Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Against the Null Hypothesis?

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1. Jo Craven McGinty in the WSJ:

Decades after the end of legalized segregation, and the funding disparities that accompanied it, minority students remain disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty areas. Academically, they trail students in more affluent areas, and they fall increasingly behind as the years pass. The result is an achievement gap that limits the educational and career opportunities of nonwhite children.

She refers to a study by Sean F. Reardon and others. The abstract reads

In this paper we estimate the effects of current-day school segregation on racial achievement gaps. We use 8 years of data from all public school districts in the U.S. We find that racial school segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in 3rd grade, and with the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The association of racial segregation with achievement gaps is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty: racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower-poverty schools. Finally, we conduct exploratory analyses to examine potential mechanisms through which differential enrollment in high-poverty schools leads to inequality. We find that the effects of school poverty do not appear to be explained by differences in the set of measurable teacher or school characteristics available to us.

The last sentence appears to support the Null Hypothesis. But the study and McGinty’s interpretation clearly assume that placing a child in a high-poverty school will worsen that child’s educational outcome. One possibility is that peer effects are strong, as the late Judith Rich Harris claimed. Another possibility, more consistent with the Null Hypothesis, is that the relationship between neighborhood poverty and school outcomes is not causal.

McGinty cites a paper by Raj Chetty and others that finds that moving to a different school affects educational outcomes. If these results are causal, then this would be evidence against the Null Hypothesis. But I am not convinced that moving to a different school district is unrelated to the characteristics of the parents and hence of the children.

2. Angelo Codevilla writes,

During Word War II, only 4 percent of some 18 million draftees were illiterate. Despite (or because?) of massive expenditures on education over the subsequent two decades, 27 percent of the Vietnam war’s draftees were judged functionally illiterate. Between 1955 and 1991, the inflation-adjusted average K-12 per-pupil expenditure in America rose 350 percent. In 1972, 2,817 students scored 750 or better on each half of the SAT. By 1994, only 1,438 made this score though the test had been made easier. Today, U.S. 15 year olds rank 24th out of 71 countries in science, and 38th in math. In 2018, college students spent less than a third of the time their grandparents did studying for their classes.

If you believe the Null Hypothesis, then this must be due to a worsening the innate characteristics of American children. To blame the education system, you have to believe that the Null Hypothesis is not true, and that the education establishment has found ways to achieve worse outcomes.

Either possibility is distressing.

High school and community service

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Lauren Bauer and others write,

The teen labor force participation rate reached an all-time peak in 1979 (57.9 percent) and gradually declined until about 2000, when it then dropped precipitously to a 2010–18 plateau of about 35 percent (figure 1). While the participation rate of prime-age workers (25- to 54-year-olds) has edged down since its peak in the late 1990s and older workers’ (55- to 64-year-olds) participation has increased, the scale of the shift in teen participation dwarfs these other changes.

One of the factors reducing teen labor force participation is that high schoolers have less time for work. Included in the list of time impositions is my pet peeve: the requirement for “community service hours.” My line is that community service is for convicted criminals, but high school students are innocent.

I would like to see more young people gaining experience in working for a profit. “Community service” does the opposite.

Non-tribalism

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Karen Tamerius writes,

Through tribalism, Trump has created a self-reinforcing system. The more he lashes out at others, the more they strike back at him and his followers. And the more people strike back at Trump and his followers, the more he and they feel persecuted. The escalating sense of persecution binds his followers to him ever more tightly.

Her advice to progressives for handling Trump supporters:

1. Don’t attack
2. Keep personal relationships alive
3. Hear them out
4. Agree where appropriate
5. Gently nudge them toward progressivism
6. Invite them into the fold

I found this essay quite refreshing. It goes against 99 percent of the essays that progressives write. Conservatives and libertarians would be advised to follow these six maxims, also (substituting their own ideology in #5).

Bryan Caplan’s sociology

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Bryan Caplan writes,

1. All humans are somewhat impulsive, but the degree of impulsiveness varies.

2. On average, impulsiveness causes poverty. The greater the impulsiveness, the greater the poverty. So the very poor tend to be highly impulsive.

3. In traditional societies, however, social pressure and stigma against impulsive behavior sharply reduce their incidence. Teens like unprotected sex, but fear social suicide.

4. In the 1960s, social pressure and stigma against single motherhood started to deteriorate for largely cultural – not economic – reasons. (While the expansion of the welfare state was one notable economic factor, it wasn’t decisive).

This is similar to Charles Murray’s sociology. Both Caplan and Murray see the cultural changes of the last several decades as removing some of the social guardrails. People with strong character traits kept driving down the middle of the road, but people with weaker character traits crashed into telephone poles by having children out of wedlock.

One element that appears to be central to Caplan’s sociology is the trait of conscientiousness. He sees this trait as predicting success. He sees college completion as a signal of conscientiousness, which explains how college graduates can earn a salary premium without necessarily acquiring any skills in college. He sees poverty as caused by impulsiveness, which is the opposite of conscientiousness.

Others, notably Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, claim that causality runs from poverty to low conscientiousness. Poverty is a stressor that makes it more difficult for people to make good decisions.

Is low conscientiousness an innate trait or a trait caused by stressful circumstances? I am skeptical of the latter view. Probably the most stressed people would be new immigrants. Yet immigrants are often highly conscientious. Perhaps this is a selection phenomenon (it takes a lot of conscientiousness to get to another country). But even if it is a selection phenomenon, that shows that innate qualities can dominate external circumstances.

On this year’s Nobel Prize in economics

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It goes to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for work on field experiments in the economics of (under-) development. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has coverage, starting here.

I am currently drafting an essay suggesting Edward Leamer for the Nobel Prize. Last week, I wrote the following paragraph:

The significance of what Angrist and Pischke termed the “credibility revolution in empirical economics” can be seen in the John Bates Clark Medal awards given to researchers who participated in that revolution. Between 1995 and 2015, of the fourteen Clark Medal winners, by my estimate at least seven (Card, Levitt, Duflo, Finkelstein, Chetty, Gentzkow, and Fryer) are known for their empirical work using research designs intended to avoid the problems that Leamer highlighted with the multiple-regression approach.

This year’s Nobel, by including Duflo, would seem to serve to strengthen my case for Leamer.

On black progress

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Coleman Hughes writes,

The evidence against racial progress tends to compare black-white gaps today to black-white gaps in the past. Here, white metrics are used as benchmarks against which to measure black progress. By contrast, the evidence in favor of progress tends to compare black metrics today against black metrics in the past. White metrics do not enter the equation. Crucially, the same data can often be made to look like either progress or regress depending on which framework is chosen.

A striking example that he cites is that the rate of incarceration for black men dropped 72 percent between 2001 an 2017, but the ratio of black to white incarceration still increased.

Libertarians and the legitimacy crisis

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A legitimacy crisis is when people stop believing that the governing elite is competent and benevolent.

In theory, a libertarian might welcome a legitimacy crisis. If people lose faith in the government elite, then should that not make them more libertarian?

In practice, we are seeing something closer to the opposite. We are seeing a decline in legitimacy, although it probably does not qualify as a crisis. In any case, the rise of populism helps to promote demagogues, such as Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren.

Today, libertarians are losing whatever allies we once had. We used to have progressive allies on social issues, such as free speech or regulation of sexual conduct. The younger generation among progressives is opposed to free speech. In the 1960s, college campuses ended their rules concerning visitation of dorm rooms by members of the opposite sex (only a few years before I went to Swarthmore, the rule was that the door had to be open and each student had to have one foot on the floor at all times). Now, the campus sexual rulebook is thicker than ever.

We used to have conservative allies on markets. Now, conservatives are happy to excoriate the tech industry or the pharmaceutical industry or outsourcing. Tyler Cowen’s love letter to Big Business is a rare libertarian voice being drowned out by other voices, such as J.D. Vance or Senator Josh Hawley or Mary Eberstadt.

Perhaps the natural tendency is to oppose liberty. I speak of FOOL, which is the Fear Of Others’ Liberty.

One possibility is that liberty, when it includes liberty for others, is a value held by only some elites. When those elites are weak, FOOL holds sway, and demagogues emerge to satisfy the FOOL.

Random interesting comments

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1.

One group of people who make good canaries are rich celebrities who were once more or less normal people but who can (1) suddenly get away with a lot of bad behaviors because the people around them give them a pass, (2) their wealth allows them to have access to and afford to buy all kinds of vice-enabling goods and services.

And so, for example, when it comes to propensity to overdose from drugs, we have Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, Michael Jackson, Prince, Lenny Bruce, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bruce Lee, Sid Vicious, John Belushi, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, Dee Ramone, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joan Rivers, Tom Petty (and his bass guitarist, Howie Epstein, also Beetles manager Brian Epstein, and do I need to mention Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth-enabled unleashed-by-norms behaviors … )

And this list goes on and on and on. And as soon as similar drugs become widely available, cheap, and popular, well, as the canaries showed up, “opioids crisis” and “deaths of despair”.

2.

I see there being two basic consumption baskets (this is an oversimplication of course): a “basic needs” basket (food, energy, clothing, etc) and a “aspirational” basket (healthcare, education, nice real estate). I think most people would take todays “basic needs” but the 1970s “aspirational” basket.

3.

It turns out that most people dislike politics, and when you talk to those people about “Republicans” and “Democrats” in survey questions, they don’t think about the average person who happens to vote for those candidates or have conservative or liberal opinions in general. They are thinking of those disagreeable ideologues and the loudmouth blowhards in their lives whose self-identification centers around their political beliefs and affiliations and who are obsessed with politics and indefatigably relentless in talking about it

4.

Ed Glaeser: “In 1983, the 75th percentile 25- to 34-year-old had $45,000 in home value. Thirty years later, that same group had only $21,000 of net housing wealth. Among 65- to 74-year-olds, by contrast, the 75th percentile household’s net housing wealth rose from $150,000 to $225,000 over that period—and the 95th percentile’s climbed from $427,000 to $700,000. Housing is the main store of wealth for most Americans, and regulations have clearly helped redistribute wealth from young home-buyers to old home-sellers.”

I think it’s fair to put the emphasis on illiberal policies and not the finitude of land.

Legitimacy and information control

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Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman write,

Rather than terrorizing or indoctrinating the population, rulers survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent. Having won popularity, dictators score points both at home and abroad by mimicking democracy. Violent repression, rather than being helpful, is counterproductive: it undercuts the image of able governance that leaders seek to cultivate.

They are offering a theory of dictatorship in which the dictator obtains power through nonviolent persuasion. In political science, I believe that this is known as “legitimacy.” In this case, their thesis is that dictators achieve their legitimacy through the control of information.

But the relationship between legitimacy and control over information also might be important in a democracy. That is what Curtis Yarvin argues in a recent essay.

all modern regimes are Orwellian thought-control regimes.

. . .we can explain how a decentralized civil society, effectively protected from democracy, can, does, and indeed must become a distributed Orwellian despotism. But we’ll postpone these loose ends till the final essay.

Any ruling elite must “survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent.” The phenomenon that Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public is the loss of this belief in the era of the Internet and social media.

Note: Tyler Cowen recently pointed to a paper by Guriev and others that also is pertinent to Martin Gurri’s thesis.