Category Archives: links to my essays
catching up on FITS
My latest substack piece. I disagree with one of Glenn Loury’s correspondents.
Elites and vaccine hesitancy
You may have seen the story that Ph.D’s are especially vaccine-hesitant. This reminded a reader of an essay I wrote years ago about two strategies for avoiding truth.
The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.
The Ph.D’s who hesitate to take vaccines may be harder to talk out of their stance than the stereotypical Trump supporters.
Update: See Michael Shermer’s piece on vaccine hesitancy.
A bit more history: 1967
My latest essay is about smoking and hippies. It starts out,
Cigarettes were cool. When you think about the 1960s, that probably does not occur to you, but it’s true. Early in 1964, the U.S. surgeon general issued a report linking cigarettes with cancer. But the anti-smoking attitude that prevails today was still decades away.
The moral weakness of an eviction moratorium
If you understand that rental contracts are socially desirable in normal times, then you should be wary of the idea of having government break them during a pandemic. To put it clearly: anyone who advocates an eviction moratorium is being deeply immoral.
Speaking of recent essays, I also wrote on baseball, race and economics.
in 1965, in a sense only the National League was integrated. Only one American League team, the Minnesota Twins, had more than one black contributor. The Twins’ black cadre included catcher Earl Battey, shortstop Zoilo Versalles, right fielder Tony Oliva, and pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant. Not coincidentally, that team waltzed to a pennant.
My review of Noise
Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony (henceforth KSS) argue that inconsistency in human judgment is widespread, not well appreciated, and very costly. Sentences differ for similar crimes. Underwriting decisions differ for similar loan applicants. Hiring decisions differ for similar job candidates. Performance evaluations differ for similar employees.
I found their book worth reading, although if you read my review you will see where I quibble.
TBT
For now, I am refraining from speculating on ETFs that profit from increases in interest rates. In other words, I am not putting my money where my mouth is (except that I have invested a lot in inflation-indexed bonds, or TIPs).
If you want to put your money where my mouth is, then you want to buy shares in TBT. But doing so will lose if goods prices revert to their declining trend. As I put it,
The big question going forward is this:
- Will inflation will go back to “normal,” meaning that the prices of services like higher education and health care go up, but goods prices trend downward?
- Or are we in a new environment, with rising prices for goods, in which case sooner or later interest rates have to rise, also?
Price discrimination explains everything
Tyler Cowen writes about what should be taught more in econ grad school,
Price discrimination. They do it to you more and more! Or perhaps you are striving to do it to others. This is typically covered in a first-year sequence, but how many second-year students really have mastered when it is welfare-improving or not? How it relates to product tying? When it is sustainable against entry or not?
If I were in charge of undergraduate economics, no one would come to graduate school needing to learn about price discrimination. When I taught AP economics in high school, I taught that price discrimination explains everything. That is, most real-world business practices that might seem odd can be explained as attempts to charge more for consumers with the least elastic demand. An intermediate undergraduate microeconomics course ought to spend a lot of time on the topic of price discrimination.
The fundamental question that economic grad schools face is whether to teach math or economics. When I was in grad school, the answer was to teach math. The case for teaching math is that to succeed in the profession you need to be able to “use the tools.”
I think that, at the margin, economics graduate students should study more economics. Economic history is very much worth studying. Financial institutions are worth studying. Calomiris and Haber invites the reader to contemplate financial institutions, history, and public choice.
Intangible factors in the economy are worth studying. You could spend at least a semester with a course on organizational capital, institutions, innovation, trust, etc.
A recommended book
I review Andrey Mir’s PostJournalism. [link fixed]
But relatively placid stories do not motivate people to pay subscription fees. Today, people can get news for free. They can get sports scores, financial information, and entertainment without going to newspapers. Mir argues that nowadays people pay newspapers to validate their worldviews. Newspapers do this most effectively by highlighting stories about the outrageous actions of their subscribers’ political adversaries.
An excerpt cannot do justice to my review. And the review cannot do justice to the book.
Glenn Loury on black self-making
One argument comes from the left. It says history has dealt blacks a bad hand and we have been oppressed and we have been beaten and abused. What can you expect but that you would see pathological behavior? It’s fixed by the historical inheritance. The wealth gap is what it is because we didn’t get the hand down from our parents because they didn’t get the hand down from their parents. What can we do? The crime rate is what it is, the test scores and what they are, et cetera. Fixed by history. Predetermined.
And the genetic argument. It’s in your genes. What can we expect? Do the best you can. We’ll respect you as a human being, but we won’t expect you to be doing calculus and we won’t expect you to be performing at a high level. And if we see that you’re not a good parent or that you break the law frequently or that you’re more often involved in violence, while we regret that, we can’t say that we’re surprised. Because after all your genetic et cetera.
I excerpted half of it, and I am short-changing you if you don’t go read the whole “aria.”
I myself wrote that there are three narratives for racial gaps. As Loury points out, the oppression narrative and the genetic narrative deprive blacks of moral agency and hope. The third narrative, which I prefer, is cultural characteristics that can change. That essay was influenced by listening to and reading Loury. It also was influenced by reading The Mind Club. Recall this blog post.