Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

Thoughts on cancel culture

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1. Tyler Cowen writes,

So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.

In fact, the increase in bias at the NYT and WAPO may be more than offset by increased attention paid to podcasters like Bret Weinstein or Ben Shapiro. The intent to introduce “anti-racism” curriculum into schools may be more than offset by the way that the virus is creating a situation that lowers the status of school teachers among parents.

2. John McWhorter writes,

people left-of-center [are] wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the “circular firing squad” of the left: It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

Here is where I think Pluckrose and Lindsay have the explanation, in Cynical Theories. The liberal philosophy that these older left-of-center academics share is incommensurate with what I would call the “folk” postmodernism of the younger leftists.

3. I think that there is at least a 30 percent chance that cancel culture has already peaked. The mobs, whether on Twitter, on campus, or in the streets, are engaged in bullying and making dominance moves, which create fear but also resentment. Academic administrators and progressive mayors are Neville Chamberlains, and I sense that an increasing number of people want to see a more Churchillian approach.

Misperceptions of virus risk

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Sonal Desai writes,

The discrepancy with the actual mortality data is staggering: for people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34 it is 90 times higher.

I am not so happy with the metric here.

Let A = someone is worried about health consequences of the virus.

Let B = someone dies of the virus

Let C = someone is 18-24.

The claim that young people have a distorted view of their risk would be that p(A/C) is way too high relative to P(B/C). But the data that they are presenting seems to me to compare P(A/C) relative to P(B and C)

But let us stipulate that in fact young people now tend to greatly over-estimate the risk. Why would this be?

1. Tyler Cowen predicted this with one of his very first posts on the virus–that we would under-estimate the risk early and then over-estimate the risk. More recently, he speaks of phantom risk, or the “stigma” of cases.

2. Desai cites partisanship and media hype. I agree that this is a hypothesis, and perhaps when President Biden takes office the mainstream media will decide that it’s time to say that it’s safe for people to go back to work and school. But I think that the virus fears are too deep in our collective psyche for the media to undo them.

3. Respect for authority is still a thing, and the authorities are saying that schools cannot open, etc. So people infer that the risk must be pretty great.

4. I don’t think we can say that fear of the virus is completely irrational. As of a week ago, the average daily death figures continued to hover at around 1000, and if you extrapolate that to an annual rate of 365,000 it is frighteningly high. And young people know that even if they do not suffer adverse consequences, they may come into contact with friends or relatives who are older and more vulnerable.

Virus update

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Jeff Harris, who did some research claiming that the NY subway system affected the outbreak there, is still ringing that bell.

That leaves us with the public transportation system, particularly New York City’s public subway system. We continue to stress the word system, because we should think of the subways not as a loose aggregate of individual stations docked in individual neighborhoods, but as a whole, as a mechanism for efficiently pooling millions of individuals into one large mixing basin.

New York City’s unique subway system had the capability in late February and early March to rapidly disperse SARS-CoV-2 throughout the city’s boroughs

Elsewhere, Harris notes that the falling ratio of deaths to reported cases suggests that treatment is getting better. That goes along with my prediction that treatment is more likely than a vaccine to be the solution.

Tyler Cowen notes that testing with rapid results could change the game, also, and he put some grant money where his mouth is. Read the whole post.

Suppose that with current best treatment practices (aided by rapid-results testing?), out of 10,000 otherwise healthy people who get the virus, fewer than 5 suffer adverse long-term consequences. Are we still supposed to structure our lives around fear of the virus?

Of course, health experts cannot or will not give us an estimate of how many out of 10,000 otherwise health people will suffer adverse long-term consequences if they get the virus. Because we are in the dark, every outbreak of cases becomes a justification for allowing our lives to be directed by health experts.

I note that this paper looks at India’s performance with respect to the virus by comparing age-specific case fatality rates across countries. The U.S. is not one of the comparison countries. Probably because we do not have the data broken down that way?

The virus as a PSST shock

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David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds write,

The COVID crisis appears poised to reshape labor markets along at least four axes: telepresence, urban de-densification, employment concentration in large firms, and general automation forcing. Although these changes will have long-run efficiency benefits, they will exacerbate economic pain in the short and medium terms for the least economically secure workers in our economy, particularly those in the rapidly growing but never-highly-paid personal services sector.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Also discussed by Timothy Taylor.

I keep emphasizing that a recovery in terms of employment will require a massive amount of entrepreneurial experimentation. I think that deregulation and cutting payroll taxes are the best hope there. If instead you get a lot government debt/money being issued with an inflexible economy, the only result will be bidding up prices for the offerings of the surviving businesses.

On the payroll tax cut, I believe that President Trump is correct. I wrote,

government ought to be encouraging the transition to new activities that are profitable in a virus-conscious economy. One way to do so would be to pay businesses a wage subsidy to hire workers. Another method would be to cut the payroll tax. An economy-wide incentive to add workers would have more bang for the buck than a costly effort to keep uneconomical businesses afloat.

It is sad that even some Republican Senators prefer Keynesian remedies. Shows you how little influence I have.

Maybe we *are* in an Atlas Shrugged moment

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Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes,

Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the gatekeepers—the arbiters of what it is and is not O.K. to say, and who is allowed, by virtue of their identity, to say it. As Eric Weinstein, a podcast host and managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment firm, tweeted, “I believe that activism has taken over.” Here was the first great salvo in a new front in the culture wars.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Lewis-Kraus gets many details right, but I think he gets the theme wrong. If you were to buy into his narrative, you would come away thinking that the feud is because Silicon Valley types are very jealous of the status of people in the legacy media. There is some of that, but I think that the opposite is more prevalent.

I think of the conflict in Randian terms, as industrialists vs. moochers. The industrialists (not in the Rand sense of heavy industry, but in the contemporary sense of software eating everything) take pride in having shown an ability to build something. It might be as humble as a section of computer code that gets used. Or it might be as grand as a successful company, or two. The moochers have never built anything, and they are looking for other ways to assuage their egos and fight the zero-sum game of status. The moochers have found that social justice activism is a useful weapon for lowering the status of the industrialists.

Scott Alexander, Less Wrong, and the Intellectual Dark Web occupy a sort of Galt’s Gulch. They see the moochers as intellectually deficient. They are trying to uphold an old-fashioned value of scientific objectivity against the moochers’ assault of oppressor-oppressed framing.

UPDATE: Think of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan in this context. What is loose in the land is a religion that is animated by the thrill of identifying and persecuting heretics.

An unflattering portrayal of social justice activists

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Tyler Cowen writes,

The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word. I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.

I think that this is one of Tyler’s best posts of the year, and I have not excerpted my favorite part. The context is a letter to Harper’s signed by some prominent intellectuals, including many on the left, mildly rebuking cancel culture. I interpret Tyler as saying that the letter indicates how weak our side is relative to what one would hope. Imagine if the same group of signatories published a letter taking a stance with which you disagreed. Would you care? If not, then perhaps one should not be optimistic that this letter will turn the tide.

I wish we had a more scientific profile of social justice activists. My unscientific observations:

1. They tend to be young. Most of the people on my side of the free speech issue are also on my side of 50.

I’ve said before that I suspect that heavy usage of social media makes it more difficult to cope with beliefs you dislike. It makes controversy feel immediate and necessitating a response rather than remote and something one can allow to pass.

2. They tend to be not in the highest status brackets. How many leading scientists want to support #ShutDownSTEM?

If you’re successful in a prestige hierarchy, you don’t resort to dominance moves. Dominance behavior seems to me to be the essence of he social justice activist approach. It feels anti-liberal because it is.

3. They are not in the highest intellectual brackets. For a variety of reasons, institutions of higher education have had to accommodate students, professors, and especially administrators who are not top caliber in analytical ability. Part of the accommodation is to try to disguise the intellectual inferiority of those who are what George Will called lumpen intelligentsia.

They see liberal values and intellectual merit as elements of a dominance hierarchy, and they are wrong about that. They make their own dominance moves in the name of justice, and they are wrong about that, too.

The DARPA process includes an audit

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Benjamin Reinhardt writes,

Every program at DARPA is intensely technically scrutinized by the tech council

The Tech Council is composed of people with technical expertise in the proposed program’s area and adjacent areas. The Tech Council Pitch Meeting is meant to be very high level but council members can ask deep technical questions on anything. The tech council doesn’t have any power besides advising the director on the program’s technical soundness. A purely advisory tech council seems like a good idea because it both avoids decision by committee and keeps all responsibility squarely on the director and PM.

I see this as something like an external audit. I am a big fan of audits. The essay I am working on will suggest audit mechanisms as a way out of our “post-truth” morass.

the closest thing to a framework that PMs use to guide program design is “be able to explain precisely why this idea will work to a group of really smart experts both in the area of the program and adjacent to it.”

Imagine if every research project or graduate course were put through this sort of process.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who correctly lauds the essay.

Virus science catches up?

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From a UPI story.

The first, published June 5 by the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology, found that sunlight — specially ultraviolet solar radiation — kills SARS-CoV-2 in 30 minutes.

The second, published by JAMA Network Open on June 11, suggested that climates with warmer temperatures and higher humidity — like much of the United States during the summer — might slow the spread of the virus.

. . .The authors of both studies argue that people might be safer outdoors. This runs counter to many of the lockdown and social distancing measures implemented across much of the country in March, the researchers told UPI.

I posted What I Have Come to Believe on April 23. I said,

A fresh-air lifestyle is good for you. I am struck by the low death rate among homeless people and in India. Those populations ought to be at high risk, and the only story I can come up with is that they don’t spend as much time as we do indoors with HVAC.

I did not have much to go on. But I think what I said holds up. You are better off outside. The problem with hot weather in the U.S. is that it drives many people indoors for the air conditioning. UPDATE: According to Tyler Cowen, Nate Silver agrees on this point.

In fact, pretty much everything in that post holds up. I think that if you go back to March and April, I out-performed the professional health care experts in drawing inferences about the virus.

The case for PSST

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If you listen to Raj Chetty at Princeton, one implication is that the economy is not well described as a GDP factory. Most of the talk is about heterogeneities in the economy. Affluent consumers behave differently from low-income consumers. Small service businesses were impacted differently from other firms. And above all, the patterns of specialization and trade that were broken are not likely to come back quickly.

As a result, the “stimulus” largely missed its target. In order to be able to see this, Chetty and his collaborators are using new data sources, rather than the standard government statistics that were designed for the Keynesian paradigm.

But to make the most sense of what he finds, it helps to read Economics after the Virus, my latest essay. I had already anticipated most of Chetty’s empirical results when I wrote,

In a typical recession, households reduce spending involuntarily, since they have lost income. In this case, household members have deliberately chosen not to shop or travel or seek entertainment outside their homes, even if they can afford to do so. . .In a typical recession, construction and durable-goods manufacturing experience the sharpest declines, while service industries stay relatively stable. In this case, in-person services have been among the hardest hit sectors of the economy. In a typical recession, nearly every industry can look past the immediate troubles and foresee something close to a return to normal. In this case, retail stores, restaurants, entertainment venues, institutions of higher education, hotels, and the like foresee drastic changes even if the economy were to revive rapidly.

It is one of my most important essays. Academic economists, including Chetty, should be reading it in something like the American Economic Review, in order to have perspective on Chetty’s findings. But the PSST story is too “soft” to sell to an academic journal. George Akerlof explains the methodological bias.

it has become all-but-uncontestable that new theories need to generate testable predictions. This belief may seem innocuous; but, in point of fact, it involves rejecting softer tests of theories, such as those that evaluate models based upon the quality of their assumptions as well as the quality of their conclusions. It especially entails exclusion of evidence from case studies, whose detailed evidence can be highly informative regarding context and motivation. While harder tests with statistical data may be a gold standard, restricting the set of permissible tests reduces—perhaps greatly—the ability to test theories. Hence, bias toward the hard makes us too accepting of existing theory and insufficiently willing to be self-critical as a profession.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Whose course will scale?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it.

Suppose that none of the top tier colleges can have on-campus learning in the fall. If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled. As an online student, your best approach might be to take econ with Tyler, engineering from someone at Carnegie-Mellon, journalism from someone at Northwestern, etc.

The online course market could end up looking like the textbook market. The per-student cost should fall to about the cost of a textbook. The market structure will tend toward winners-take most. If Tyler is one of the winners, he could have a few hundred thousand students.

In the online environment, having a good traditional brand, like “Mankiw,” will not matter much. Your competitors have been focused on the online product and persistently iterating and improving it.

With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.

[UPDATE: Read Scott Galloway’s take, which is somewhat different from mine, but is still based on the view that online education scales differently from in-person education.

In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.

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