Paul Romer on mass migration

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In a conversation with Tyler Cowen, Romer says,

I think we should talk about a trilemma for migration, which is three things, and we can only have two out of the three. You think of the liberal democracies — what would we like as a response for large numbers of people who need to go someplace? If it was some political jurisdictions, one of the things we want is local democratic accountability for the officials in the government. The second would be equal treatment under the law. And the third is, in this jurisdiction, the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, potentially numbers that are bigger than the existing population.

Picture one of these places when there’s a million people there, but you’d like it to be able to accept another 9 million. All three of those things are things that most people would support, and you can’t have all three. So, the two we pick in most existing jurisdictions — we just don’t allow large-scale migration, and you can see some logic to that.

His preferred solution is to suspend local democracy for a while, until the immigrants are absorbed. I think of this as adding Syrian refugees to Germany but, instead of letting the Syrian refugees vote in a different set of rules, letting the EU run things there.

It’s a very unfamiliar approach, and it has features that are unattractive. But the thing to realize is, we just don’t have an answer at all if we’re facing this kind of very large-scale crisis of migration.

A sense of Huemer

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Bryan Caplan mentioned that Michael Huemer is notw blogging. For example, Huemer writes,

I think ideology is based on outrage. We like to feel righteous outrage, and we pick our ideology according to the thing we most like to be outraged about. The ideology then tells us that that thing is everywhere.

That is a very TLP-ish statement, of course. Conservatives are outraged by threats to civilization, and they see them everywhere. Progressives are outraged by oppression, and they see it everywhere. etc.

He has this interesting corollary:

How to scam an ideologue: tell them a [false] story that fits their narrative about society and plays into their stereotypes.

Bryan points out that Huemer’s early posts offering tips for debate are pretty sensible–if you assume that people want fair debate. Unfortunately, the TLP-ist view is that is not the game they want to play. Instead, they prefer competing for status within your tribe by portraying the other side as evil.

Why humans can still play chess

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Ken Rogoff writes,

At one time, it did seem that computers would sound the death knell for chess, not to mention all human mind games. That was certainly my guess in the late 1970s, when the rise of computers was one of the main reasons I gave for retiring from competitive chess.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Tic-tac-toe is not much of a game. It has been solved, and the solution is easy to remember.

I believe that computers have solved the game of Othello, and with best play by both sides, White should win, 33-31. But humans still play in Othello tournaments.

The reason is that the “solution” to Othello is impossible to remember. There are many, many variations that lead to the optimal score. More important, there are many openings where if you have memorized the continuations and your opponent has not, you can get an outstanding result.

Another way to put this is that a computer has sufficient memory to put every playable variation into its “opening book.” The only positions that a computer will not recognize from memory will be ones where it is way ahead.

Humans do not have that much memory. You can take a human out of his opening book and force him to think, without putting yourself in a hopeless position.

I suspect that a similar solution to chess is attainable. Suppose that you turned a computer loose playing against itself millions of times, a la Alpha Go, and you discarded all of the variations where one side falls hopelessly behind, until you end up with the solution to chess. My guess is that this would consist of tens of thousands of variations that end in a draw. A computer can store all of these variations, along with refutations of plausible alternatives.

If you play against such a computer, you must either follow a line that the computer has memorized, leading to a draw, or pick a line that loses easily. Same as in tic-tac-toe.

If I am correct about Othello, a championship match involving computers would just result in a lot of 33-31 wins for white that the computers have already memorized. If I am correct about chess, then such a match would just result in a lot of draws that the computers have already memorized. No new lines would emerge.

But humans could still play the game, because they don’t have that much memory. As an aside, when he was pursuing the goal of achieving grandmaster status, Rogoff told me that he had 30,000 entire chess games in what he called “active memory,” with more in storage. Wow!

Klassic: three libertarian priorities

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In January of 2007, I wrote,

The goals of the free-market agenda should be:

1. Increase the proportion of children who are schooled outside of the public school system.
2. Increase the proportion of health care spending that is paid for directly by consumers.
3. Limit the fraction of people’s lives where they collect Social Security.

. . .If I wanted to create an industry with poor performance characteristics, I would set it up like the public school system. I would create a monopoly and set up an institutional structure that entrenches producers while marginalizing consumers. I would locate decision-making power at an ever-increasing distance from those affected by the decisions.

If I were writing this essay today, I would emphasize the ideological damage inflicted by government schools, not just the inherent inefficiency. But I think that the main point of the essay holds up, namely that the Republicans have ducked the big three elements of statist economic policy.

Klassic: Masonomics

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In 2007, I wrote,

Masonomics says, “Markets fail. Use markets.”

. . .The argument between Chicago and MIT seems to be over whether perfect markets are a “good approximation” or a “bad approximation” to reality. Masonomics goes along with the MIT view that perfect markets are a bad approximation to reality. But we do not look to government as a “solution” to imperfect markets.

Two years later, I wrote,

Tyler argued that politics is about determining what sorts of groups have high status in a society. I think this can relate to the idea that people are motivated to feel good about themselves and to believe that others think highly of them. Think of political identity as like religious identity or musical identity. Tyler pointed out that it’s pretty easy to predict what music will be on the iPod of an upper middle class sophomore girl at Brown will like certain music, and it is pretty easy to predict the musical tastes of a 25-year-old male gas station mechanic in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and those are quite different. You might not get as high an R-square predicting political affiliations, but you could still do pretty well.

I am thinking that at the margin this blog may be better if I include more posts that point readers to older essays of mine. Hence the Klassic.

Comments on contemporary politics

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1. Tyler Cowen was interviewed by Max Read and David Wallace-Wells a couple of weeks ago. He sees a growth in non-libertarian right-wing politics, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

That seems correct. I think that the Republicans can do well electorally by throwing libertarians under the bus. The Democrats’ best chance in a national election is to throw coastal progressives under the bus, but I don’t think they will be able to do that.

2. Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni (WSJ) wrote,

a campaign for Congress in many places starts with 60% of college-educated white women favoring the Democratic nominee. An even larger share of white men without degrees favor the Republican—making both essentially unreachable by the opposing candidate.

…The differences between the two groups are stark on many of the issues dominating the midterm campaign: immigration, gun control and health care. In each case, white men without college degrees support Mr. Trump’s policy stance, while white women with degrees are opposed.

For me, this is the most useful polling analysis that I have seen in a long time. I brought it up with a friend, and she said, “Of course, those two groups despise one another sexually, as well.”

The first story in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest story collection, You Think it, I’ll Say it, concerns the sexual tension between a professor of gender studies attending a conference and the Trump-supporting driver who takes her from the airport to her hotel.

In movies of an earlier era, there is a theme of tension between a prim, proper, attractive woman and a blue-collar male played by an actor like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, or James Garner. If the movie is a comedy, the man wins the affection of the woman. If it is tragedy, it ends. . .differently.

I answer two questions

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At the blog of Joseph Gray, an aspiring young economist.

My first thought is Fischer Black. You absolutely must read Perry Mehrling’s biography of him. If nothing else, you get a sense of what the 1970s felt like, both in the culture at large and in the economics profession.

More at the link. You might also check out the questions that he asked other economists, and their answers.

Construction productivity in the 1930s

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José Luis Ricón writes,

It also seems that buildng speed (this is all looking at the US now) was faster during the Great Depression years. Before and after it was slower.

My first thought is that you might have had some unusually productive construction workers, given the high unemployment in the economy. We think of blue-collar workers as homogeneous, but that is not the case. People who are more intelligent and more conscientious can be more productive at those jobs, at least if they are motivated. Which you would be during the Depression.

If this story is correct, then we should not long for the days when an Empire State Building could be put up quickly. Because we probably are better off with an economy in which those workers use their intelligence and conscientiousness elsewhere.

The case for no inflation

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The author writes,

But reducing uncertainty about prices by keeping the inflation target at 2% or more might actually increase a sense of uncertainty about real things like home values or investments. While it is right to worry about massive deflation, the historical relationship between deflation and recession is not all that strong. In a 2004 paper, the economists Andrew Atkeson and Patrick Kehoe concluded that most of the evidence of a relationship comes from just one case: the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Sometimes, a viewpoint is particularly interesting because of who holds it. In this case, it is Robert Shiller, arguing from his vantage point as a behavioral finance theorist.