to outcomes has been the basis of much of the Indian philosophical and religious discourse.
The dilemma is recurrent in Indian films…. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the dilemmas invariably resolve in favor of duty. The mother in Mother India (1956) shoots and kills her wayward son as he attempts to kidnap a woman—an action that would have been shameful for the village. “I am the mother of the entire village,” she says as she picks up the gun. As the son collapses to the ground, she wails and rushes to his side, and is shown to lament his death for the rest of her life, but the film valorizes her as “Mother India.”
… But then starting with Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1986) there is a spate of films that celebrate the assertion of one’s desire. The assertion commonly takes the form of falling in love—an audacious act in a society where the sexual mores are conservative and a majority of marriages are arranged on basis of familial and community criteria. The young lovers in the big hit Qayamat se Qayamat tak (Doomsday to Doomsday, 1988) elope and endure enormous hardships on account of their families’ opposition. The families had a falling out in the past when they were neighboring landlords in the country. The demands of familial loyalty, shown to arise in this way from a feudal setup and concluding in the death of the young lovers, are condemned by the film as savage and outdated. “We are not the property of our parents,” the young man once counsels his beloved. “We need not be carriers of their legacy of hate.”
At the same time, the treatment of businessmen becomes more positive, wealth is shown as being earned rather than simply given, and the pursuit and achievement of wealth is shown to lead to happiness and pride rather than misery and spiritual death. Adhia argues that these changes helped to cause the liberalization reform beginning in the 1990s.
the ideological change is visible in the films of the 1980s, preceding the wave of liberalization starting in 1991. It lends support to the notion that the ideological change, reflected in the films as early as 1980, was a cause rather than a consequence of liberalization.
Guru, which I have called the most important free market film ever made, comes after liberalization but can be understood as in many ways the apex of these trends.
Hat tip: Prateek Raj.
Who’s complacent? Penn State is complacent
The student “Outing Club,” which has gone backpacking, kayaking, and hiking in state parks over the course of its 98-year-existence, will no longer be allowed to host outdoor events after administrators conducted a risk assessment, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“The types of activities in which [Penn State Outing Club] engages are above the university’s threshold of acceptable risk for recognized student organizations,” according to an official announcement.
A key issue for administrators was that the Outing Club frequently visit locations with poor cell phone coverage. This wasn’t an issue during the Coolidge administration, but now that cell phones exist, students are apparently expected to remain glued to them at all times.
“Student safety in any activity is our primary focus,” Lisa Powers, a Penn State spokeswoman, told The Post-Gazette.
And yet the treasurer of the Outing Club said that he hadn’t heard of any injuries sustained on club outings in recent years.
Here is the full story at Reason, via Maximilian Roos.
Defensive Gun Use and the Difficult Statistics of Rare Events
In the mid-1990s, Kleck and Gertz (1995) estimated that in a typical year about 1.3% of US adults used a gun for self-defense against another person. Kleck and Gertz’s estimate, which came from a survey of nearly 5000 people, implied that there were millions of defensive gun uses every year.
Following Kleck and Gertz’s 1995 paper, the CDC added a question about defensive gun use to their Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). In 1996, 1997, and 1998 the CDC asked:
“During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a fire arm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”
But here is the surprise. The CDC buried the question and the results. Only recently was the data discovered and made public by Kleck in a new paper.*(see addendum) So what were the results? You will perhaps now not be too surprised that the CDC’s survey supports Kleck and Gertz’s original finding, about 1% of survey respondents reported a defensive gun use, implying millions of such uses over a year.
The case isn’t closed on defensive gun use, however, because of a statistical conundrum.
The CDC asked 12,870 individuals about defensive gun use over the three samples.That’s a relatively large sample but note that this means that just 117 people reported a defensive gun use, i.e. ~1%. In comparison, 12,656 people (98.33%) reported no use, 11 people (0.09%) said they didn’t know and 86 people (0.67%) refused to answer. People answering surveys can be mistaken and some lie and the reasons go both ways. Some people might be unwilling to answer because a defensive gun use might have been illegal (Would these people refuse to answer?). On the other hand, mischievous responders might report a defensive gun use just because that makes them sound cool.
The deep problem, however, is not miscodings per se but that miscodings of rare events are likely to be asymmetric. Since defensive gun use is relatively uncommon under any reasonable scenario there are many more opportunities to miscode in a way that inflates defensive gun use than there are ways to miscode in a way that deflates defensive gun use.
Imagine, for example, that the true rate of defensive gun use is not 1% but .1%. At the same time, imagine that 1% of all people are liars. Thus, in a survey of 10,000 people, there will be 100 liars. On average, 99.9 (~100) of the liars will say that they used a gun defensively when they did not and .1 of the liars will say that they did not use a gun defensively when they did. Of the 9900 people who report truthfully, approximately 10 will report a defensive gun use and 9890 will report no defensive gun use. Adding it up, the survey will find a defensive gun use rate of approximately (100+10)/10000=1.1%, i.e. more than ten times higher than the actual rate of .1%! Those numbers are, of course, approximately what the CDC survey found which doesn’t prove that Kleck’s interpretation is wrong only that very different interpretations are also plausible.
The bottom line is that it’s good to know that the original Kleck and Gertz survey replicated–approximately 1% of adult Americans did report a defensive gun use in the 1990s–but the real issue is the interpretation of the survey and for that a replication doesn’t help.
Addendum: The paper has since been taken down perhaps because in addition to the issue of interpretation that I raised the survey may not have been national. Robert VerBruggen has further details.
Sunday assorted links
1. Last known survivor of the 19th century has passed away. And a related thread.
2. Women working in the D.C. area do especially well.
3. “The longer the hikikomori remain apart from society, the more aware they become of their social failure,” explains Elan. “They lose whatever self-esteem and confidence they had, and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever more terrifying. Locking themselves in their room makes them feel ‘safe’.” Link here.
4. An old David Hendry paper on forecast failure.
5. Kenya estimate of the day: are C-section births at 50 percent?
6. Interview with Stephanie Koontz on marriage and gender. Interview with David Perell.
7. Jared Diamond reviews David Reich (NYT).
Why are Americans so loud?
From Julia Belluz at Vox:
…Americans are loud
A final point about why restaurants are so loud. This has nothing to do with restaurateurs or designers or acoustic engineers. It has to do with Americans — who I believe are a slightly louder people, on average.
As a Canadian working in the US, I am often struck by how much louder my fellow diners in restaurants seem to be, and how much more loudly the people I’m walking near on streets speak to one another or into their cellphones.
This is not a scientific observation, but it’s one that’s fueled Reddit discussions and even a ban on “loud Americans” in a pub in Ireland. Sietsema, for one, also agreed with my view. “When Europeans imitate Americans, they shout,” he said. “We tend to be louder people — we’re louder talkers; we’re bigger with our expressions.”
And Alex W. asks me: Since you’re so well traveled, is this true, and if so, why? I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. At least originally, Americans had much more space than did Europeans, and this is still true to some degree. That induce norms of loudness, which have to some extent persisted.
2. America is a nation of immigrants, with English-language proficiency of varying quality, including historically. For whatever reason, good or bad, we tend to shout a bit when the listener is not fluent in our language.
3. Taleb has suggested that higher status people shout less, talk in more hushed tones, and are more likely to whisper, to grab the attention of the crowd. Perhaps America has fewer high status people to set social norms. Or perhaps our high status people derive status from their wealth, and feel the need to emit fewer cultural signals, just as wealthy Americans often dress more poorly or eat a worse diet than European elites.
4. Characters on TV speak more loudly, and Americans watch more TV and admire and mimic it more.
5. Americans command a broader personal space, keeping a greater distance, and thus they have to speak more loudly to each other (and they feel Italians are intrusive with respect to how close they stand).
6. Loudness is perhaps a byproduct of individualism.
7. American culture values “forthrightness and self-confidence.” Plus maybe it’s a regional thing?
What else?
Parag Pathak wins the John Bates Clark Award
Parag Pathak, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor whose research suggests that school choice can lead to improved student performance, won the John Bates Clark award for contributions from a young economist.
Pathak, 37, was honored for his work on market design and education policy, the Nashville, Tennessee-based American Economic Association said Friday in a statement on its website. It said his work “blends institutional knowledge, theoretical sophistication, and careful empirical analysis to provide insights that are of immediate value to important public-policy issues.”
That is from Bloomberg. Here is scholar.google.com. There is lots on his home page. Only 808 Twitter followers! His Wikipedia page is good. He is a protege of Al Roth, and overall this prize is a victory for the notion of market design.
Subliminal education?
The idea of inserting “social-psychological interventions” into learning software is gaining steam, raising both hopes and fears about the ways the ed-tech industry might seek to capitalize on recent research into the impact of students’ mindsets on their learning.
…Publishing giant Pearson recently conducted an experiment involving more than 9,000 unwitting students at 165 different U.S. colleges and universities. Without seeking prior consent from participating institutions or individuals, the company embedded “growth-mindset” and other psychological messaging into some versions of one of its commercial learning software programs. The company then randomly assigned different colleges to use different versions of that software, tracking whether students who received the messages attempted and completed more problems than their counterparts at other institutions.
The results included some modest signs that some such messaging can increase students’ persistence when they start a problem, then run into difficulty. That’s likely to bolster growth-mindset proponents, who say it’s important to encourage students to view intelligence as something that can change with practice and hard work.
But the bigger takeaway, according to Pearson’s AERA paper, is the possibility of leveraging commercial educational software for new research into the emerging science around students’ attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking about themselves.
Here is more, via Phil Hill. Is all education subliminal education?
Meet me in Mongolia? (North Korea fact of the day)
As officials scramble to convene the hastily announced and once-unthinkable meeting in the coming weeks, the site itself remains an open question. It is unclear whether Mr. Kim’s fleet of Soviet-era planes can fly him more than a few thousand miles from North Korea.
“We know he has a plane, but it’s an old plane,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council aide who worked on Korea issues. “No one really knows if it works.”
Since taking power in 2011, Mr. Kim is not known to have flown outside his country, and the question of his transportation adds a layer of political complications to a fraught and uncertain summit meeting…
With the expected range of Mr. Kim’s planes, a trip to Hawaii or Guam, the closest United States territory to North Korea, would almost certainly require a refueling stop or a borrowed plane. Korea experts call that an indignity that Mr. Kim would not accept.
That is from Ali Watkins of the NYT.
How do people respond to shared trauma?
Studies of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19th, 1995, indicate that the traumatic event resulted in people seeking to strengthen their bonds with loved ones: Divorce rates went down, and birth rates went up.
While tragic, the Oklahoma City bombing provided a fortuitous case study. When domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols carried out the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, a total of 168 people died and more than 700 were injured. At the time it was the most calamitous terrorist attack in American history. Sixty-two percent of people in the city reported that they were personally affected by the events of that day. Forty percent said they knew someone who was injured or killed. The death of nineteen young children in the bombing was particularly traumatic.
Researchers have since studied the ripple effect the attack had on both divorce rates and birth rates. Family researchers Paul A. Nakonezny, Rebecca Reddick, and Joseph Lee Rodgers note that after the bombing, survivors were statistically less likely than the general population to divorce. Divorce rates, compared to the previous 10 years, declined in the Oklahoma City region in the months after the blast. Researchers thought that the impact would be felt most acutely by those closest to the bomb site, and indeed, the impact was highest among those who lived in counties most directly affected by the bombing, and lessened in Oklahoma counties located further away from downtown Oklahoma City.
In a separate study, Joseph Lee Rodgers, Craig A. St. John, and Ronnie Coleman discovered that Oklahoma City metropolitan area underwent a baby boom nine months after the bombing. In seventy-seven Oklahoma counties, both factors—marriage longevity and increased procreation—declined the further away the counties were from ground zero.
That is from Daily JStor.
What can we plausibly hope for with North Korea?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
First: The North Korean regime has never been bureaucratized in the modern sense of that term. While we don’t have comprehensive information, it seems that until recently Kim as leader had not been going abroad, nor had he been receiving many visits from other heads of state. His position and perhaps his mood has been one of extreme isolation, and he is not surrounded by anything resembling the U.S. State Department or even the old-style Soviet bureaucracies that managed foreign policy for the USSR. The rest of his regime is probably poorly informed about the extent of American military superiority, should a conflict come to pass.
By meeting with other foreign leaders, the North Korean regime would be forced to build up its basic processes for dealing with the rest of the world. That in turn creates interest groups and flows of information (some of which invariably leak out). The North Korean populace responds by thinking more about the outside world, making it harder to control by propaganda. In turn the North Korean leadership may decide to continue economic liberalization.
One need not count on an “End of History” story culminating in liberalism and democratization. The more modest hope would be for the North Korean leadership to become more decentralized, more bureaucratic, better informed and harder to marshal behind crazy military measures.
The unspoken goal of engagement would be to encourage North Korea to evolve into a more banal and more predictable form. That is the natural flow of most bureaucratic organizations, so in this regard American negotiators actually have time on their side. The North Koreans are going to change a lot more than the U.S. is likely to.
And the concluding sentence:
Think of any diplomatic talks with North Korea as a big act of theater — designed not to fool him, but to teach him that theater itself can be fun.
Do read the whole thing.
Washington, D.C. fact of the day
The National African Art Museum has a problem:
Attendance dropped to 159,000 last year from a high of 403,000 in 2009, when there was a special exhibition. Last year’s number is 43 percent below the 10-year average.
One of the under-reported stories about D.C. is how much the city’s art museums have faded as intellectual and cultural centers for the city. This seems to be extreme for the African museum, perhaps because of urban gentrification, and perhaps because the African museum has an especially hard time mounting blockbuster exhibits famous to the public eye. Prince Twins Seven Seven just isn’t as famous as he ought to be.
In the meantime, you all have the internet to keep you busy.