Monthly Archives: December 2015

The Grumpy Case for Conservatism

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John Cochrane said,

Our society codes its experience into its institutions; in a grand edifice we call limited government and rule of law.

His theme is that there is more knowledge embedded in institutions than in individual technocrats. Remember to take note of Joseph Henrich’s anthropological support for that in The Secret of our Success, one of my five favorite books of the year.

The entire talk is moving and masterful, but if there is one sentence with which I would argue it is the first one in the quote below.

People who distrust the government are less likely to vote for the next big personality promising big new programs. Instead, they might be more attracted to candidates who promise restraint and rule of law; to administer competently and to repair broken institutions.

I think that as distrust in government rises, you get more demagoguery, not less.

Terror Soldiers and Lone Wackos

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Eric Raymond makes a distinction that should be pretty obvious.

A lone wacko is a tragedy but almost never a disaster; a terror network can scale up violence to much greater levels by deploying multiple soldiers, and is far more likely to have expertise in bomb-making, airplane hijackings, and other means that can inflict casualties well above the level of a rampage shooting with personal firearms.

One of his more tendentious claims is that many on the left go out of their way to misclassify these two types, because

the left end of the American political spectrum is heavily invested in the belief that “right-wing terrorism” is prevalent in the U.S. and a greater danger than either left terrorism or Islamism.

From the oppressor-oppressed axis point of view, you want to lean in the direction of treating a lone wacko who attacks a Planned Parenthood facility as a terror soldier, and you want to lean in the direction of treating an Islamist terror soldier who attacks an American military base as a lone wacko.

Raymond’s sensible analysis leads to sensible conclusions.

Rampage killings are a public health problem – police may be the first responders to an incident, but the effective interventions to prevent them them are mainly medical, not criminological.

On the other hand, what terror soldiers do is best thought of as a kind of distributed irregular warfare, intended like all warfare to break the enemy’s will to resist. Criminal enforcement can typically do little or nothing about their networks. Instead, the normal counter to irregular warfare applies; you want to bait them into concentrating so they can be confronted and destroyed by regular forces.

That was the French strategy in what was then Indochina in 1954, when they deliberately set up their base in a valley in order to lure the opposing general into concentrating his forces nearby. The resulting battle and its outcome are historically significant.

Shikha Dalmia’s Three-Axis Model

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She writes,

The central political problem for conservatives is maintaining virtue; for liberals equality; and for libertarians liberty — or avoiding government tyranny.

She argues against Tyler Cowen’s view that a culture that encourages individual gun ownership goes along with a culture of military adventurism. One point that she could have made is that many of our military adventures have been launched under Democratic Administrations, and those also tend to support gun control.

Four Forces Watch: Assortative Mating Has Gone Up

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Tyler Cowen quotes a paper by Robert D. Mare.

Spousal resemblance on educational attainment was very high in the early twentieth century, declined to an all-time low for young couples in the early 1950s, and has increased steadily since then. These trends broadly parallel the compression and expansion of socioeconomic inequality in the United States over the twentieth century. Additionally, educationally similar parents are more likely to have offspring who themselves marry within their own educational level. If homogamy in the parent generation leads to homogamy in the offspring generation, this may reinforce the secular trend toward increased homogamy.

Commenters here have argued about this in the past. Evidently, the facts show that the Mad Men era did indeed have lower assortative mating.

They Dared to Report This

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Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim write,

The evidence suggests that racial preferences are so aggressive that reshuffling some African
American students to less-selective schools would improve some outcomes due to match effects dominating
quality effects.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who indicates that it is forthcoming the Journal of Economic Literature. Even Donald Trump finds this offensive.

More Hospital Access Does Not Equal More Health

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Nathan Petek writes,

I construct a hospital-level panel using American Hospital Association data from 1982-2010 that includes measures of the quantity of health care and indicators for hospital entry and exit. I combine this file with county-level measures of health, including mortality rates from 1982-2010 and self-reported health from 2002-2010, and detailed health care utilization and mortality data for all Medicare fee-for-service enrollees from 1999-2011.

He finds that having more hospitals in an area does increase the utilization of medical resources. It does not improve health outcomes. Like all studies, this one by itself is not convincing. But it does add to the huge pile of studies that go into the Hansonian medicine file.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

An Antidote to Obamacare

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James Capretta and others put together a comprehensive health care policy proposal. If the 2016 Presidential campaign ever gets serious, this is probably the plan that the Republican nominee should be pushing. A brief excerpt:

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). HSAs should be a central component of health care in the United States. The accounts provide strong incentives for their owners to seek the best value for their health care purchases, and they provide a ready vehicle for providing additional protection against high medical expenses. Existing rules should be modified to allow all Americans to make annual contributions to an HSA, and a new, one-time federal tax credit would provide a strong incentive for those without accounts to establish them. HSAs should also be fully integrated into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The goal of their reforms is to increase consumer choice and market incentives in health care. They want to reduce the centralized management from Washington that was in place prior to Obamacare and then was greatly expanded by that legislation. Their proposals seem to me to accomplish those goals, and I believe that the result would be much better performance of the U.S. health care system.

Women’s Education and Childbearing

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Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi write,

while highly educated women had fewer kids than women with lesser education in the US until the 1990s, it is no longer true today. During the 2000s, highly educated women had higher fertility rates than women with intermediate levels of education.

Their explanation:

childcare has become relatively more expensive for women with less than a college degree but relatively cheaper for women with a college or an advanced degree. Note that the changes are quantitatively large. Over the past three decades, the relative childcare cost has increased by 33%, 16% and 5% for women with no high-school diploma, a high-school degree and some college education, respectively. In contrast, this relative cost decreased by 9% for women with a college degree and by nearly 16% for women with an advanced degree.

Read the whole article. Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Jeffrey Miron on Fiscal Imbalance

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He concludes,

The fundamental economic reality implied by fiscal imbalances is that the “rich” economies are not as rich as they would like to believe; they are planning far more expenditure than they can afford. Recognizing this fact sooner rather than later does not eliminate the problem, but it allows for more balanced, rational, and ultimately less costly adjustments. And if attention to fiscal imbalance helps cut ill-advised expenditure, economies can have their cake and eat it too.

I think that this way of putting it is vulnerable to the comeback that we can always cancel our debt, since we owe it to ourselves. I prefer to characterize the problem as one of creating political friction because of the need to disappoint people’s expectations. See my classic (in my opinion) Lenders and Spenders essay.

Chris Blattman on Experiments

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In a must-read post, he describes a number of methodological problems with the interpretation of experiments in social science, but says

There’s no problem here if you think that a large number of slightly biased studies are worse than a smaller number of unbiased and more precise studies. But I’m not sure that’s true. My bet is that it’s false. Meanwhile, the momentum of technical advance is pushing us in the direction of fewer studies.

For me, the crux of the issue is this remark from Blattman.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that one randomized trial on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya led some of the best development economists to argue we need to deworm the world. I make the same mistake all the time.

The way I would put it is that there is no such thing as a study that is so methodologically pure that by itself it can serve as a reliable guide to policy. As I wrote in What Else Would be True?, the results of any study need to be thought about in the context of other knowledge.

Often, one encounters studies with conflicting results. You tend to focus on the methodological flaws only of the studies with results that you do not like. But remember Merle Kling’s third iron law of social science: the methodology is flawed. That law applies to every study, including experiments.