Category Archives: Jason Collins is Indispensable

IQ and Institutions

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Jason Collins dares to write,

Those nations with high-IQ, educated populations tend to have higher levels of economic development. Although rich countries tend to have good political institutions and policies that are not completely crazy, the direction of causation is population to institutions. If you have the “right” people in a nation, decent political frameworks tend to follow.

You can read my cross-country study, which supports Jason’s view. The appendix is where I introduce an IQ variable, which is very powerful. If you don’t like my dependent variable, which is an index of economic freedom, you could redo the analysis using the United Nations human development index and get very similar results.

Gregory Clark on (the lack of) Social Mobility

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He writes (concerning China),

the descendants of the pre-revolution elites crop up unexpectedly frequently among high government officials, university professors, and students at elite universities.

Also,

Marriage is highly assortative in all societies. Even in 19th century England, where women had no formal educational status and little control of wealth, women married men who were very like their fathers or brothers in wealth and education.

This is from an article a couple of weeks ago that I missed. Thanks to Jason Collins for the pointer.

Will Better Contraceptives Make A Difference?

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Vox reports,

the MicroCHIPS implant will last up to 16 years, and women will be able to turn it off via remote control if they’re trying to get pregnant. Trials in humans are expected to start next year, but the same microchip technology has been tested successfully in women with osteoporosis. MicroCHIPS Biotech says the implant could reasonably be on the market by 2018.

Pointer from Jason Collins., who has other interesting links this week.

My prediction is that this will make little or no difference in the number of “unwanted” births. My intuition is that a relatively small proportion of these are truly unwanted. To put this another way, I do not believe that the important margin is the change in quality of contraceptives.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Obesophobia

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Apparently, Jonathan Gruber says yes. But at Cato Unbound, Christopher Snowdon says no. In response, Russell Saunders says yes. Pointer to the Cato Unbound issue from Jason Collins.

I have not yet read the essays. We decided to take a break from winter and drive down to Florida. As we went through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the population did seem to get older and more obese. I know that many of my progressive friends would be disgusted by the obesity, but that does not make it a public policy problem. You can complain about paying for obese people’s health care, but why not just let insurance companies determine the charge for that, rather than treating it as a tax issue?

People have strong tastes about their associations. San Franciscans have a revealed preference for segregated schools (link from Tyler Cowen).

In Florida, my casual observation is that the buildings with the guards are in affluent neighborhoods in communities that are miles from any urban diversity, and the buildings in the urban diverse neighborhoods have less security. I attribute that to selection bias–people who are comfortable with diversity are less xenophobic.

I can imagine that if it were conservatives rather than progressives who were offended by obesity, then the term obesophobia would be in widespread use in the liberal media.

Judith Rich Harris 1, Nurture Assumption 0

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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.

Annual Physicals vs. Evidence

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Ezekiel Emanuel writes,

Those who preach the gospel of the routine physical have to produce the data to show why these physician visits are beneficial. If they cannot, join me and make a new resolution: My medical routine won’t include an annual exam.

He cites controlled experiments showing that the Null Hypothesis is true for the routine physical exam.

Not surprising, really. Ask Robin Hanson.

Pointer from Jason Collins.

Teaching is Not About Teaching

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Eric Loken and Andrew Gelman wrote,

Being empirical about teaching is hard. Lack of incentives aside, we feel like we move from case study to case study as college instructors and that our teaching is a multifaceted craft difficult to decompose into discrete malleable elements.

More recommended excerpts here. Pointer from Jason Collins.

They refer to statistical quality control. Deming would describe what educators do as “tampering.” By that, he means making changes without evaluating the effect of those changes.

I think that there are two obstacles to using statistical techniques to improve teaching. One obstacle is causal density. It is not easy to run a controlled experiment, because there are so many factors that are difficult to hold constant.

But the more important obstacle may be the Null Hypothesis, which is that you are likely to find very discouraging evidence. Sometimes, I think that what the various consumers of teaching (administrators, parents, students) want is not so much evidence that your teaching methods work. What they want is a sense that you are trying. Teaching is not about teaching. It is about seeming to care about teaching.

Of course, if student motivation matters, and if students are motivated by believing that you care, then seeming to care can be an effective teaching method. I recall a few years ago reading a story of Indian children attempting distance learning, with the computer guiding the substance of their learning supplemented by elderly women acting as surrogate grandmothers, knowing nothing about the subject matter but giving students a sense that someone cared about their learning.

Hormones and Financial Intermediation

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A recent post reminded me that Jason Collins really liked The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, by John Coates. Coates looks at how hormones are activated in traders. My guess is that I will get as much from Jason’s review as I would from the book. Jason writes,

In a bull market, testosterone surges through the population of traders. Each takes larger and larger risks, pushing markets to new highs and triggering further cascades of testosterone. Irrational exuberance has a chemical base.

Read the whole review. I would like to see the link between an individual short-term hormonal response and broad, long-term market trends established.

I do believe that there are cycles of financial intermediation. Remember how I think of financial intermediation. Households and businesses want to hold riskless, short-term assets while issuing risky, long-term liabilities. Financial intermediaries accommodate this by doing the opposite. When there is too little financial intermediation, opportunities to take reasonable risks are foregone. When there is too much financial intermediation, there is excessive risk-taking.

To a first approximation, I am not sure that simple trading of financial assets should boost testosterone on net, because financial trading is not positive sum. It’s not like “you want meat and I want shoes, so I’ll trade you meat for shoes.” Financial trading is closer to zero sum, which is why when you win you get high. The guy who sold you that stock that went up 5 points right after you bought it probably feels badly. So why should a bull market make more people feel high? Perhaps because as share prices increase, net financial intermediation is going up overall. That is, there are more short-term, low-risk liabilities being backed by more long-term, high-risk assets. Maybe that increased financial intermediation is accompanied by and reinforced by a hormonal response. Perhaps that is plausible, but it seems to me to require more of a stretch and, above all, more of a story of how markets react in the aggregate, or how System 2 and System 1 interact over long periods of time and across an entire array of market individuals and institutional relationships.

Jason Collins on Colander and Kupers

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He writes,

Overall, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy is a good book. However, the last third of the book did not convince me that complexity theory arms us with many new policy tools. A complexity frame punches holes in many of our methods of analysis and the policy options we put on the table using standard economic frameworks. But the very nature of complex systems makes it a challenge to propose options that we can claim with any confidence to have positive effect. Roland and Kupers have ventured into that area – which I am grateful for. I was glad to read a complexity book with an attempt to give some policy relevance without yet another description of the El Farol Bar problem. But the particular examples they provided leave me of the view that the strongest contribution of complexity theory will be to tell us when our standard economic policy tools will work, and when they won’t. That’s no small accomplishment, but in a world where we need to “do something”, it’s not an easy sell.

I called it the best book of 2014, and I think hardly anyone agrees with me. However, I found myself often frustrated by its flaws, and Collins shares my frustration. I strongly recommend reading Collins’ entire piece. I agree with every sentence in it.