Tag Archives: Tyler Cowen

Narrower, Deeper, Older

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Phil Moss writes,

But the plethora of new dances comes at a cost. It increases our fragmentation. It creates a barrier to entry for both veterans (who come and go at various points in their lives) and for newbies who have to “drink from a firehydrant” in order to become regulars. For veteran non-regulars it becomes daunting to come back and see so many dances they haven’t learned. Unless one attends regularly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land instead of feeling comfortable when “coming home.”

The article is about Israeli folk dancing, which I know interests me a lot more than my readers, so I won’t say “read the whole thing.” Instead, I want to talk about the general trends I see in the way people engage with their interests. You can become engaged with any number of interests, including your religion, a sport, a hobby, your profession, a charitable cause, etc.

I want to offer some observations that apply to the entire class of interests, and I will suggest that “matching technology” (Tyler Cowen’s term) plays a role in these trends. Then I will come back to Israeli Dancing.

My central claim here is that the nature of engagement has changed over the past fifty years, in these three ways:

1. Narrower. There are fewer people casually engaged.

2. Deeper. Those who are engaged are more committed and have deeper knowledge.

3. Older. For any interest that has been around for a long time, the demographics of those interested now skews older.

For example, consider the game of bridge. A social bridge game is four friends getting together in someone’s house to play. A bridge tournament is many strangers competing against one another in a large room. In high school and college, I played a lot of social bridge. In college, I also played some tournament bridge. I then stopped playing for decades.

Fifty years ago, I believe that there were more social bridge players than tournament players. Today, it is closer to the reverse.

When I tried to get back into tournament bridge a few years ago, I found that the “barrier to entry” had gotten much higher. Players expect you to know a plethora of new tactics, which in bridge are known as “conventions.”

The other point to notice was that the median age of players at the tournament seemed to be about 70. Not many young people are willing to get past the barrier to entry.

As another example, consider people with an interest in baseball. Fifty years ago, many casual fans knew the batting averages and home run totals of well-known players. Today, there are fewer fans with that knowledge. Instead, there is a relatively small group of fans whose knowledge includes arcane statistics that did not exist when I was growing up.

Also, I think that interest in baseball skews older, in spite of marketing efforts aimed at the young. My sense is that in the ballpark it is mostly people over age 50 who are paying close attention to the action on the field. The younger people are on their cell phones and/or watching the JumboTron.

I believe that religion is becoming narrower, deeper, and older. A smaller fraction of the population is affiliated with a place of worship, but there may be an uptick among those deeply committed, such as Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, many congregations are thinning out as their populations age and die off.

I suspect that what Tyler Cowen calls “matching technology” (the Internet) plays a big role. Instead of settling for a lowest-common-denominator activity, like a game of social bridge, you can find something that really excites you and connect with people who share your excitement. With better matching technology, the total number of viable interests goes up, and the share of people who settle for activities in which they are only moderately interested goes down.

“Matching” means that any given interest draws a narrower set of people. Those people are more committed, so that the interest becomes deeper, with a higher barrier to entry in terms of study and practice. Finally, as new interests emerge, the population engaged in traditional interests gets older.
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Household Production, Continued

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The insightful Handle writes,

free YouTube videos combined with cheap and quick home delivery of tools and parts have made my own home, computer, and auto repairs much more worth my time than trying to arrange for an experienced professional.

I get it that having a YouTube video that tells me how to fix my toilet can lower the time it takes me to do it myself. But the Internet also makes it easier for me to find a cheap handyman. Overall, I think that my propensity to spend time fixing things myself has gone down rather than up over the past decade. Not that it was very high to begin with.

Another commenter writes,

I think Prof. Kling misunderstood Prof. Cowen’s point. Less household production as share of GDP is not necessarily a bad thing and the best number may very well be 0%.

However, household production is generally not included in the GDP figures, even though it arguably should be. If actual GDP, including household production, used to be 37% higher than measured GDP, but now is only 20% higher than measured GDP, then the growth in actual GDP over the period has been even lower than the pretty dismal numbers we are observing.

Hence, this statistic supports Prof. Cowen’s hobby horse of the Great Stagnation, regardless of how one feels the ideal percentage of GDP household production ought to be. I think he is right on this point.

In a follow-up, the commenter writes,

My neighbor and I live in identical houses and we are equally messy. Initially, we both clean our own houses and nothing is added to measured GDP.

Then we decide to pay each other $100/week to clean each other’s house. Suddenly, measured GDP is $10k/year higher than it used to be. But economically nothing has changed. This suggests that we ought to include our cleaning labors in GDP regardless of whether we clean our own houses or each other’s.

I think this is misleading. I prefer to look at it this way:

1. Suppose you are willing to pay me $100 for 5 hours of cleaning services. Then that puts a value on my time of $20 an hour.

2. Now, suppose that I decide to spend 5 hours cleaning my own house. You want to say that I have produced $100 of output.

3. I would say instead that the 5 hours I spend cleaning my own house is a waste of time!

Maybe if you assume that the most valuable work I can do is cleaning houses, then you are sort of right. But if I am a surgeon, then you are pretty much wrong. And I claim that as an economy gets more efficient at using specialization, you become less and less right and more and more wrong.

In terms of comparing well-being now with well-being 50 years ago, suppose that most of the reduction in housework is due to the prevalence of permanent-press clothes rather than having to iron them. Suppose that our entire (market-based) GDP consists of shirt production. It would be really nice if the GDP calculation subtracted the need for ironing from the cost of today’s shirts. But it could only show up as a quality adjustment that I suspect is too sophisticated to be captured in the statistics.

Suppose that actual shirt production remains the same as it was 50 years ago. Then measured GDP might be the same, also (it could be a little higher, if the statisticians pick up some of the quality adjustment). But the alternative concept, of GDP + household production, has gone down from 50 years ago, because we have stopped ironing. To me, that makes GDP + household production a stupid concept. It has things exactly backwards.

If you are going to add anything household-related in GDP, it ought to be leisure, not housework. If you show me that leisure + GDP is not growing very much, then I would count that as an argument for a Great Stagnation. But I am not the least bit persuaded by a measure of GDP + housework.