Saturday assorted links
1. Sabine Hossenfelder on German highway speed limits.
2. Sheep to humans ratios are falling in the Anglosphere.
3. Why are international firms leaving Nigeria?
4. Can Claude Sonnet 3.5 identify a Robin Hanson talk from a single slide?
5. Gavin Leech on living in Estonia.
6. Just how screwed up philanthropy and cancel culture have become.
Needed in Empirical Social Science: Numbers
By Aaron S. Edlin and Michael Love:
Knowing the magnitude and standard error of an empirical estimate is much more important than simply knowing the estimate’s sign and whether it is statistically significant. Yet, we find that even in top journals, when empirical social scientists choose their headline results – the results they put in abstracts – the vast majority ignore this teaching and report neither the magnitude nor the precision of their findings. They provide no numerical headline results for 63%±3% of empirical economics papers and for a whopping 92% ± 1% of empirical political science or sociology papers between 1999 and 2019. Moreover, they essentially never report precision (0.1% ± 0.1%) in headline results. Many social scientists appear wedded to a null hypothesis testing culture instead of an estimation culture. There is another way: medical researchers routinely report numerical magnitudes (98%±1%) and precision (83% ± 2%) in headline results. Trends suggest that economists, but not political scientists or sociologists, are warming to numerical reporting: the share of empirical economics articles with numerical headline results doubled since 1999, and economics articles with numerical headline results get more citations (+19% ± 11%).
Via somebody on Twitter?
Alice Evans on Nordic gender egalitarianism
So what’s the connection between hierarchy and patriarchy? It is my contention that if everyone is equal, it is much more acceptable for women to get to the top. No one is special. ‘Leaders’ are not due unique perks, privileges or power. Queuing by the roadside, they board the bus like commoners. Since everyone is respected, it is much more permissible for (low status) women to become politicians, clerics and bosses. What’s there to envy? The status gap is meagre. The rest of society acts as a reverse dominance coalition – keeping her power, esteem and ego in check.
By contrast, in hierarchical institutions, where status gaps loom large, it would be enormously unsettling for a (low status) woman to command prestige. If men must always bow and let her first speak first, it may grate their egos. Even for men who are perfectly supportive of female employment or gender equality in abstract, it might still be uncomfortable to literally kow-tow. The larger the hierarchy, the more distressing it may be to see a woman soar…
My theory helps explain why Scandinavian countries were quick to elect female leaders and share childcare. It also explains why management and politics remain so male-dominated in hierarchical Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Russia and Nigeria.
Here is the full post, and here is Alice’s more recent post on what paintings can tell us about British patriarchy.
Friday assorted links
1. WSJ profile of David Autor.
2. By Dean Ball, a simple public choice theory of what will go wrong with SB 1047. I genuinely do not see why people such as Dan Hendrycks do not get this.
3. Derek Thompson: “We really are living in an era of negativity-poisoned discourse that is (*empirically*) historically unique.” The importance of this cannot be overestimated. And here is his excellent Atlantic piece on how parts of the Anglosphere are exporting despair — one of the best and most important pieces of the year. Which side of this dynamic are you on?
Tallinn bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome, thank you in advance…
Shruti Rajagopalan and Anne Krueger podcast
Shruti Rajagopalan and Krueger unpack the complex interplay of trade, politics, and economic development from the past five decades. Link here.
Economic Freedom, Even More Important Than You Think!
Economic freedom, as measured by say the Fraser Institute’s EF Index correlates highly with GDP per capita. Alvarez, Geloso and Scheck show that once you take into account the fact that dictators lie, the correlation is even higher!
SSRN: The literature connecting economic freedom indexes to income levels and growth generally points in the direction of a positive association. In this paper, we argue that this finding is a highly conservative as the data is heavily biased against finding any effects. The bias emerges as a result of the tendency of dictatorial regimes to overstate their GDP level. Dictatorships also tend to have lower scores of economic freedom. This downwardly biases any estimations of the relation between income and economic freedom. In this paper, we use recent corrections to GDP numbers — based on nighttime light intensity — to estimate the bias. We find that the true effects of economic freedom at its component on income levels are between 1.1 and 1.33 times greater than commonly estimated. For economic growth, the bias is far smaller and only appears to be relevant for some individual components such as size of government and property rights.
“US-based academics and those at top-ranked institutions exhibit higher egocentrism and toxicity in their tweets”
Compared to other academics, that is. They are still more reasonable than the general public on Twitter. Here is the paper by Prashant Garg and Thiemo Fetzer. Here is a useful tweet storm about the paper. Via Kris Gulati.
*Jan Morris: life from both sides*
That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.
Here was one good passage:
…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination. Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining. Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’ The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer. She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’ In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’
As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer. Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well. In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read. If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.
Thursday assorted links
1. AI to manage your social media accounts?
2. Portland International Airport Recruits Thousands for “Dress Rehearsal”.
3. India’s Farmers Are Now Getting Their News From AI Anchors (Bloomberg).
4. How a council of 50 members of the Austrian public decided to give away a large sum of money (NYT). Effective Altruism it ain’t.
5. “As well as stripping rants of their frightening tone, the AI will step in to terminate conversations it deems have been too long or vile.” FT link. Is this a good way to protect the morale of call center workers?
6. Was Willie Mays the greatest baseball player ever? I recall as a young boy owning some Willie Mays baseball cards. He simply seemed classier and more special than the other players, as if he had some magic, secret power that others did not.
7. Generative models can outperform the experts that train them.
Thomas Schelling meets LLMs?
Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models’ reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics.
That is from a new paper by Juan-Pablo Rivera, et.al., via the excellent Ethan Mollick. Do note that these recommended tactics are for the U.S., so perhaps the LLMs simply are telling us that America should be more hawkish.
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Part XXIV
WashingtonTimes: Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
A big part of the problem is the piling on to any government program a host of progressive wish-list items including:
• Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.
• Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.
• Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”
If this sounds familiar, recall my post on Building Back Key Bridge Better (note the date).
By the way, the FCC estimates that 7.2 million locations, i.e. houses and businesses, don’t have broadband access. $42.5 billion is enough to give all 7.2 million locations a 4-year subscription to Starlink (7.2 million locations * $120 per month * 48 months=$42.7 billion), and I am sure Elon would give us a discount so I didn’t include set up costs. Of course, the FCC decided that Starlink was not eligible for the program citing “SpaceX’s failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket.” Note that the FCC made their decision in 2022, years before the program was to rollout.
The polity and culture that is Oregon
Oregon voters will likely decide in November whether to establish a historic universal basic income program that would give every state resident roughly $750 annually from increased corporate taxes.
Proponents of the concept say they likely have enough signatures to place it on the ballot this fall, and opponents are taking them seriously…
“It’s looking really good. It’s really exciting,” said Anna Martinez, a Portland hairstylist who helped form the group behind the campaign, Oregon People’s Rebate, in 2020. If approved by voters, the program would go into effect in January 2025.
Most of the Portland business community opposes the proposal. Here is the full story, via Mark W.
Do not stifle supply and then subsidize demand
That phrasing comes from Arnold Kling, right? It is also the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Unfortunately, the US already was setting a bad example for the British. Recent plans from the Biden administration called for a broadly similar approach to housing policy, namely subsidizing demand. Earlier this year, Biden called for $10,000 tax credits for Americans buying starter homes and for those selling them. That too will boost the demand for housing and raise prices, and thus much of the value of the subsidy will be captured by current homeowners.
The Biden plan could increase home prices further yet. If Americans come to expect that the government will act repeatedly to prop up home prices, housing will appear to be a safer investment. Thus there will be yet another reason for demand to rise.
Like Sunak’s, Biden’s plan also calls for more construction, namely two million new or renovated affordable homes. The problem is that in the US, most of the obstacles to new construction come at the city, county and state levels. The Biden plan mentions tax credits for cheaper homes, and there are efforts to jawbone local governments to allow more building. But again, the federal government is better at handing out cash than inducing America’s decentralized political system to deregulate construction. So if this plan were to move forward, the likely outcome — as in the UK — would be subsidized demand and stifled supply, leading to higher home prices.
Lessons our governments still need to learn…
Congratulations to SSI Inc.!
Here is the tweet announcement. Here is Bloomberg coverage from Ashlee Vance.