Culture splat (a few broad spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Challengers is a good and original movie.  Imagine a 2024 rom com, except the behavior and conventions actually are taken from 2024, and with no apologies.  The woman says the word “****ing” a lot, and no one treats this as inappropriate or unusual.  There is bisexuality and poly.  Society is feminized.  Of course opinions will differ on these cultural issues, but the movie is made with conviction and so it is truly a tale of modern romance.  Who in the movie is in fact the emptiest shell?  Opinions will differ.

Zendaya dominates the screen  — for how long has it been since we have had an actress this central and this charismatic?

Also, I quite like the new Beyonce album, and Metaculus estimates the chance of an H5N1 pandemic at about two percent.

*Native Nations*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America.  This is an excellent book.  Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages:

By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam were abandoned.  People continued to live nearby and, in many cases, continued to use the ruins as part of their ceremonies, but they no longer lived in the cities.  Trade, religion, and politics became democratized, more the domain of the people.  North America changed dramatically between 1200 and 1400, and the causes had nothing to do with Europeans.

Climate change, and The Little Ice Age, are the most likely culprits here:

The Little Ice Age was particularly hard on large, centralized agriculture-based cities around the world, including those of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam.  In times of hardship and famine, leaders struggled to maintain their positinos, especiallly if they had claimed special powers over natural forces that were out of their control: rain, rivers, and tempereature.  The urbanized settlments of North America were unable to deliver the healthand prosperity that people had enjoyed for generations.  Now people saw conditions getting worse in their lifetimes: less food, more poverty, a declining future for their children…

Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality.  The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political economic centralization to build new ways of living…

The first European explorers who crossed North America got a glimpse of this changing world.

I am excited to read the entire book.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Nandan Nilekani’s vision for the “Finternet” is to enable individuals to transfer any financial asset, in any amount, at any time, to anyone, anywhere in the world—cheaply, securely, and near-instantaneously.   Andy Mukherjee summarizes it here.

2. Claims about Chinese LLMs.  And LLMs and UK regulatory issues.

3. Stripe will start accepting global payments in stablecoins.

4. Rare book theft arbitrage.

5. Shelley Duvall update (NYT).

6. Police and economics professor party.  And here is how the rest of the party played out.

7. Cops testing AI body camera that writes its own police report.

Post correction and retraction

by  Tyler Cowen in

Apologies!  I took down my post based on this tweet, which upon further reflection struck me as premature.  Does anyone have actual word from the would-be co-author as to what happened?  Note that sometimes individuals don’t want to be co-authors on particular papers, especially if they are working in the private sector or for multilateral agencies.  They have to go through the time-consuming refereeing process, and they are responsible for the final results in the paper, possibly with no professional rewards for the publication itself.  The employer may need to be involved with clearance, or the employer may not like the results in the paper.  I don’t know whether that is what happened here, but so far it seems that nobody knows.  If I learn more of substance, I will update you all.

Hassan Sayed, banned from Princeton?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hassan Sayed, a fifth year PhD candidate in economics, it seems was banned from Princeton.  Ostensibly for partaking in illegal demonstrations.

I am not saying whether this is justified or not, as I do not know the circumstances.  I can assure you I am fine with “being tough on students,” and I am far from having pro-Hamas sympathies.  But surely this deserves some discussion?  What exactly happened?  What kind of due process did Sayed receive?  After all, university presidents have been known to make mistakes.  Is there any appeal or recourse?

So what is the story here?  Here is partial coverage, noting that another student, of Indian origin, was involved (and banned) as well.  The Indian press is starting to cover this story, with an emphasis on the Indian student Achinthya Sivalingan, but those links have too many pop-ups and at least so far don’t seem to have additional information.

Trade reform and economic growth

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the excellent Doug Irwin:

Do trade reforms that significantly reduce import barriers lead to faster economic growth? In the twenty-five years since Rodríguez and Rodrik’s (2000) critical survey of empirical work on this question, new research has tried to overcome the various methodological problems that have plagued previous attempts to provide a convincing answer. I examine three strands of recent work on this issue: cross-country regressions focusing on within-country growth, synthetic control methods on specific reform episodes, and empirical country studies looking at the channels through which lower trade barriers may increase productivity. A consistent finding is that trade reforms have had a positive impact on economic growth, on average, although the effect is heterogeneous across countries. Overall, these research findings should temper some of the previous agnosticism about the empirical link between trade reform and economic performance.

Here is my much earlier CWT with Doug Irwin.

What should I ask Paul Bloom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia:

Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.

Here is Paul’s own home page.  Here are Paul’s books on Amazon.  Here is Paul on Twitter.  Here is Paul’s new Substack.  Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Works in Progress will be running an “Invisible College” in Cambridge, UK.

2. How much was Britain already industrializing in the 17th century?

3. Something, something, blah blah blah, but probably interesting? Research article is here.

4. “We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. market concentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.”

5. Is the newly rediscovered Klimt portrait (NYT) a picture of Helene Lieser, a female Austrian economist who studied with Mises?

6. Shruti and Rasheed Griffith podcast on the Caribbean.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Non-Competes

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I agree with Tyler, that the FTC ban on non-competes is overly broad and not tailored to fields where the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Additionally, the FTC’s authority to enact this rule, rather than Congress, is questionable.

Nevertheless, I don’t think banning non-competes is without merit. The reason is not the standard Twitter-econ view that non-competes are bad for workers. Indeed, some non-competes, so-called “gardening leave”, pay the worker during the non-compete period. Sounds pretty good! More generally, non-competes are just one item in the wage bargain like hours, health and pension benefits. As a result, the FTC is quite wrong to think that banning non-competes will raise wages–the most immediate effect will be to reduce wages. Indeed, more workers will be willing to work at lower wages precisely to the extent that non-competes were a burden. Can’t have it both ways. Instead of being bad for workers, my skepticism about non-competes is that they are bad for industry.

The problem with non-competes is that every firm wants non-competes on the workers it fires but no firm wants non-competes on the workers it hires. However, firms only control the terms on which they hire workers so it’s possible for each firm acting in its self-interest to create a situation which is in the interests of none. Or, to put it differently, firms may approve of the decision to ban non-competes because it’s a package deal, firms can’t restrict their own former employees but they gain the ability to recruit freely from competitors.

More generally, worker mobility often carries externalities. As I wrote earlier, ideas are in heads and if you don’t move the heads, often the ideas don’t move either. The innovation that results from mobility is a public good. Non-competes are a type of intellectual property, call it intellect property. Once again, firms want to lock up their intellectual property but they also want to use ideas from other firms. Firms only control the former decision not the latter so IP in general has a prisoner’s dilemma issue which is one reason IP in the US is too strong (see the Tabarrok Curve) and non-competes are part of that package. Ultimately, if the innovation effects are important, wages could rise but those effects would be for more or less all workers not specifically for those with non-competes.

Governments aren’t good at the fine details of optimizing IP so perhaps a heavy-handed approach is the best we can expect. Non-competes also aren’t a huge issue for most firms, even firms that use them, so given the above I am willing to give the experiment a try.

The Norwegian ban on smart phones in middle schools

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new paper by Sara Abrahamsson.  Perhaps there is Norwegian exceptionalism at work, but the results reflect my expectations reasonably closely.  The basic setting is that smart phones were banned in middle school, but at varying (and exogenous) rates around the country.  Here are some of the core findings, noting that reading the paper gives some different impressions from some of the Twitter summaries:

1. Grades improve, for instance for the girls it goes up by 0.08 standard deviations.  Worth doing, but hardly saving a generation.  For girls, the biggest improvement comes in their math scores.

2. The girls consult less with mental health-related professionals, with visits falling by 0.22 on average to their GPs, falling by 2-3 visits to specialist care.

3. “I find no effect on students’ likelihood (extensive margin) of being diagnosed or treated by specialists or GPs for a psychological symptom and diseases.”  So more visits, but those visits don’t lead to much.

4. Bullying falls, by 0.42 of an SD for girls, 0.39 of an SD for boys.  That is a larger effect than I would have expected.

5. The grade gains are highest for students with lower SES backgrounds.

6. When you look into the details of the data (p.22), the improvement in grades does not seem correlated with the decline in the number of visits to mental health professionals.

So if you ban smart phones from schools, grades go up by a very modest amount, bullying falls by a less modest amount, and actual mental health diagnoses stay the same.  In the United States at least, parents seem to hate cellphone bans, because they cannot reach their kids at will.

And there you go.  Here is some commentary on the p values in the paper.

Why do I prefer current airport procedures?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Michael Stack writes me:

“Hi Tyler – you wrote about preferring current airport procedures to pre-9/11 procedures. Do you plan to elaborate on this? I have a hard time understanding why you’d feel that way.

Here is the list I produced – these are guesses as to why you might feel the way you do:

  • Because friends/family can’t meet you at the gate, it reduces crowding in some of the stores, restaurants, and waiting areas.
  • Security imposes a higher cost on travelers which reduces crowding – what are the pricing effects? Is this a transfer from airlines? From travelers?
  • You’re very worried about another terrorist attack and think our security substantially reduces the chance of an attack.

I can’t really think of many other reasons you’d prefer the current approach.”

TC again: My view is fully his third explanation.  Whether we like it or not, people and policymakers respond irrationally to terror attacks on airplanes, or terror attacks using airplanes.  I do think the current procedures stop or discourage some number of idiots, noting they likely would not stop a sufficiently sophisticated attack attempt.  But a lot of criminals are simply some mix of stupid and incompetent or poor on execution.  You don’t want to have attacks on airplanes become any more focal/copycatted than they already are.

I fully get all the “why don’t they just set off a bomb by the passengers waiting to get through security” points, and the like.  I just don’t think that is how it works.  Why don’t school shooters go to playgrounds instead, or wherever?  Maybe someday they will, but for now there is an odd stickiness in the nature of the events.

I don’t doubt that various features of the status quo could be improved, such as more security entry points being open and a better bureaucracy for generating and confirming pre-check privileges.  Some of those improvements, however, might be more rather than less intrusive, such as more spot checks of passengers at security or during boarding.

Many people have objected to the point I made, but I don’t think the benefit-cost analysis on this one is close.  Nor do I see a huge voter or elite demand to return to the pre-9/11 world for airports.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. U.S. vs. Taiwanese work culture.

2. Albert Wensemius and the rise of Singapore.

3. Unusual questions answered by Megan McArdle.

4. Why Panama dollarized.

5. New open access book on prices and games by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein.

6. Canada now limiting immigration.

7. “In the fiscal year 2023, more than half of the irregular arrivals at the US’s southern border were from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America for the first time…”  FT here, source here.

7. Helen Vendler, RIP.

8. A possible plateau in opioid and drug overdose deaths? (limited data, but possibly true)

9. A different way to deal with non-competes?