My thoughts on scientific progress

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A reader asked for my thoughts on the issues raised in the econtalk episode featuring Patrick Collison. Here are a few:

1. The important question is whether there is anything that citizens or government officials can do about the pace of scientific progress. How can one stimulate progress? How can one remove barriers to progress?

2. I think that there are major unanswered questions about the nature of scientific and technical progress. Is it mostly inevitable, or do chance, individual genius, and sudden changes in the regulatory or cultural environment play a big role? Is the process smooth or are there sudden leaps? Are “general purpose technologies” a key element?

3. One of my biases is that I believe that when the technological preconditions exist, progress is inevitable. Often, the preconditions involve the development of instruments that make it possible to observe and measure phenomena that we could not observe and measure before. I would like to believe that if you had limited Newton and Gallileo to the instruments available 150 years before they were born, they would not have come close to doing the work that they did. I would like to believe that the Chinese did not sail west before Columbus sailed east more because they lacked certain instruments (what they are, I cannot say) than because of the Emperor. That is, I would like to believe that if they had the right instruments, they would have gotten around the Emperor.’

More prosaically, Jimi Hendrix could not have made his debut album in 1967 with the guitar technology that existed in 1963, and perhaps not even with the technology that existed in 1965. Steve Jobs could not have spurred Apple to develop a successful smart phone with the technology that existed in 2004.

4. Another one of my biases is that I believe that genius is synergistic, not individualistic. It was John Lennon *and* Paul McCartney *and* Bob Dylan *and* Atco *and* Motown *and* . . .that made 1964 – 1967 such a spectacular musical era. No single musician was responsible for it. It was Xerox Parc *and* DARPA *and* the Homebrew Computer Club *and* Bell Labs *and* NCSA *and* . . .that got us out of the mainframe era and into the modern era of computing. No single individual was responsible.

If you believe my biases, then you want to think in terms of supporting people who are developing new and better instruments to observe and measure. In health care, that might mean supporting researchers working on nanobots that can provide new observations about the life cycle of cells and of whole organs. In energy and materials science, it might mean supporting researchers working on new instruments to measure chemical processes.

If you believe my baises, then you want to think in terms of supporting individuals who are good at copying others and competing with others at the same time. It is this copying/competing dynamic that seems to be at work in synergistic progress.

Speaking of copying/competing, I believe that blogging is seriously under-rated by people who claim to be researchers. Done properly, blogging is fantastically synergistic. Imagine how much faster progress could be if folks were weaned away from academic journals and onto blogs.

Martin Gurri watch

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podcast with Robert Wiblin.

There were a core of us there that thought this has completely radically changed the way the world works. The old world, the institutions owned the information. We trusted them because we had no alternative but to trust them. They were, for example, they were the media and they told us this is the event you need to look at. The fact that there were many other events that were not being discussed wasn’t obvious to anybody because they chose the same narrow set, or you were the government and you’d say, “Well this is what’s important.” You explained why it was important and you explained how it should be interpreted.

Russ Roberts and Patrick Collison

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Patrick Collison says,

What is the aggregate rate of progress in science going to be, between now and then? Right? Maybe some tail, really bad things are going to happen. But don’t happen, I think that the single biggest determinant will be the aggregate rate of progress in science.

The discussion is focused on Collison’s claim that on a per-scientist basis, scientific productivity is declining rapidly. I liked best the last 15 minutes or so.

Collison has an ability, which I am pretty sure I don’t have, of finishing a thought out loud when it’s clear that his mind has moved on to a new thread.

What I’m Reading

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Why Culture Matters Most, by David C. Rose.

I will have finished it by the time this post goes up. It is a valuable book on the whole. Let me state my initial reservations.

1. He makes the claim that culture matters more than institutions. But he doesn’t sharply delineate between the two. Early on, he says

Culture pertains to knowledge transmitted across generations through imitation and teaching rather than through genes.

Later, he writes

“institutions” refers to consistent patterns in how we do things

Still later, he writes

when someone says the word “culture,” for many the image that jumps to mind is some kind of consistent practice within a given society

Do you see my problem?

2. The crucial cultural issue for Rose comes down to trust, and the concept of a “high-trust society.” I am pretty sympathetic to the focus on what I would call cooperation and defection, but I worry that such a focus may be a bit too narrow.

3. There approach may owe too much to economics. This is related to point 2.

In the end, I may decide that (2) and (3) are virtues rather than bugs. But I expect to remain somewhat annoyed by (1).

Economics over sociology?

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Consider Marriage Markets, by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn. They write,

At the top, there are more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women. In the middle and the bottom, there are are more competent and stable women seeing to pair with a shrinking pool of reliable men.

. . .the conclusion is short and simple: it’s the economy, stupid. And any analysis or proposed solution that does not take growing inequality into account is based on a lie.

Thanks to a commenter for mentioning the book.

I will read it with some skepticism. I certainly see a strong arrow going in the other direction, from assortative mating to inequality. If there is a reverse causal arrow, then that implies a sort of positive feedback loop.

I am not sure what they mean by the first sentence quoted above. If you define success as “college-educated,” then it is the sucessful women who have to compete for a relatively small pool of men.

Consider the following alternate universes:

1. Boys grow up in households with their fathers in households with decent finances.

2. Boys grow up in households with their fathers in households with fragile finances.

3. Boys grow up in households without their fathers in households with decent finances.

Pretty much everyone assumes that in alternate universe (1) we would have fewer problems than we have today. If the authors really believe that “it’s the economy, stupid,” then it seems to me that they either believe that (3) would work about as well as (1) or that income redistribution would be sufficient to create (1).

I read conservatives as saying that scenario (2) leads to boys who can function well as adults, and that scenario (3) does not. And conservatives see income redistribution as leading to (3) rather than (1).

Bipartisan cronyism on housing finance

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Norbert Michel writes,

The witnesses supporting the bipartisan approach represent the following groups: the Housing Policy Council, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the National Association of Realtors, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders, the Community Home Lender Association, the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, and the U.S. Mortgage Insurers.

He refers to a bipartisan housing finance “reform” bill. With that list of rent-seekers in support, you know that one should pray that the bill never passes.

McCloskey on teaching economics

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She (then he) wrote,

I think economics, like philosophy, cannot be taught to nineteen-year olds. . .comes directly from a socialized economy (called a family), and has no feel on his pulse for those tragedies of adult life that economists call scarcity and choice.

Thanks to a commenter for reminding me about the article, which I recall reading a few years ago.

I am not as pessimistic as that. But this may be an instance where the demand side of the market is actually in control. That is, students feel like they are learning something when they can define and use economic jargon and diagrams. Deeper, more philosophical points, like the way that economic growth resembles evolution, or the challenge of achieving cooperation in large-scale society, don’t sell as well to a 19-year-old market.

Should economists study folklore?

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Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue write,

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, myths, legends, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body of culture, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for economists and political scientists interested in comparative development and culture.

I am tempted to say that culture = folkways + institutions. That is, one aspect of culture is bottom-up, informal, emergent folkways (or folklore). Another aspect, institutions, is culture that is hierarchically-influenced, formalized, and codified.

Following a painstaking effort to catalog folklore across subgroups, the authors write,

We demonstrate the predictive power of folklore-based measures of culture on current norms as reáected in modern surveys, concluding that folklore itself may be one of the vehicles via which culture is vertically transmitted across generations.

It seems interesting.

New research on the minimum wage

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Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer write,

Our method infers the disemployment effect of the minimum wage by tracking the changes in the number of jobs throughout the wage distribution following a minimum wage increase. The changes at the bottom of the wage distribution—in particular the missing jobs below the minimum, and the excess jobs at or just above the minimum—reflect the effect of the minimum wage on low-wage workers.

The idea is that if the minimum wage increase has a big effect, then you should see a noticeable drop in the rate of growth of jobs that are just below the minimum wage. They do not find such a drop. They conclude that an increase in the minimum wage has minimal adverse employment effects.

The bank run of 1930?

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Gary Gorton, Toomas Laarits, and Tyler Muir write,

At the start of the Great Depression there were no nationwide bank runs and banks did not avail themselves of the discount window. Yet, output dropped substantially: industrial production fell over 20%. As a consequence, 1930 is viewed as a puzzle. For example, Romer (1988) writes: ”The primary mystery surrounding the Great Depression is why output fell so drastically in late 1929 and all of 1930” (p. 5).2 And Bernanke (1983) does not include 1930 in his study of the effects of bank failures on output: ”it should be stated at the outset that my theory does not offer a complete explanation of the Great Depression (for example, nothing is said about 1929-1930)” (p. 258).

In this paper show that a large part of the output drop in 1930 can be explained by bank actions: the reduction in loans and purchase of safe assets. We argue that banks realized the severity of economic conditions and, in effect, ran on themselves.

I want to note this paper for future reference. But I’m not saying I buy it. I mean, the reason that output dropped so sharply is that the banks ran on themselves, and the reason that the banks ran on themselves is that they realized that output was dropping so sharply?