Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Don’t trust doctors as statisticians

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1. Daniel J. Morgan and others write,

These findings suggest that many practitioners are unaccustomed to using probability in diagnosis and clinical practice. Widespread overestimates of the probability of disease likely contribute to overdiagnosis and overuse.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In 2008, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres in Supercrunchers also reported that doctors tend to do poorly in basic probability. When I taught AP statistics in high school, I always used an example of bad experience inflicted on me by a Harvard-trained physician who did not know Bayes’ Theorem.

2. From a 2014 paper by Ralph Pelligra and others

The Back to Sleep Campaign was initiated in 1994 to implement the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) recommendation that infants be placed in the nonprone sleeping position to reduce the risk of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). This paper offers a challenge to the Back to Sleep Campaign (BTSC) from two perspectives: (1) the questionable validity of SIDS mortality and risk statistics, and (2) the BTSC as human experimentation rather than as confirmed preventive therapy.

The principal argument that initiated the BTSC and that continues to justify its existence is the observed parallel declines in the number of infants placed in the prone sleeping position and the number of reported SIDS deaths. We are compelled to challenge both the implied causal relationship between these observations and the SIDS mortality statistics themselves.

I thank Russ Roberts for the pointer. This specific issue has been one of my pet peeves since 2016. See this post, for example. I think that back-sleeping is a terrible idea, and I never trusted the alleged evidence for it. Doctors do not understand the problem of inferring causation from non-experimental data, etc.

UPDATE: A commenter points to this Emily Oster post, reporting on a more careful study that supports back-sleeping.

Business advice from Balaji Srinivasan

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He says,

So product is merit and distribution is connections. And so for example, a great blog post that nobody sees is a great product with terrible distribution. Conversely, a really dumb article, or whatever, that is a piece of content that is in a feed that is seen by millions is a terrible product with great distribution, right?

From an interview of Balaji Srinivasan by Tim Ferriss. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Balaji, Tim, and Tyler were all picked early in the version 1.0 FITs draft.

Set aside time to read the transcript. Balaji certainly scores a Thinking in Bets point, but it is hard for any scoring system to do justice to this piece.

Here’s another Balaji line:

it’s futile to try to argue with someone who has way more distribution and is hostile, you just need to build your own distribution, which is much more possible in the internet age.

And another:

I think we’ve just begun the global internet Cold War, where all of the social networks, currency networks compete for ideological and economic dominance around the world, because it can just spread virally back and forth like this. And everyone will be trying to cancel each other and whatnot, it’s going to be this crazy, crazy thing.

…pseudonymity stops both discrimination and cancellation. So it’s not ideal, but it is accepted and widely used by people of all political persuasions. And so it’s sort of like a mutual disarmament where you can’t cancel somebody.

and another:

when the internet disruptor comes in, variance increases, there’s more downside and more upside, more amazing outcomes and more really bad outcomes in all kinds of ways.

A toy to spot your bias on Twitter

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Tyler Cowen writes,

What is the ideological news slant of your Twitter account? (mine was 57% left-wing, 34% right-wing, not too many centrists, at least by their measures, maybe I prefer “the kooks”). I don’t wish to embarrass anyone in particular, but some of the ideological bubbles you can find with this are…just remarkable.

I put in klingblog, and it says I do not interact enough with Twitter to give a reading. Check.

I put in econtalker (Russ Roberts) and it said 48 percent left, 44 percent right.

I put in slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) and it said 71 percent left, 15 percent right.

My thoughts.

1. I think that Twitter overall leans very far to the left. So my guess is that this measure overstates the amount of leftwing news and understates the amount of rightwing news that a person gets in the “real world.”

2. I suspect that if you are active on Twitter and interested in political issues, you have no choice but to interact with a lot of news from the left. For a long time I have believed that those of us on the right know what the leftwing narrative is on news. But people on the left miss some angles on stories and some stories altogether because these analyses never penetrate their bubble.

The top 150 intellectuals, selected competitively

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We held the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft on Saturday. 10 owners competed. The owners came from the readership of this blog, and they themselves are not public figures in any way. The intellectuals they chose are shown below in the order they were selected. Because one owner arrived well after the draft had begun, the order in which teams picked was a bit mixed up.

Scoring for this season, which starts April 1 and ends June 30, is based on three categories:

(M) memes. These are phrases that are associated with a certain intellectual. For example, Black Swan is associated with Taleb (pick 31). If during the season the term Black Swan is used in at least three prominent places (well-known podcast or blog, newspaper, new book), that scores one M for Taleb. No more than one M per season for each catch-phrase. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme,” was not chosen, although picking him would have guaranteed his owner at least one meme point.

(B) bets. An intellectual scores a B by expressing a belief in quantitative probabilistic terms. Oddly enough, Annie Duke, who would be credited with a meme if the phrase “Thinking in Bets” were to appear three times during the season, was not selected, either.

(S) steel-manning. The intellectual presents a point of view with which he or she disagrees in a way that someone who holds that point of view would consider to be representative. It is the opposite of straw-manning. I believe that Peter Thiel (pick 70) coined the term, or at least popularized it, and his owner is all but certain to pick up an M point. S’s are most likely to be earned by bloggers and podcasters and least likely to be earned by tweets or political speeches. They are more likely to be earned by centrists than by hard-core Red or Blue team members.

Tyler Cowen (pick 2) is a solid three-category player. He sometimes states beliefs in terms of probabilities, he tries to steel-man (although at times he can be too terse to earn a point), and he has meme candidates, such as Great Stagnation or “mood affiliation.”

Scott Alexander (pick 4) is likely to be a monster in the S and B categories.

I think that for next season I would add a category (R), for summarizing the research on two (or more) sides of a controversial issue. I would score one R for every 2 examples. I don’t want to give away an R to someone who just looks at research on a single topic during the season. Adding the (R) category would make Tyler and Scott even stronger candidates.

I will note that I thought that about a third of the picks reflected mood affiliation, and I would not have chosen them. I don’t want to pick on any owner in particular, but I’ll just say that I don’t think politicians will score points, and I will not be rooting for whoever took Oren Cass. By the end of this season, all of the picks will have track records, and those should inform owners who compete in a follow-up season.

I would caution the reader not to pay too much attention to relative ranking within this list. If there had been ten drafts, with ten different sets of owners, the average order would represent a consensus rank. But with only one iteration, the results reflect individual idiosyncrasies. In your comments, I am not interested in what picks you don’t like or what picks you think should have gone higher. I am interested in suggestions for intellectuals who seem likely to earn at least 3 points but who were not chosen.

Much as I poor-mouth my connections, I can brag by saying that in recent years I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages with pick numbers 2, 5, 13, 32, 37, 38, 42, 95, 97, 132, and 147. I have met several others in person, but not recently. I believe that a social graph of the picks would show Tyler Cowen (2) and Marc Andreessen (97) as having the most dense connections with other picks.

Continue reading →

Another idea for the intellectual space

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The goals are to:

  • Reward old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. Find the next James Fallows, the next Chris Arnade, the next Sam Quinones.
  • Reward people who serialize major projects on line, rather than going through the book process
  • Reward people who engage in high-level discourse, fighting the trend toward what Tyler calls “Twitter economics”
  • Discover, promote, and compensate talented commentators. Find the next Scott Alexander, the next Matt Yglesias, the next Coleman Hughes

Think of this idea as a cross between a multi-author Substack and Tyler’s Emergent Ventures. Think of a producer/editor (me, for example) having a stable of 100 contributors, each of whom contributes on average one essay or podcast about every 20 days, for a total across all contributors of about 5 a day. All contributions would sit behind a single paywall, as in a newspaper subscription. Perhaps it could run on Substack, with the editor handling the administration involved in managing and compensating the contributors.

Each day, a subscriber would receive a newsletter with 200-word summaries of each of the daily contributions, along with a link to each contribution. Assuming 100,000 subscribers each paying $100 a year, that would allow for average compensation of $100,000 a year to each contributor (less after paying for overhead expenses, such as payments to Substack if we were to use that platform).

At first, we would have to get some established contributors to bring in subscribers. These contributors would have to be willing to be paid less than the value of the subscriber base they pull in, so that there would be funds for the new talents.

The editor’s job is to filter contributors, not each individual contribution. As a contributor, you produce your essay or your podcast without interference. The editor acts as an adviser. I would be willing to be an editor without monetary compensation, but as the project scales up there would be paid editors.

I do not have the connections to be able to find enough contributors to pull this off myself. But I think I could with the help of others (Reihan Salam? Tyler?)

It is a project that could scale up with more editors. It is hard to know in advance whether revenue is maximized with one giant bundle or with different bundles based on topics or channels or user-defined packages (it’s like the Cable TV pricing problem in that sense).

At sufficient scale, this project could invade the space of major news media, the advertising-based models of news provided by Google/Twitter/Facebook, and university presses.

The case against stimulating demand and restricting supply

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The New York Times asks ten economists about the risks of “overheating.” I don’t go along with the mainstream macro paradigm, but several of the responses resonated with me, especially Olivier Blanchard’s.

I shall plead Knightian uncertainty. I have no clue as to what happens to inflation and rates, because it is in a part of the space we have not been in for a very long time. Uncertainty about multipliers, uncertainty about the Phillips curve, uncertainty about the dovishness of the Fed, uncertainty about how much of the $1.9 trillion package will turn out to be permanent, uncertainty about the size and the financing of the infrastructure plan. All I know is that any of these pieces could go wrong.

I would have answered the question this way:

1. During the pandemic, many Americans accumulated a lot of paper wealth, as the government printed paper wealth in the form of bonds and the stock market returned to a state of possibly-irrational exuberance. This wealth now hangs over an economy with some supply bottlenecks and a progressive Administration that is likely to exacerbate those bottlenecks. The only way that we avoid price increases is if the people with the wealth choose to spend it very, very gradually.

2. If spending and inflation do pick up, we are going to find that the Fed’s brake pedal does not work. The Fed can try to raise interest rates by, for example, raising the interest rate that it pays on Fedcoin (digital bank reserves). But higher rates will be politically unpalatable, because the interest bill for the government will be too much to bear.

Suppose that the Fed can get past the political objections. Then we will have an experiment to test my heterodox view that government bonds are as inflationary as money. If rates were allowed to rise, the interest bill would send the government’s deficit up. So the government will have to issue more bonds, which in my view are inflationary fuel themselves. In my view, it is up to Congress to stop inflation by cutting deficits.

It’s not that I don’t understand the conventional (monetarist) view of inflation or that I have missed some argument in its favor. So don’t waste your breath calling out my ignorance. We’ll see what happens if and when we run the experiment.

3. As to the question of “overheating,” I think of inflation in terms of phase changes. Just as water changes properties when it boils, an economy changes properties when it goes from low and steady inflation to high and variable inflation. By the time it has changed phases, it is too late to deal with it using mild measures.

Although economists won’t see overheating until it’s too late, historians of this episode will go back and see that in hindsight signs of overheating were evident by early 2021. The digital currency mania and the rally in GameStop will be seen as emblematic of the distortions caused by excessive creation of paper wealth.

The case for stimulating demand and restricting supply

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J. W. Mason writes,

The fact that people like Lawrence Summers have been ignored in favor of progressives like Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, and deficit hawks like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have been left screeching irrelevantly from the sidelines, isn’t just gratifying as spectacle. It suggests a big move in the center of gravity of economic policy debates.

It really does seem that on the big macroeconomic questions, our side is winning.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. He lists a number of propositions, which tend to favor macroeconomic policies that stimulate demand and restrict supply.

For example although he argues (correctly) that there is no bright line between being unemployed and being out of the labor force, he claims that

Work incentives don’t matter.

Suppose you have very high marginal tax rates on work. The “new” theory is that with enough aggregate demand, everyone will work, anyway. As Mason puts it,

Weak demand is an ongoing problem, not just a short-term one. The most serious criticism of the ARPA is, I think, that so many of its provisions are set to phase out at specific dates when they could be permanent (the child tax credit) or linked to economic conditions (the unemployment insurance provisions). This suggests an implicit view that the problems of weak demand and income insecurity are specific to the coronavirus, rather than acute forms of a chronic condition.

I think that if you subsidize demand and restrict supply, then the whole economy will look like education, health care, and real estate, where prices go up and resources are wasted.

John Cochrane has a more detailed critique of this “new” economic theory. One way in which it differs from the conventional wisdom of the 1960s: back then, economists were confident that if inflation broke out, the government could direct businesses to slow the rate at which they increased wages and prices. That theory has not made a comeback, at least so far.

COVID models still don’t work

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David Wallace-Wells writes,

Looking back, you could find a few lonely voices suggesting winter would be calmer than autumn. But the CDC aggregates and showcases 26 pedigreed models predicting the near-term course of the disease. On January 18, only two of the 26 showed the dramatic case decline the country experienced by February 1 as being within what’s called the 95 percent confidence interval. In other words, 24 of the 26 models said what ended up happening over just the next two weeks was, more or less, statistically impossible. The other two gave it, at best, a sliver of a chance.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The article correctly points out that the only clear differences in outcomes are between Asia and the West. I still wonder whether the two faced the same virus.

Organized resistance

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1. Academic Freedom Alliance. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities.

I clicked on “members” and it seems like a prestigious list. FITS candidates include Cowen, Pinker, Haidt. . .

2. Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Pointer from a commenter. This one looks even better.

Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.

And check out their Board of Advisors. FITS candidates include Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Pinker, Pluckrose. . .

It looks like they are ready to take the fight to the K-12 sector, where I believe it may be most needed. I think this one is worth joining.

Soon to be canceled?

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Ross Douthat writes,

Are we living through a decisive turn from a liberal culture to an authoritarian “successor ideology” (as conservatives and some liberals fear) or a long-awaited reckoning with white supremacy and and patriarchy and inequality (as many progressives hope)?

. . .My bet is still on the second scenario, stultifying but sustainable, rather than the revolution in full. But then again I haven’t personally experienced a Full Cancellation yet.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

When Douthat says “yet,” I sense that he believes he could be next. And that is why he started writing on substack.