Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Paul Romer vs. Perry Bacon, Jr.

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The latter wrote,

with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week and new allegations coming out against Kavanaugh on Sunday, it’s worth noting that the biggest divide is not between men and women on these issues, but between Democrats and Republicans.

Romer writes,

The best one can say about this comparison is that it is careless. Its measure of the partisan divide suffers from an obvious upward bias relative to the measure of the gender gap because it excludes the responses of independents. Leaving out these centrists will automatically increase the difference between the two groups that remain. The effect is big because there are lots of independents. For this particular poll and in round numbers, 600 of the 1500 respondents do not provide a party affiliation.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I clicked through to the Huffpost poll, taken several days prior the hearing, which asked whether the allegation against Kavanaugh is credible.

Men answered it 28-34, with the 28 percent saying yes, and 34 percent saying no. The rest did not want to commit to an opinion.
With women, it was 25-23.

Among Democrats, it was 53-8.
Among Republicans, it was 4-60.
Among independents, it was 19-25.

But this isn’t the poll result that Romer uses to make his point. Instead he uses a question that asks generically about the importance of protecting the accused’s rights or the victim’s rights.

Among Democrats, it was 11-76
Among Republicans, it was 20-54.
Among independents, it was 14-53

This is a much smaller partisan gap to begin with. In every group, the majority stresses the victim’s rights.

To me, the poll result about the credibility of the accusation is the one that stands out. It just screams “motivated reasoning.” I’m sorry to have to disagree with Romer, but if you focus on that poll result, there can be no escaping the conclusion that partisanship is the main driver.

GMU or IDW?

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Bryan Caplan lists ten cultural characteristics of his intellectual subculture. For example,

Appealing to your identity is a reason to discount what you say, not a reason to pay extra attention.

A few remarks;

1. If you took the ten characteristics out of context, they might describe the Intellectual Dark Web. But he says he is referring to GMU econ bloggers.

2. Although it refers to a “culture” of GMU econ bloggers in general, the links in his list pretty much all go to previous Bryan Caplan posts. Most bloggers are self-referential, but for Bryan it’s an art form.

3. His last item is “strategically appease mainstream thinkers,” which seems out of synch with the rest. The link goes to a post where he justifies paying taxes, and for me that post fails to provide clarification. Mainstream thought for the most part does not come with a threat of imprisonment behind it. For now, at least.

4. Just as a reminder, I am not on the faculty of GMU. I am nominally affiliated (no office, no salary) with Mercatus, which is at GMU. Once every couple of years or so I try to have lunch with some of the GMU econ bloggers.

Note: after I wrote this post but before it appeared, Tyler Cowen wrote a post in favor of taking identity into account. But I think Tyler missed the important difference between taking identity into account and having someone appeal to their identity. I agree with Bryan that the latter is a negative signal. Opening with “Speaking as a ____” is a bullying tactic.

Adult marshmallow-test winners do better

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William H. Hampton1\, Nima Asadi and Ingrid R. Olson write.

Participants engaged in a delay discounting task adapted from O’Brien et al. (2011). In the task, participants were asked to make choices between a smaller sum of money offered now versus a larger sum of money (always $1,000) offered at five different delays.

They then use this variable along with other variables to predict the person’s income.

The results of each model were quite consistent, with occupation and education paramount in each case. On average, the next most important factors were zip code group and gender. While zip code group was highly associated with income, it is worth noting that our data do not adjudicate directionality. Logically, a person’s income is more likely a determinant of where they live than vice versa. Nonetheless, zip codes are a useful proxy for socioeconomic status, which is also related to income (Winkleby et al., 1992). As our zip codes were binned by average income, the association between zip code and income is not surprising, but does suggest that the individuals in our sample had incomes roughly representative of the incomes from their respective zip code group. Regarding gender, we found that males earned more money than females, a result consistent with a corpus of research on the gender wage gap (Nadler et al., 2016). The fifth most important variable was delay discounting, a factor closely related, but distinct from impulsivity. Although previous research had indicated that discounting was related to income (Green et al., 1996), it was unclear to what extent, relative to other factors, this variable mattered. Interestingly, delay discounting was more predictive than age, race, ethnicity, and height

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Oy. It would be nice to be able to cite their comment that “delay discounting was more predictive than age, race, ethnicity, and height.” But the flaws I perceive in the study are just too fatal to allow me to do that.

1. Most of the variables that they use to “predict” income are not plausibly exogenous to income. For that matter, it is possible that your level of income helps determine your willingness to delay receiving money, so even their key delay-discounting variable is plausibly endogenous.

2. When you compare the strength of different predictors (hardly ever a valid exercise), measurement error is everything. A variable that is measured unambiguously will do much better than a variable that is measured subject to errors, even if the latter variable has more influence in reality. So gender has the advantage of being unambiguous*, while self-reported ethnicity can be ambiguous.

*all right, some people insist that gender is ambiguous, but I don’t think those people find their way to this blog.

Emergent Ventures: first thoughts

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It is a Tyler Cowen project, with seed funding from Peter Thiel. The press release says that it is

an incubator fellowship and grant program for social entrepreneurs with highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society.

1. It definitely is not “Shark Tank.” I have only seen parts of a few episodes, but the entrepreneurs had very small ideas, and the sharks only cared about whether the entrepreneurs had made some progress and could demonstrate that the market had enough revenue potential.

2. In a brief podcast, when Tyler says that his comparative advantage is spotting talent, it almost made me spill my orange juice (I don’t drink coffee). If I had a dime for everyone who thinks that spotting talent is their comparative advantage, I could fund Emergent Ventures. I am not saying that Mercatus is bad at spotting talent, but are they better than Google or Andreessen, Horowitz, or Paul Graham, or. . .? I guess it depends on what domain you are talking about.

3. Maybe their slogan should be, “We’re looking for the next Robin Hanson.”

4. One way to come up with a moonshot is to think of a big, annoying problem to solve. Some possibilities that come to mind:

–the intellectual collapse of American education, including higher education and K-12.

–terrorism and the responses to terrorism

–potential use or mis-use of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence

5. Have I ever had a “change-the-world” idea? Back in October of 2000, I wrote,

Now, imagine that everyone in the world is given an “ethics rating” that is analogous to a chess rating. Maybe 2500 would be the highest, and 0 would be the lowest. Your rating would affect how you could use various technologies. “Ethical grandmasters” would be allowed to do advanced research in biotechnology and robotics.

Note the passive voice. It raises the question of who is going to create and control such an “ethics rating” system. The Chinese government? They seem inclined to implement such an idea, but they are not necessarily the ones I want to see doing it.

At the time, I assumed that I would initiate the ethics rating system by designating a few people as ethical grandmasters. They would in turn rate other people, and these would rate other people, until everyone had a rating. You can read the essay to see the idea sketched out a bit more. Note that as of the time I wrote the essay, I was still left of center, as you can see from the people I named as possible ethical grandmasters.

As I re-read the essay, I think that this qualifies as a moonshot idea. It might even be worth trying.

Charles Chu on Vaclav Smil

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Chu writes,

Another interesting thing about Smil is that he has principles. In particular, you can tell he that he values intellectual honesty far more than he values fame or material wealth.

. . .the danger of getting paid for your ideas: It’s easy to sell out or self-censor because you’re afraid of (a) financial or (b) status pushback.

The essay covers several interesting issues. I think that every public intellectual has to have second thoughts about writing things that challenge the views of his or her audience. But it is important to be willing to do that. I think that this is one of Tyler Cowen’s strengths.

Claire Lehmann and Tyler Cowen

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Interesting conversation, I could have picked many items to excerpt. She says,

If you look at the personality data on libertarians, they tend towards being more systematizing in their cognitive profile. Women, on average, tend to be more empathizing and agreeable, and so arguments around political issues that are based on quantitative reasoning and facts and logic without an emotional layer to it are going to be less appealing to women.

I’ve said to libertarian friends that if you want to be more appealing, get your message across in a more appealing way, you need to wrap up the ideas into a story that has an emotional component.

Is internationalism liberal or imperalist?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

In other words, it could be that the fractious and increasingly nationalistic politics of today are how things naturally are — and the anomaly is this decades-long period of cooperation and harmony.

He calls the internationalist approach “liberalism,” and he laments its inability to persist.

Contrast with Yoram Hazony.

For centuries, the politics of Western nations have been characterized by a struggle between two antithetical visions of world order: an order of free and independent nations, each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding; and an order of peoples united under a single regime of law, promulgated and maintained by a single supra-national authority. . .

the imperial rulers of the ancient world saw it as their task, in the words of the Babylonian king Hamurabi, to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience.” That obedience, after all, was what ensured salvation from war, disease, and starvation.

And yet, despite the obvious economic advantages of an Egyptian or Babylonian peace that would unify humanity, the Bible was born out of a deep-seated opposition to that very aim. To Israel’s prophets, Egypt was “the house of bondage,” and they spared no words in deploring the bloodshed and cruelty involved in imperial conquest and the imperial manner of governing

Hazony sees the quest for international order as intrinsically imperialist. He has a forthcoming book that extends these arguments.

I believe that this is an issue that is particularly challenging for libertarians. We believe that national borders restrict freedom, including the freedom to live where you want. But what if every project to get rid of national borders is one in which power is concentrated in a central authority?

Advice to teenagers

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Patrick Collison writes,

If you’re 10–20: These are prime years!

. . .Above all else, don’t make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.

There is much more at the link. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I read this as saying, “Go against your programming as a teenager.” I figure that teenagers are programmed to care above all about their status within their peer group. You become defined by your friends.

When I graduated high school, a remarkably wise classmate wrote in my yearbook a message saying gently that she preferred it when I stepped out of the role that I had defined for myself (or fallen into) within my group of friends. This inspired me to re-define myself when I went away to college.

So my advice is to look for opportunities to redefine yourself. When I went to graduate school, I took up folk dancing as a hobby, even though I had been afraid to dance before. When I worked at the Fed and at Freddie Mac, I made a lot of lateral moves in order to fend off boredom. But I think I stayed in both places too long. I take the view that working in a large organization is like attending school. You get through the curriculum in a few years, and then it’s time to graduate. To put this another way, each organization has its own culture. Once you have experienced that culture for a few years, the best way to learn and grow is to experience a different organizational culture.

Working at Freddie Mac (back in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I was defined by others as someone who could come up with a vision but could not execute. Starting my own business was a chance to redefine myself. I recommend starting a business, because it is an educational experience, even if it doesn’t work out.

Whose problems would you prefer?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Over a period of less than five years, China will retake Taiwan and also bring much of East and Southeast Asia into a much tighter sphere of influence. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nuclear weapons and become dominant players in their regions. Russia will continue to nibble at the borders of neighboring states, including Latvia and Estonia, and NATO will lose its credibility, except for a few bilateral relationships, such as with the U.K. Parts of Eastern Europe will return to fascism. NAFTA will exist on paper, but it will be under perpetual renegotiation and hemispheric relations will fray.

This is not his forecast of the most likely future, but he tees it up as a pessimistic scenario.

I think that forecasting the emergence of other powers is easy if you think only in terms of the problems that the U.S. faces. But you get a different point of view if you think about other countries’ problems and ask, “Whose problems would you prefer?”

China is aging rapidly. It faces the problem known as premature de-industrialization, meaning that there is not enough demand for manufactured goods to provide a broad base of middle-class jobs for low-skilled workers. If giant cities connected by high-speed rail are the most efficient configuration, then fine. But what if that turns out to be a bad bet?

I do not agree that Turkey has a chance to be a dominant player in its region. Nobody in the region likes the Turks. The Turks don’t even like each other very much. There are major divides between urban and rural, between religious and secular. If they come to dominate, it will only be in a tallest-pygmy sort of way.

Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, has yet to show that its entire society is on board with modernization. If only a thin sliver of elite is ready to join the modern world, then it will have plenty of internal conflicts to worry about. It won’t be a dominant player.

According to David Halberstam, in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Khrushchev told Americans that Laos would fall “like a rotten apple” into Communist hands. Today, if we look around for rotten apples, meaning regimes that are failing to deliver for their people, we can find them in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran. If those apples were to fall, particularly the latter two, that would make up for foreign policy problems that might emerge elsewhere.

Again, Tyler is not arguing that the pessimistic scenario is the most likely one. But I think he gives it a notably higher p than I would.

Noise and statistical analysis

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Tyler Cowen quotes a story in the Atlantic about a study that finds that genetic variation can explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment.

consider that household income explains just 7 percent of the variation in educational attainment, which is less than what genes can now account for.

In any statistical study of this sort, I think it helps to think about the sources and impacts of mis-measurement of key variables.

For example, if you measure “educational attainment” as years of schooling, you are ignoring differences in quality. You also have to deal with artificial factors that push people toward specific numbers. If you count graduating high school counts as 12, then a lot people who are actually below that will have been carried along to that point, and some people who continue to teach themselves in a non-school setting will be stuck on that point.

Also, household income is a noisy measure of overall economic status. Maybe this year the household earned much less than usual, or much more.

Measurement error in either the independent variable, the dependent variable, or both, will drive down the percentage of variation that is “explained” by the independent variable.

Also, genetic characteristics and household income may be correlated. If the former is measured more precisely than the latter, then the former will appear to matter more.