We digitize and analyze the near-universe of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) membership records and link them to population and industrial censuses. Four findings emerge. First, as the party expanded, its membership came to resemble the broader population more closely in occupational, demographic, and religious terms. Second, SS members’ characteristics remained different: younger, more educated, and more fanatical, as measured by the display of Nazi insignia in membership portraits. Third, within communities, coworkers, and families, early membership generated hysteresis, with subsequent entrants drawn from the same groups. Finally, local increases in party membership are associated with subsequent deportations of Germany’s Jews.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Luis Bosshart, Max Deter, Leander Heldring, Cathrin C. Mohr & Matthias Weigand.

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Comments

• Milton Mayer seems to have been one of the first to study 'the ... by Kaz Stanczak
• Lots of interesting material in the preprint. by MikeP
• I find it hard to understand, but a lot of guys came back from ... by Steve Sailer
• > younger, more educated, and more fanatical History really ... by Leo

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As an economist, I find positive-sum gambles more appealing than negative-sum gambles. Positive-sum gambles might include buying blue-chip stocks, exercising more (even if there is always risk of injury), marrying, initiating a new friendship, or trying out a new idea at work.

We collectively, as Americans, are trying out more and more of these positive-sum gambles all the time. Contrary to common reports, younger generations are accumulating wealth at roughly the same pace as older ones, and each generation as a whole has been richer than the previous one. Real, inflation-adjusted wages in the United States are higher than ever before, even if we might feel the pinch of affordability relative to our expectations.

And there’s the rub: It seems to be a feature of human nature that as good things happen we have a desire to. . . piss some parts of those gains away. Entrepreneurs will step into those slots and create new, exotic, and appealing ways for us to do so. Sports gambling can be destructive and addictive, but for a lot of people it is mostly harmless fun. Yes, you’re more likely to end up losing, but a bet on how many points LeBron James will score might make the game more exciting.

So if NewBird AI is your idea of a modest thrill, who am I to stop you? Most people who trade in such stocks are spending discretionary funds rather than their lunch money. They may be making mistakes, but they are unlikely to end up in the breadlines.

The intertwining of successive ups and downs reminds me of how many people use GLP-1 drugs. They help you lose weight, and if they work for you, they ensure your weight will not rise above a certain level. So why not eat more chocolate ice cream? The penalty for overeating is smaller, just as in an economy of generally greater affluence and security, the consequences of losing some of your money on fun but highly speculative wagers diminish.

Unfortunately, the picture is not that smooth and safe for everyone.

I expect the policy issues here will only rise in importance.

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2. How is it that Jakarta has improved so much?

3. The Coasean perspective at Stripe.

4. Becker-Posner blog has been put back online.

5. Raoul Dufy and cortisone.

6. Competition in health insurance markets.

7. A Stockholm cafe run by AI?

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Wayfaring Stranger. Transjakarta. Did you read ... by RAD
• In reply to Action Figure. North Carolina teachers get ... by JMK
• In reply to Anti-Gnostic. There is a way out. Rationing. No ... by Old Programmer
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Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by arguing that children should rarely, if ever, participate in digital spaces. As a result, many schools in the US now demand that students seal their smartphones in magnetic pouches. A number of countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and France, are even considering or have already implemented bans on social media accounts for children and teenagers.

Such restrictions, however, are not the tools of liberation we may imagine them to be.

In fact, for some children, the internet may be one of the last remaining spaces where they can grow up doing what children everywhere have evolved to do: independently play and explore with their peers.

Here is more from anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster.  I would add a point.  I do accept the evidence suggesting that limiting or banning cell phones in schools brings marginally better academic results.  Yet the people who advocate such policies never point out that so many schools are just deadly dull and not very intellectually stimulating?  Often what is on the phone is in fact more interesting and sometimes more instructive as well, even if the students do worse in terms of the standards set by the school.

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Michael Pettis frequently claims that, by running large surpluses, China is forcing “the demand-suppressing cost of their policies onto their trading partners.” The idea here is relatively straightforward: by disincentivizing consumption within China, China’s policies are reducing domestic demand, which, ceteris paribus, reduces global demand.

The problem with this logic should be fairly obvious: ceteris is not in fact paribus. It assumes other countries passively hold their own demand fixed in response to suppressed Chinese demand. But if that were the case, we should expect to see excess unemployment in the rest of the world in response to rising Chinese surpluses.

The empirical record decisively rejects this prediction: both US and EU unemployment was falling during China Shock 1.0 (2000-08), and post-2021 we’ve seen falling unemployment in the EU and stable full-employment in the US.

Monetary policy in other countries adjusts, preventing any shortfall of demand. The more sophisticated version of this argument recognizes that it only bites if other countries are constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB). In that case, monetary policy cannot lower interest rates to offset a fall in demand elsewhere in the world.

But reports of the death of domestic demand levers at the ZLB have been greatly exaggerated. The monetary authority can raise the inflation target, implement (NGDP or price) level targeting, use forward guidance, and open up the spigots on QE. Furthermore, fiscal policy remains an adequate tool for boosting demand.

That is from J. Zachary Mazlish, the rest of the post has separate interesting points about China shock 2.0

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• In reply to Hazel Meade. Chinese demand being higher probably ... by Lizard Man
• In reply to Harun. “Probably they sterilize some of it on ... by rsm
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• We shouldn't be trading with communist countries, especially ... by Mort Main
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Here is the Open to Debate Substack.

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• In reply to Mark Bahner. /s ie they were not well applied. ... by bazza
• In reply to MikeP. A STEM field? P.S. Just FYI, if you're ... by Mark Bahner
• In reply to Dismalist. I’m thinking more like the ... by Gilligan
• In reply to Hazel Meade. 'one thing that happendd 50 years ... by carlospln
• In reply to Mark Bahner. MikeP, what *is* your exact ... by MikeP
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2. Where the goblins came from.

3. The next big advance to come from AI?

4. Georg Baselitz, RIP.  And now in English.  I am happy to own a print of his, one of the upside-down eagles.

5. Okie-dokie, USG edition.

6. In spite of what polling says, political events do not much affect voter attitudes?

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• #5: Bad policy. As bad as Democrats giving away everything from ... by Wayfaring Stranger
• In reply to Lord Action. No, that is not the consensus. Some ... by Gdanning
• In reply to Kaz Stanczak. Absent in this discussion is how we ... by Vivian Darkbloom
• In reply to bazza. Nobody other than humans — and animals ... by Kaz Stanczak
• In reply to Dylan. Speaking of Altman's flow state, software ... by Randall
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All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.

I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.

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• In reply to MikeT. Good faith and competition are not ... by Roger Sweeny
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AI-powered mental health apps have attracted growing interest as a low-cost way to expand care. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, safety, and whether they may crowd out psychotherapy. We evaluate one such app in a randomized controlled trial among 1,964 Mexican women with mild to severe psychological distress. Over six months, app access improved mental health by 0.3 standard deviations with no evidence of harm, improved sleep quality, increased healthful behaviors, and reduced missed work, yielding considerably larger benefits than costs. Treated participants were also more likely to seek traditional psychotherapy, but this increase does not explain most of the mental health gains. App use was high in the first month but then declined, as is common in digital interventions. Despite this drop in use, treatment effects persisted. Participants continued to implement practices promoted by the app, suggesting that even short-term engagement can produce durable improvements through sustained behavioral change.

That is from a new paper by Manuela Angelucci, Raissa Fabregas, and Antonia Vazquez.  Those are some pretty strong results for a cheap intervention, let us hope they hold up.  Via John Holbein.

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Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and persistently over time, with economically meaningful effects emerging after several years. These patterns are robust across alternative measures of reform and specifications. The results reconcile conflicting findings in the literature by showing that market reforms generate long-run growth gains despite short-run disruptions. Overall, the evidence supports the view that institutional liberalization operates through slow-moving channels that accumulate into sustained improvements in economic performance.

That is from a recent paper by Jon Hartley and Brian Wheaton.

The post Do Market Reforms Cause Growth? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• The abolition of property zoning would lead to an immediate ... by Benjamin Cole
• A good follow-up post to the Argentina post a few days ago. ... by TMC
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2. An SRO approaching to regulating AI.

3. Dwarkesh: “We don’t talk enough about how any state or group which is harvesting encrypted packets right now will be able to read those contents once quantum computers arrive. There’s a huge espionage and transparency overhang on any information that is currently “secret” and hasn’t been encrypted using post-quantum cryptography.”

4. Craig Venter, RIP.  Here is the NYT obituary.

5. What happened to Haiti?

6. With the UAE’s departure, OPEC will become much more an instrument of Iranian power (FT).  But also weaker.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Harpoon. Very interesting story. Thank you for ... by Niko Davor
• What happened to Haiti is Haitians. by Diego
• In reply to Alamo. I do not agree that the impact on China ... by Elad
• In reply to MikeP. Isn't this the thinking behind all my ... by Mike in TX
• In reply to Mark Bahner. Addendum: The IQ argument refers to ... by Kaz Stanczak
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Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.

That is from a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo.

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The Breakthrough Institute (BTI) found that “just 10 organizations initiated 35% of the total NEPA cases brought by NGOs.” The Sierra Club and its local chapters alone were responsible for more than 14% of these lawsuits. The dominance of a small number of groups is more pronounced in forest management and energy cases; only 10 groups filed 67% and 48% of these cases, respectively. In BTI’s “The Procedural Hangover: How NEPA Litigation Obstructs Critical Projects” follow-up, which expanded the analysis to district and circuit court NEPA cases, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Center for Biological Diversity were responsible for 24% of all litigation against public lands management decisions.

To paraphrase Alex Tabarrok, federal environmental agencies seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—environmental NGOs.

Grant Mulligan’s excellent post shows in detail how environmental groups use the courts to block projects—including environmental projects. But Mulligan finds that a disproportionate share of the lawsuits come from a handful of relatively small organizations. A textbook case of the tyranny of the complainers.

The lawsuits give environmentalists a bad name but the key point is that many environmental groups are not reflexively anti-development.

What are the largest environmental groups doing with their money if not suing to stop development? Two of the three biggest, the Wildlife Conservation Society and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, primarily operate zoos. Land trusts like TNC, The Conservation Fund, and Ducks Unlimited protect land directly. Many also work on research and policy to varying degrees. Contrary to the typical narrative, many operate pro-market, abundance-style projects.

TNC has several programs that align with the abundance agenda. TNC’s Power of Place research and policy work is aimed at facilitating the build-out of renewable energy and transmission infrastructure. The idea behind the research is to identify and speed the permitting and development of renewable energy projects that won’t interfere with important conservation areas. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) used the research as part of its Western Solar Plan, which aims to promote solar development on public land. TNC also wants permitting reform, and their mapping efforts are an example of what environmentalism that builds could look like — identify critical habitats that need protecting and guard them closely while unleashing building everywhere else.4

While the tyrannical minority has held up forest management projects, TNC has been an advocate and practitioner of forest thinning and prescribed burns to prevent catastrophic wildfires for more than 60 years. In California, they’re part of a coalition working to thin millions of acres of overgrown forests.

TNC isn’t alone. Audubon’s renewables siting work, Ducks Unlimited’s water infrastructure projects, and the Conservation Fund’s Working Lands programs all follow the same pattern of balancing environmental protections with economic imperatives. Plenty of green groups agree, as Larry Selzer, Conservation Fund’s President and CEO, says in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, “we have to build, and build, and build.”

I’m not trying to defend all the choices of TNC or suggest that the big environmental NGOs don’t promote their share of bad policies. I had plenty of discussions with degrowthers when I worked at TNC that made me want to pull my hair out. I’ve also written about the need for environmentalism to be more positive-sum in frustration over zero-sum environmental positions. But on the whole, environmentalists have been made too convenient a villain by abundance advocates. Environmentalists aren’t as uniformly obstructionist, degrowth, and misanthropic as commonly believed.5

Understanding that only a vocal minority of environmentalists are anti-progress, procedural complainers is important because abundance advocates and environmentalists aren’t natural enemies—and assuming they are serves neither side.

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Mr Bessent’s bullishness notwithstanding, this month his department released a proposal that would treat stablecoin issuers as financial institutions for the purposes of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws. This means adopting the same onerous monitoring and compliance procedures as banks, adding to the cost of launching and managing a new coin.

Here is more from Buttonwood at The Economist.

The post Stablecoin sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Tyler and Craig discuss why webpage design has gotten worse for 30 years, what Craig’s “obsessive customer service disorder” taught him about human nature, why trusting people and maintaining a nine-second rule for scams aren’t as contradictory as they sound, why roommate ads are a better way to find love, why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, why Leonard Cohen speaks to him more than Bob Dylan, what William Gibson’s Neuromancer got right about the internet, why Jackson Lamb is now one of his role models, why large foundations lose accountability, what two painful Ivy League grants taught him philanthropy, what he gets from rescuing pigeons, the hard lesson he learned about confronting people who lie for a living, his favorite TV shows and movies, the one genuine luxury he can’t go without, what he still needs to learn, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What is scarce in your life then? You’re giving away money. You don’t have to run the company on a day-to-day basis. We’d all like more years to live, but what is it that if you had more of it, you could be more effective with?

NEWMARK: I guess, ideally, I would have more social skills—meaning, some.

COWEN: We’re simulating social skills just fine here.

NEWMARK: That’s the phrase I use. At least on my part, what looks like social skills is just fakery. I can do it for short amounts of time, maybe 90 minutes. I’ve given up, though, on actually accumulating social skills, getting better at it. More to the point, I try to get into positions where other people can show social skills.

COWEN: One journalist once described you as having “obsessive customer service disorder.” Isn’t that a social skill?

NEWMARK: That’s more obsession, so it’s pathological, but a good one. I believe that you should treat people like you want to be treated. Think of the many times that you needed customer service. Sometimes you can get good customer service, but that’s the exception. That’s no reason for us not to provide a good customer service. Like earlier today, someone sent in a grant proposal, and I had to tell them that they forgot to sign the thing, a very minor thing. More importantly, I’m telling people they need to do some planning for good communications because their work is much less valuable if they can’t talk about it effectively.

COWEN: According to Susan Freese, who wrote about you, in one year, you answered 40,000 customer service emails. Is that possibly true? If so, what did you learn about humanity doing that?

Recommended, charming and engaging throughout.

The post My very charming Conversation with Craig Newmark appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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• In reply to Richard Brody. No by Justin Chang
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