Results for “age of em” 17236 found
When was the great age of migration?
Jürgen Osterhammel writes:
Between 1815 and 1914 at least 82 million people moved voluntarily from one country to another, at a yearly rate of 660 migrants per million of the world population. The comparable rate between 1945 and 1980, for example, was only 215 per million.
That is from The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Here is my first post on the book.
Rampage is on a rampage (the most expensive schools are art schools)
After a mere week or so at work, it can no longer be said that Catherine Rampell is the most underrated force in economics writing and journalism (or can it?). Here is her post on which are the most expensive schools. It is art and music schools, when you take all relevant costs and financial aid into account. Excerpt:
Now here’s a list of the top 10 most expensive four-year private nonprofits, after subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid at each institution:
1. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2. Ringling College of Art and Design
3. The Boston Conservatory
4. Berklee College of Music
5. California Institute of the Arts
Do see the earlier MR post “Artists grew up in households w/typically higher incomes than doctors did.” What does this imply about the competitiveness of the sector? About our models of child-rearing?
What happens when the unemployed retire?
They become much happier, or so it seems in a new paper by hetschko, Knabe, and Schoeb, “Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment.” (Ungated versions here.)
Catherine Rampell reports on the research here. Part of her summary is this:
The paper is based on German survey data and finds that self-reported “life-satisfaction” increases by around 0.3 points on a scale from 0 to 10 for people who transition from unemployment to retirement. That’s about twice the increase in happiness that newlyweds experience. The average person who transitions from employment to retirement, on the other hand, does not experience a bump in life satisfaction.
And:
Rather ironically, it is hope that keeps people unhappy while unemployed…
Average is Over
New technologies are transforming the structure of the US economy but creating only modest numbers of jobs, according to the biggest official survey of businesses, conducted only once every five years.
The 2012 economic census shows how technology is creating a boom in output for new industries – such as shale gas and internet retail – but only a modest increase in their payrolls.
It highlights concerns that recent innovations in information technology tend to raise productivity by replacing existing workers, rather than creating new products that demand more labour to produce.
The FT link is interesting throughout and I believe these numbers vindicate what many of us have been arguing. It also stresses the oft-neglected point that mining and drilling are relatively capital-intensive sectors:
Drilling is capital intensive, however, so even though the industry’s sales rose by $142bn, its annual payroll was up only $20bn to $61bn in total.
It also turns out that online retail is not very labor intensive at current margins.
Is age-adjusted divorce actually way up?
Kay Hymnowitz reports:
According to new research, far from declining since 1980 as researchers thought, age-adjusted divorce rates have actually risen 40%.
She cites this new paper from Demography, by Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles. The abstract is this:
This article critically evaluates the available data on trends in divorce in the United States. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 underestimate recent marital instability. These flawed data have led some analysts to conclude that divorce has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the age composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in age-standardized divorce rates between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have doubled over the past two decades among persons over age 35. Among the youngest couples, however, divorce rates are stable or declining. If current trends continue, overall age-standardized divorce rates could level off or even decline over the next few decades. We argue that the leveling of divorce among persons born since 1980 probably reflects the increasing selectivity of marriage.
You will find ungated versions here. I haven’t had a chance to paw through the argument, but it seemed worth passing along. Hat tip goes to Charles Murray on Twitter.
The Silicon Valley wage suppression conspiracy
Many readers have asked me what I think of the email chain which shows evidence that Silicon Valley firms conspired to hold wages down, by refusing to engage in competitive bidding for workers’ services.
I would suggest caution in interpreting this event. For one thing, we don’t know how effective this monopsonistic cartel turned out to be. We do know that wages for successful employees in this sector are high and rising. Many a collusive agreement has fallen apart once one or two firms decide to break ranks, as they usually do. Without legal enforcement, or without an NCAA-like clearinghouse enforcement structure (also backed by the law), it is hard to find examples of persistently successful monopsonistic labor-buying cartels. One reason is that workers can find means of switching firms which do not directly implicate the new hiring firm as the villain which plucked them away. The most successful collusive agreements are not usually monopsonistic and furthermore they are often based on self-sustaining and self-interested norms which do not require articulation in the form of incriminating emails.
A second point is this. Let’s say you knew that when you took a job at Apple or Google that no other Silicon Valley firm would bid you away. You don’t need to have explicit knowledge of the workings of the cartel, rather you simply observe that other people in your general position seem to stay put rather than receiving fantastic outside offers. Given that you have outside alternatives, you would demand, and receive, higher wages in the first place for moving to one of those firms. This actually would increase wage compression and limit inequality, albeit while decreasing efficiency. Still, workers as a whole would win back some of what they seemed to be losing, albeit not all of it.
How are the benefits distributed from Medicare Advantage?
There is a new NBER Working Paper by Mark Duggan, Amanda Starc, and Boris Vabson, here is the abstract, with the bold emphasis added by me:
Governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services. While a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting, surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract. In this paper we examine this issue in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program, through which the federal government contracts with private insurers to coordinate and finance health care for more than 15 million Medicare recipients. To do this, we exploit a substantial policy-induced increase in MA reimbursement in metropolitan areas with a population of 250 thousand or more relative to MSAs just below this threshold. Our results demonstrate that the additional reimbursement leads more private firms to enter this market and to an increase in the share of Medicare recipients enrolled in MA plans. Our findings also reveal that only about one-fifth of the additional reimbursement is passed through to consumers in the form of better coverage. A somewhat larger share accrues to private insurers in the form of higher profits and we find suggestive evidence of a large impact on advertising expenditures. Our results have implications for a key feature of the Affordable Care Act that will reduce reimbursement to MA plans by $156 billion from 2013 to 2022.
There is an ungated version here (pdf).
Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market?
There is new Brookings research by Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer, and David Cho:
The short-term unemployment rate is a much stronger predictor of inflation and real wage growth than the overall unemployment rate in the U.S. Even in good times, the long-term unemployed are on the margins of the labor market, with diminished job prospects and high labor force withdrawal rates, and as a result they exert little pressure on wage growth or inflation.
Consistent with my earlier views, this work is suggesting that many of the long-term unemployed are/have become an economically segmented group. This is noteworthy too, as it implies the problem is not merely initial discrimination:
…even after finding another job, reemployment does not fully reset the clock for the long-term unemployed, who are frequently jobless again soon after they gain reemployment: only 11 percent of those who were long-term unemployed in a given month returned to steady, full-time employment a year later.
I would consider that evidence for a notion of zero marginal product workers. Furthermore, in my view (I am not speaking for the authors here), right now further inflation is as likely to harm as to help these individuals. To ask whether the Fed “should give up” on the long-term unemployed is a biased framing which is more likely to mislead us than anything else.
There is a good piece up at 538:
Krueger and his coauthors, Princeton economists Judd Cramer and David Cho, find evidence that the long-term unemployed aren’t getting jobs even in parts of the country where the job market is comparatively healthy, suggesting that a stronger economic rebound won’t be enough to put them back to work.
Storage vaults for Bitcoin?
…a raft of bitcoin thefts at exchanges like Mt. Gox is raising the question of whether the sophisticated currency still needs the same sort of physical security infrastructure—impenetrable steel vaults, armed security guards, and even paper ledgers—as cash and gold.
A Silicon Valley startup called Xapo is among a handful of young companies trying to become the Fort Knox of bitcoin, building secret bank vaults deep in the earth that would safely store millions of dollars worth of bitcoin code on computer drives. And if modern bank robbers still manage to pry open the vault? Xapo promises to fully insure all deposits.
On Wednesday, Xapo said it raised $20 million in funding led by venture-capital firm Benchmark, to support a network of underground vaults that the company says are in mountainous regions on multiple continents.
There is more here. I think of this as a lesson in how bid-ask spreads tend to reemerge, one way or another, no matter how hard we try to abolish them. One key question about Bitcoin is whether it has found a better place to “put” the bid-ask spread.
Government’s Empty Buildings Are Costing Taxpayers Billions
The boarded up building in the photo sits a mere 6 blocks from the White House on prime real estate but it’s been empty for 30 years! What’s the problem? The building is owned/controlled by the Federal government which often doesn’t even know what it owns, lacks the incentive to control costs and whose bureaucratic strictures make selling difficult even when motivation exists.
From an excellent piece on NPR:
Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget believes these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.
…But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job. It turns out that the federal government does not know what it owns.
…even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.
Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.
Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.
The NPR article is excellent but it vastly underestimates the size of the problem. In addition to empty buildings, the Federal government owns/controls millions of acres of land that are worth hundreds of billions and perhaps even trillions of dollars. The land is not being used to its full value or potential even though maintenance costs runs in the tens of billions annually.
The most human-like computer poem?
Try this:
Long years have passed.
I think of goodbye.
Locked tight in the night
I think of passion;
Drawn to for blue, the night
During the page
My shattered pieces of life
watching the joy
shattered pieces of love
My shattered pieces of love
gone stale.
Here is (supposedly) the most computer-like human poem, “Cut Opinions,” by Deanna Ferguson:
cut opinions tear tasteful
hungers huge ground swell
partisan have-not thought
green opinions hidden slide
hub from sprung in
weather yah
bold erect tender
perfect term transparent till
I two minute topless formed
A necessarily sorry sloppy strands
hot opinions oh like an apple
a lie, a liar kick back
filial oh well hybrid opinions happen
not stopped
Here are related rankings and explanation (sort of). Was this poem written by a human or a computer? I have no idea.
Is Islamic political control bad for women’s empowerment?
Maybe not, once we control properly for endogeneity:
Islamic Rule and the Empowerment of the Poor and Pious
Erik Meyersson
Econometrica, January 2014, Pages 229–269Abstract:
Does Islamic political control affect women’s empowerment? Several countries have recently experienced Islamic parties coming to power through democratic elections. Due to strong support among religious conservatives, constituencies with Islamic rule often tend to exhibit poor women’s rights. Whether this reflects a causal relationship or a spurious one has so far gone unexplored. I provide the first piece of evidence using a new and unique data set of Turkish municipalities. In 1994, an Islamic party won multiple municipal mayor seats across the country. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I compare municipalities where this Islamic party barely won or lost elections. Despite negative raw correlations, the RD results reveal that, over a period of six years, Islamic rule increased female secular high school education. Corresponding effects for men are systematically smaller and less precise. In the longer run, the effect on female education remained persistent up to 17 years after, and also reduced adolescent marriages. An analysis of long-run political effects of Islamic rule shows increased female political participation and an overall decrease in Islamic political preferences. The results are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes the Islamic party’s effectiveness in overcoming barriers to female entry for the poor and pious.
There are ungated versions here. That is via Kevin Lewis, who surveys other interesting papers on religion here.
Why many government jobs are a bad idea for many academics
When the Obama White House requested that I serve on the National Council on the Humanities, I agreed to have my name put forward. I went through the lengthy FBI check, including repeated probing of friends about my nonexistent drug use.
But in the end the White House decided not to move my nomination forward. There were two reasons. First, taxes. In 2009 and 2010, the years of my divorce, I filed my taxes late — four weeks and 10 days, respectively. Second, I was not willing to commit to never criticizing the administration, nor to restricting my publishing agenda to topics that were unlikely to be controversial. There is just no point trying to be a public intellectual if you can’t speak your mind. This requirement was conveyed and discussed through phone calls; I have no written record to prove it. But that was how it went.
Why did the White House want such restrictions? Lawyers told me that the administration didn’t want to have to deal with even one news cycle being overtaken by media frenzy about something some low-level official had said. The administration was trying to survive in our 21st-century media environment.
That is from Danielle Allen.
The biggest problem with Swiss immigration restrictions
Switzerland really does produce global tfp, Tim Berners-Lee being the most obvious example, not to mention CERN, particle colliders, and pharmaceuticals:
The outcome of an ill-conceived referendum on 9 February against ‘mass immigration’ threatens to spoil Switzerland’s beautiful science landscape (see page 277).
The full story is here. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Michael Strain’s new jobs agenda and mobility payments
I have been meaning to cover this topic, here is an overview from Reihan. There is one brief version from Strain here. He has many valuable ideas, and the one which has caught my attention is this:
Offering relocation vouchers to the long-term unemployed in high-unemployment areas…
There are some pretty good jobs around, including in parts of Texas and North Dakota. The point is not that these jobs/regions could absorb all of the current unemployed, but rather that we can learn something about the current unemployed (at the margin of course) but noting that these jobs remain unfilled.
First, I would like to know what the unemployment (participation?) rate would be today if American labor had a mobility rate closer to that of the early to mid 1980s.
Second, here is a study (pdf) of a 1976 federal jobs relocation subsidy program. The conclusion is vaguely positive, but not firm. Here is a study (pdf) of relocation assistance in Germany, mostly positive. Here is a good discussion of U.S. trade adjustment relocation assistance with lots of numbers (pdf), it tries to be positive but my reading of the content suggests lukewarm results. Here is a Brookings proposal (pdf).
Some states offer relocation assistance, for Wisconsin you need to have a job elsewhere already lined up. Perhaps that restriction should be eased, but in any case I do not hear of massive success stories from current relocation programs, even if they are net positives. Here is a CRS overview of federal programs for unemployed workers, some of which boost mobility. Here are some FAQs on trade adjustment relocation assistance.
Third, I wonder if a subsidy is the right response here. After all, there is already a potential benefit from moving, assuming the subsidy idea makes sense in the first place. Yet, if we are to accept many of the more pessimistic behavioral accounts of unemployment, a lassitude and feeling of hopelessness sets in. Positive incentives may not suffice, at least not in the absence of a behavioral spur to change the process of decision-making and induce some more pro-active choices.
By the way, there are some bureaucratic complications — not daunting ones but costs nonetheless — if you switch states while looking for a job and collecting UI. Perhaps these paperwork requirements could be eased and turned into a simple one-click process.
What if it turned out that a tax or penalty for unemployed non-movers was overall more effective? Would or should we be willing to support such an idea? Of course it would inevitably fall on some innocent victims as well, people who should not move or people who cannot move, perhaps for reasons of family ties. How about a tax for staying combined with a benefit for leaving?
How about if the tax is based on a Big Data model to limit the number of unjust losers? That would mean more frequent taxes for Appalachian stayers, and less frequent taxes for individuals with elderly dependents on their tax returns.
If the tax were a big net plus for the current unemployed, but hit some innocent losers, and sent the wrong mood affiliation, would we still support it? Should we still support it? What if the tax took the form of poor public services? Does it need to be more aggressive than that?
Should we even be asking these questions?