Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Colin Woodard watch

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Adam Ramey writes,

we show that the migrations of millions of Okies from the central plains to California has a demonstrable effect on political outcomes to this day, even after accounting for other relevant geographic and demographic factors. After demonstrating this pattern at the electoral level, we leverage a decade’s worth of survey data and show that Hispanics living in areas with large Okie migrations in the 1930s are much more likely to have conservative social values and, importantly, to vote and identify as Republicans. Put together, these results suggest that the historical legacies of migration can have a strong and sustained impact even after nearly a century after the fact.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Woodard has staked out the position that cultural differences across U.S. regions are the result of early settlement patterns. He does not hesitate to include in “Greater Appalachia” regions far from the vicinity of the mountain range. In the nineteenth century, folks migrated from Appalachia to parts of the Midwest and to rural Texas and Oklahoma. Then in the 1930s they settled in parts of California.

Tyler Cowen, NSF, and DARPA

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Cowen writes,

Let’s start with some possible institutional failures in mainstream philanthropy. Many foundations have large staffs, and so a proposal must go through several layers of approval before it can receive support or even reach the desk of the final decision-maker. Too many vetoes are possible, which means relatively conservative, consensus-oriented proposals emerge at the end of the process. Furthermore, each layer of approval is enmeshed in an agency game, further cementing the conservatism. It is not usually career-enhancing to advance a risky or controversial proposal to one’s superiors.

This also describes the National Science Foundation. You can see how an institution like this would be biased toward funding mainstream incumbents rather than innovative, heterodox projects. It’s fine to have a lot of research money go through this model, but you also want some alternative funding mechanisms in order to have a healthy ecosystem.

Think of DARPA in its heyday. The approval process had fewer layers. Choices were more idiosyncratic.

I think where DARPA succeeded was when it had two other elements. One was a vision, in particular Licklider’s vision for computing. The other was a network of creative people. Licklider knew where to find the groups that could move his vision forward.

In his Emergent Ventures initiative, it seems to me that Cowen is not relying on his network. And I don’t see a guiding vision. It is more scattershot. That may be a valid model. But I prefer the DARPA model.

If I had the money to dole out, I would do so based on overall vision. One vision is for “rules and norms for competitive governance.” The idea would be to develop the legal framework that would allow people living side by side, in existing locations (not seasteads or charter cities), to have more choice in government services and policies. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced includes more of my thoughts about that. Of course, some of you are thinking, “Go back to the founding fathers,” but it’s not as simple as that. The founding fathers did not provide for a society in which the preponderance of people, and an even bigger preponderance of economic activity, could be found in large cities.

The other vision I have concerns economic research. I would promote an agenda that I call disaggregating the economy.

But for neither of these visions do I have anything resembling a network.

The academic bubble

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What were the most influential books of the past twenty years? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a list provided by various academics. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Without doing an exact count, and of course I have only read some of the books myself, I think maybe, maybe one out of every four books in the list is not there because it reinforces leftist ideology. And of course there are zero books that challenge leftist ideology.

So let me try to correct the balance. I think that Haidt’s The Righteous Mind belongs on the list. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. Probably Richerson and Boyd Culture and the Evolutionary Process (I have not read it, but I think of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is a very important book and that book was influence by Richerson and Boyd, so if you’re talking about influential books, . . .). Something from Steven Pinker, probably The Blank Slate. How about Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Anyway, the main point of this post is that it’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would be that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy. In a more balanced culture of higher education, Haidt or Pinker would be on more reading lists, while the books listed in the Chronicle would be on fewer.

Should taxation be regressive?

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Tyler Cowen said,

The best kinds of redistributions are those that, say, educate poor children or fix up their health or end malnutrition. And those also boost wealth. So if you follow the lode star of boosting wealth, you’ll be led toward the better rather than the worst redistributions.

. . .I’m way less enthusiastic about just taking money from rich people and giving it to poor. If the incentive on both sides is to work less and create less then I generally don’t wanna do it. I would just say stick with wealth enhancing redistribution. There’s plenty of that we can do, it’s very powerful.

If I were to try to summarize his latest book, Stubborn Attachments, standing on one foot, it would be this:

1. The future will include many people not yet born, and we should care about their welfare. To a first approximation, we should care about future people as much as we care about people who are alive today.

2. The way that economic growth compounds, the welfare of people in the future depends mostly on the growth rate.

3. Therefore, economic growth is really important.

Let’s push on that a bit. Suppose that there is a regressive tax scheme that enhances economic growth. It’s not hard to imagine. Tax consumption, but don’t tax income or savings.

You could use some of those tax proceeds to redistribute income to the poor. But let’s push a little harder. Suppose that a poor person will spend marginal dollars on wasteful purchases, while a rich person will put marginal dollars into investment. In that case, lower taxes and less redistribution could promote growth.

So it is possible that regressive policies today could improve welfare tomorrow.

How should elites replicate?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away;

At first, I had a hard time figuring out what he meant. So here was my thought process:

In context, Cowen seems to be defending non-merit based means by which an elite replicates. That is, to be a replicating elite, you have to give unfair advantages and disadvantages to people trying to join the elite. As another example, he writes,

I was struck by a recent paper showing that “almost 80 percent of the faculty at a top 10 economics department did their Ph.D. in a top 10 department.”

It is possible that this shows the ability of top departments to select the most promising students, so that if you don’t get into a top 10 department you are probably a clod. I am sure that is what the departments themselves believe, and if it’s true, then the paper is uninteresting. On the other hand, it could be that hiring at top departments is a game of “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine” played by thesis advisers. If that is the case, then what you have is selection for orthodoxy.

I think both mechanisms are at work. The lesser departments tend to get a fair amount of clods to work with. And the better departments give an unfair disadvantage to heterodox thinkers.

So I think that what Cowen means by an elite “replicating” is something like this:

An elite replicates if the selection process for new members ensures that they tend to respect and enhance the status of incumbent members. That is, I would replace the word “replication” with “holding onto status acquired when you became a member.”

The potential problem is that the goal of protecting the status of existing members may cause too much diversion away from true merit. I believe that this is what has happened in many academic disciplines. Cowen may disagree.

Next, you can ask what would happen if whites became a minority at Harvard. Would current white Harvard alumni (the relevant incumbents) lose status if newly-admitted Harvard students were heavily Asian? One way to read Cowen is that Harvard is acting as if it believes this to be the case.

Genes and cognitive ability

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Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom write,

we utilize a polygenic score (a weighted sum of individual genetic markers) constructed with the results from Okbay et al. (2016) to predict educational attainment. The markers most heavily weighted in this index are implicated in neuronal development and other biological processes that affect brain tissue. We interpret the polygenic score as a measure of one type of endowed ability.

Perhaps a newer version of the paper is here.

The paper finds that gene-environment interaction matters. But I think it is important that we now have a genetic score that can serve as a proxy for IQ. Also, this genetic score affects economic outcomes even when educational attainment is controlled for.

By the way, Robert Plomin’s forthcoming book is on my radar. This review points out the obvious, which is that the book will not be well received.

And also, Tyler Cowen points to this paper, which says that it is liberals who attribute outcomes more to genetic factors.

I can only imagine genetic effects being powerful if you hold constant the cultural context. Suppose it were possible to create reliable polygenic scores for the Big Five personality traits, plus cognitive ability. I can imagine that these scores would be useful in predicting outcomes among a group of American teenagers. But if you were to take a random sample of teenagers around the world and use nothing but these scores to predict long-term outcomes, I cannot imagine that this would work. To carry the thought experiment even further, think in terms of plopping people with identical polygenic scores into different centuries.

Lilliana Mason watch

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1. Paul H. P. Hanel, Natalia Zarzeczna, and Geoffrey Haddock write,

We directly compared the variability across moderate-, left-, and right-wing groups. Our findings suggest that the values of more extreme (left-wing or right-wing) supporters are usually more heterogeneous than those with more moderate views. We replicated this finding for politics-related variables such as attitudes toward immigrants and trust in (inter)national institutions. We also found that country-level variables (income, religiosity, and parasite stress level) did not moderate the pattern of value variability. Overall, our results suggest that endorsing the same political ideology is not necessarily associated with sharing the same values, especially in the case of common citizens holding extreme political attitudes.

That is from the abstract. I could not find an ungated version of the actual paper. Depending on the exact nature of the analysis, this might confirm the view that polarization is more a matter of hating the other team than it is about substantive differences.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In a separate post, he passes along a chart showing that hatred of each party has gone up four-fold since 1980. Stare at the chart. Right now, I don’t think there are nearly as many rabid Republicans or rabid Democrats as there are rabid anti-Democrats and rabid anti-Republicans.

Martin Gurri watch

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Possibly the shorter news cycles are also a result of greater general disillusionment with politics and especially with elites, a theme outlined in Martin Gurri’s forthcoming book “The Revolt of the Public.”

Also, Gurri would say that elites have lost control of the news cycle. The top TV networks and newspapers used to be able to tell the public what is “news.” They could keep a story going if they wanted to. Now, people click away from stories that don’t grab them, so everyone in the media has to behave like a troll. It’s easier to do that with a current story than with last week’s story.

Tyler Cowen loses his cool

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He writes,

Here is a new Lancet paper by Stephen S. Lim, et.al., via the excellent Charles Klingman. Finland is first, the United States is #27, and China and Russia are #44 and #49 respectively. There is plenty of “rigor” in the paper, but I say this is a good example of what is wrong with the social sciences and more specifically the publication process. The correct answer is a weighted average of the median, the average, the high peaks, and a country’s ability to innovate, part of which depends upon the market size a person has in his or her sights. So in reality the United States is number one, and China and Russia should both rank much higher (Cuba and Brunei beat them out, for instance, Cuba at #41, Brunei at #29). And does it really make sense to put North Korea (#113) between Ecuador and Egypt? I’m fine with Finland being in the top fifteen, but I am not even sure it beats Sweden. Overall the paper would do better by simply measuring non-natural resource-based per capita gdp, though of course that could be improved upon too.

I think the paper is fine. It seeks to measure human capital, using indicators of health and educational attainment, whereas Tyler seems to be looking for a measure of all intangible assets. Other intangible assets include skills acquired on the job, social norms, and institutions. One certainly can make a case that human capital includes job skills, but social norms and institutions fall in a different category.

If we look at human capital per person, then it strikes me as plausible that Finland is far ahead of the U.S. We make up for it with social norms that encourage successful risk-taking and with institutions like venture capital and deep capital markets in general. Suppose Cuba and China had governments that were equally inclined to tolerate markets. Would you bet against Cuba having higher per capita GDP than China? I wouldn’t. That bottom third of China’s population has got to be a real drag.

Norms and institutions matter. That is why average human capital is not a sufficient statistic to describe a nation’s intangible wealth. But average human capital is nonetheless worth trying to measure.

Tyler Cowen on conversations

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Reacting to a typical “be a good listener” sort of advice column, he writes,

I would stress the basic point that most conversations are bad, so your proper goal is to make them worse (so they can end) rather than better.

He didn’t invoke Tyrone, so I figure Tyler owns this contrarian position.

I will say that if you take the “good listener” approach, you definitely will be considered a great conversationalist. Yes, you also will have difficulty escaping from bad conversations. But think of it this way: when you get around to writing your novel, you can mine some of those bad conversations for amusing and colorful material.