If we really could build regressions that would reliably predict what the impacts of various policies would be, it would be a powerful argument against certain political and economic freedoms. Why go to all the trouble of having a messy and expensive market, or states as laboratories of democracy, when we could just have a couple of professors build us a model?
Judith Rich Harris 1, Nurture Assumption 0
Kevin M. Beaver and others write,
The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations—mainly genetic confounding—of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.
Pointer from Jason Collins. A caveat is that this is an example of the statisical fallacy of using absence of evidence to imply evidence of absence.
How to Fix Economic Education
In this essay, I argue that it is badly broken.
Unfortunately, the conventional misrepresentation takes seriously the economics of a camping trip. There are resources to be allocated, including the time that campers have available to pitch a tent, light a fire, cook a meal, and so forth. And there are goods to be allocated, including sleeping bags, food, and water. Thus, from the conventional standpoint, there is nothing wrong with using the camping trip as a metaphor for the economy.
Read the whole thing.
I Disagree with Brad DeLong
Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks; and my friend, patron, teacher, and (until the last reshuffle) office neighbor Barry Eichengreen ‘s Hall of Mirrors. Read and grasp the messages of both of these, and you are in the top 0.001% of the world in terms of understanding what has happened to us–and what the likely scenarios are for what comes next.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
These are ultra-Keynesian treatments of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The all-purpose causal variable is a glut of savings and a dearth of government spending.
I cannot prove that this view is wrong. However, I am more convinced by Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, Engineering the Financial Crisis. The easiest way to summarize the book is that (with a nod to a different Kraus) risk-based capital regulations were the disease that they purported to cure.
The Friedman-Kraus story is one in which regulators suffer from the socialist calculation problem. With risk-based capital regulations, regulators determined the relative prices of various investments for banks. The prices that regulators set for risk told banks to behave as if senior tranches from mortgage-backed securities were much safer than ordinary loans, including low-risk mortgage loans held by the bank. The banks in turn used these regulated prices to guide their decisions.
In 2001, the regulators outsourced the specific risk calculations to three rating agencies–Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch. This set off a wave of securitized mortgage finance based on calculations that proved to be wrong.
Friedman and Kraus challenge the basic mindset not only of DeLong but of 99 percent of all economists. That mindset is that the socialist calculation problem, if it matters at all, only matters for full-on socialists, not for regulators in an otherwise capitalist system. In the conventional view, regulators can fail for ideological reasons, or because they are manipulated by special interests. But Friedman and Kraus offer a different thesis. When information discovery is vital, regulators, like socialist planners, are doomed to fail because they are unable to mimic the market’s groping, evolutionary approach to learning.
In Friedrich von Hayek’s Nobel Lecture, The Pretence of Knowledge, he concludes,
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society–a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
What Friedman and Kraus claim is that well-intended but now well-informed bank regulations were the destroyer, not of an entire civilization, but of a financial system. Like Hayek, they offer a profound critique of mainstream thinking. Like Hayek, they are sadly likely to be ignored.
The Source of the College Earnings Premium?
A collective marriage matching model is estimated and calibrated to quantify the share of returns to schooling that is realized through marriage. The predictions of the model are matched with detailed Danish household data on the relationship between schooling and wage rates, the division of time and goods within the household, and the extent to which men and women sort positively on several traits in marriage. Counterfactual analysis conducted with the model suggests that Danish men and women are earning on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I find this more plausible than the signaling model. Assortative mating is one of the four forces I will discuss in my St. Louis talk. Fifty years ago, my guess is that the majority of men who were in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution were married to women without a college education. Today, my guess is that only a small minority of men in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution would be married to a woman without a college education. What the Danish study suggests is that if people married randomly with respect to education that would greatly reduce income inequality.
Family Structure Matters
Timothy Taylor looks at various meta-analyses of studies of the possible causal role of the absence of a father on outcomes for the children. He quotes a meta-analysis by Sara McLanahan and others
The research base examining the longer-term effects of father absence on adult outcomes is considerably smaller, but here too we see the strongest evidence for a causal effect on adult mental health, suggesting that the psychological harms of father absence experienced during childhood persist throughout the life course. The evidence that father absence affects adult economic or family outcomes is much weaker. A handful of studies find negative effects on employment in adulthood, but there is little consistent evidence of negative effects on marriage or divorce, on income or earnings, or on college education.
Read Taylor’s whole post. He and the authors he cites are quite aware of the difficulty of distinguishing correlation from causation in this sort of research.
529: Popular != Good Policy
this episode and the swift bipartisan opposition it generated is so revealing, not only about the short term political instincts of the Obama administration, but about the longer term political and policy dynamics of sustaining the welfare state.
He is writing about President Obama’s proposal to tax savings from “529 plans” for college saving, which the Administration has since backed away from. I read Suderman as saying that the larger point is that when it comes to unsustainable fiscal policy, we have met the enemy and he is us. My comments:
1. Re-read Lenders and Spenders. Government debt inevitably leads to political strife.
2. 529 plans are regressive. Nearly all of the benefit flows to people with high incomes.
3. 529 plans are yet another enabler for colleges to boost tuitions.
4. 529 plans subsidize affluent people for doing what they would have done anyway–send their kids to exclusive, high-priced colleges.
529 plans are terrible public policy. Instead of demagogically criticizing the Administration’s proposal to tax them, I would say let’s get rid of them altogether.
Jason Collins on James Manzi
succeeding or failing in a single trial doesn’t usually constitute adequate evaluation of a program. Rather, promising ideas need to be subject to iterative evaluation in the relevant contexts.
The Technocrat’s Creed
The near-global stagnation witnessed in 2014 is man-made. It is the result of politics and policies in several major economies — politics and policies that choked off demand. In the absence of demand, investment and jobs will fail to materialize. It is that simple.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
Several years ago, I noticed
Stiglitz always writes as the omniscient observer. He knows exactly what should have been done
The creed of the technocrat, particularly as believed by Stiglitz might be something like this:
I am infallible. I can solve any problem. Given the authority, I can optimize any situation. When bad outcomes occur, these invariably come from policies that deviate from what I know to be optimal. The only thing that stands between reality and economic nirvana is opposition to me, which comes from economists who are too blind to see the correct ideas or from politicians who are too evil to implement them.
When it comes to other mainstream economists, Stiglitz is capable of spotting weaknesses in their point of view. He can be quite insightful in that regard. But if he has ever admitted being wrong himself, or even in doubt, I have not seen it.
Kurzweil Predictions
From an interview with Peter Diamandis.
By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.
By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.
By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.
Similar to mine (which reflect Kurzweil’s influence), but different timelines.