Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).

2. Is space the most underrated policy area?

3. On the USAID and deaths debate.  Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate.  Here is commentary from GPT Pro.  In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.

4. Using LLMs in economic history.

5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.

6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.

AI cheating on math econ at Brown

by  Tyler Cowen in

The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.

Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.

Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The US Racial Wealth Gap

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Writing in the QJE, Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, & Schularick argue that today’s black-white wealth gap can be explained by differences in initial conditions from over a hundred and fifty years ago, i.e. slavery. But there is an important, and glaring objection: in the age of immigration (1850–1924) millions of whites immigrated to the United States with essentially no wealth and yet they caught up to the “heritage” whites quite quickly and indeed today are richer than heritage whites.

Brian Marein collects and carefully analyzes the data:

Persistent racial wealth inequality in the United States is often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of historical wealth disparities. However, inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. This paper accounts for this compositional change in the white population by documenting wealth dynamics among European immigrants and their descendants. Cash-on-arrival data show that immigrants began with substantial wealth deficits relative to the native-born. Yet by the late twentieth century, these deficits had closed, as indicated by comparisons between the descendants of later-arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans and those of longer-established Northwestern Europeans. This pattern implies rapid intraracial wealth convergence, in contrast to the slower convergence observed across racial groups. A stylized model shows that these differences can be largely accounted for by income. These findings demonstrate that large wealth disparities do not mechanically persist when groups have access to comparable economic opportunities.

If initial conditions don’t explain the wealth gap then the most likely explanation is an income and/or savings gaps. I am reminded of an earlier politically incorrect paper of the year by Nathaniel Hilger and see also my review of his book The Parent Trap.

Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs.  Another pill can be printed almost for free.

That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services.  They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination.  After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.

Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you.  Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.

In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well.  It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.

“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.

Typewriters and fertility

by  Tyler Cowen in

Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.

That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid.  Via Kris Gulati.

Renationalising British utilities

by  Tyler Cowen

There is talk of this with the pending change in PM, but I would not do it.  I am quite aware that a) not all of the privatisations went well, and b) American data indicate that state-owned utilities do not seem very economically different than, or less efficient than, privately-owned utilities.  Especially for water, where the natural monopoly elements are especially strong.

Nonetheless massive restructuring will be needed to make all of these companies, no matter who owns them, “AI companies.”  That will require capital raises and pay scales that will be difficult for the public sector to pull off.  So right now renationalisation would be a mistake.

Most generally, I would say the returns to resource mobility will be rising significantly.

Blackpool fact of the day, observations on northern England

by  Tyler Cowen in

Blackpool Central was the world’s busiest station in 1911.  It was the station with the most platforms to close in UK in the Beeching cuts of 1964.

That is from the recent fun book Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World, by Chris Moss.  And I enjoyed this paragraph:

I’ve never felt or fully understood the alleged tension between Lancashire and Yorkshire.  The latter’s residents have good reason to boast, as they do with gusto, even if the ‘God’s own count(r)y’ schtick is wearisome nonsense.  Yorkshire is the UK’s largest county.  It has three national parks, two national landscapes (the new name for AONBs) and some of the most dramatic stretches of thePennine range.  Like Lancashire, it reaches from the hills to the coast.  There are fundamental differences.  Lancashire is Irish and Atlantic.  East Yorkshire is European and North Sea-facing.  Yorkshire is Anglican and past tense.  Lancashire is Catholic and forward-looking.  Lancastrians go in sideways; Yorkshire men, at least, barge in frontally.

I consider this book to be properly subjective.

An infovore shares his chats

by  Tyler Cowen in

In conjunction with OpenAI, here is a short piece by me on how to use GPT Pro for travel and a few other matters.  Excerpt:

6. Learn what to look for in an art museum

I’m visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts. Which pictures in particular should I be looking for, and what is some useful context for viewing them?

Why was this chat valuable? “After two visits in three days, I would second the advice I got from this chat.”

Here is the link to the answer.  And know when to ask it to read the local newspapers for you, to learn about a place.

There are some good photos in the piece, including some hitherto unpublished photos of Spinoza.

My Conversation with Joanne Paul

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.

Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?

PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.

COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?

PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.

I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.

He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.

And:

COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?

PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.

The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.

A good episode with many points of interest.  And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Can we make respiratory infections a thing of the past?

2. The new balance of power across companies and governments.

3. Using AI to find Brazil’s next soccer star? (NYT)

4. Token resale markets in everything.

5. A music critic reviews himself at age 93.

6. A claim that the World Cup is damaging market liquidity.

7. Soumaya Keynes on whether ideas are getting harder to find (FT).

8. Biology this year so far.