Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Gelman on Seth Roberts.

2. “Using unique class-level data containing chronological variables and institutional, instructor, and student characteristics, spanning Fall 2010 to Spring 2021 of 7,852 undergraduate classes, it is shown class average grade point averages (GPAs) in the College of Agriculture at Texas A&M University increased for the three semesters most impacted by COVID-19.”  Link here, my hypothesis is that instructors graded by easier standards during that time.

3. Ukrainian used markets in totaled EVs.  And claims about Ukraine.

4. Those new service sector jobs.

5. Axel Kaiser on Milei.

6. Scott Sumner on Japan.

7. Greaney replies to Hsieh.

8. Douthat on Milei (NYT).

Those who graduate from college late in life

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction – around 20% – of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the implications of this phenomenon. First, we show that these so-called late bloomers have significantly contributed to the narrowing of gender and racial gaps in the college share, despite the general widening of the racial gap. Second, late bloomers are responsible for more than half of the increase in the aggregate college share from 1960 onwards. Finally, we show that the returns to having a college degree vary depending on the age at graduation. Ignoring the existence of late bloomers therefore leads to a significant underestimation of the returns to college education for those finishing college in their early 20s.

That is from a new NBER paper by Zsófia L. Bárány, Moshe Buchinsky, and Pauline Corblet.

John Stuart Mill and character development

by  Tyler Cowen

Written by me, here is a passage from GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Should We Care?

Mill’s central contribution was having produced a tripartite defense of a free society, based on the ideas of character development and also consilience, the latter meaning that alternative perspectives brought together may point in a broadly similar normative direction and thus legitimize that direction. Mill was a believer in liberty, as outlined in his classic On Liberty; Mill was a believer in utilitarianism, as outlined in his Utilitarianism; finally, Mill was what I call a “civilizationist,” as reflected in his corpus of writings generally but presented most specifically in his 1836 essay “Civilization.” A civilizationist, quite simply, is one who believes that the carrying on and extension of civilization is a fundamental value.

Mill understood well that the perspectives of liberty, utility, and civilization do not always coincide, and there is a large academic “cottage industry” finding supposed contradictions and tensions in Mill’s work. For instance, why are there so many exceptions to the liberty principle in On Liberty? How should we proceed when liberty and utility clash? The tensions are real, but Mill had a means of resolving them. Insofar as individuals engage in sufficiently sophisticated character development, these differing perspectives all would tend to converge. Character development would make the case for liberty stronger as progress continued, and it would make utilitarian standards more coincident with the general elevation of mankind, as what people wanted, and what made them happy, would coincide more directly with beneficial and virtuous outcomes. Finally, character development would make civilization more sustainable and also more beneficial.

Recommended.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The wealth of working nations. “Indeed, if one further drops the early 1990s from the sample (the years of the asset price collapse), Japan was growing faster than the U.S. in terms of per-working-age adults from 1998 to 2019.”  This paper shows the impact of aging on total gdp, score one for the mercantilists.

2. New issue of Works in Progress.

3. Good questions for interviewing people for normal jobs.  (Different jobs and principles than what Daniel and I consider in Talent.)

4. Ten facts about son preference in India.

5. What are the best books about Argentina?

6. Economics in early modern philosophy.

Best non-fiction books of 2023

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the order I read them, more or less, rather than in the order of preference.  And behind the link usually you will find my earlier review, or occasionally an Amazon link:

Erika Fatland, High: A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China.

Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.

Paul Johnson, Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?

Murray Pittock, Scotland: A Global History.

Reviel Netz, A New History of Greek Mathematics.

Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege.

David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.

Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.

Martyn Rady, The Central Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe.

Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.

Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter.

Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex.

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.

Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Mikhail Zygar, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.

Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America.

Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.

David Brooks, How to Know Others: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen.

Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.

Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.

Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022.

Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?

It is hard to pick out 2 or 3 favorites this year, as they are all excellent.  I am partial to David Edmonds on Parfit, but a lot of you already know you should be reading that.  Perhaps my nudge is most valuable for Jonny Steinberg, Winny and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage?  So that is my pick for the year!

As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then.  I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet.  Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction.  And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Black athletes discuss Thomas Sowell.

2. GPT4V watches an NBA game (and roots for the Clippers).

3. No economic growth in South Africa for the last fifteen years.

4. Rasheed Griffith interviews the guy designated to lead the dollarization of Argentina.

5. Katherine Boyle speech on American dynamism.

6. Hart and Moore on property rights and the theory of the firm (1990, still relevant).  And Aghion and Tirole.

The Indian Challenge to Blockchains: Digital Public Goods

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In my post, Blockchains and the Opportunity of the Commons, I explored the potential of blockchains to create new commons:

Blockchains and tokenization are a way to incentivize the creation of a commons. A commons is an unowned place, platform, or protocol that helps people to meet, communicate and transact. Commons underlying modern life include TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, GPS and the English language. We don’t see these commons clearly because they are free, ubiquitous and, like air, taken for granted. What we do see are platforms like Airbnb, Uber and the NYSE and places to meet and communicate like OkCupid, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. What blockchain and tokenization offer is the possibility of creating commons to replace all of these services and much more.

For the most part, the potential has not been realized. But the core idea of substituting a protocol for a firm has been taken in a different direction in India. Instead of blockchains, India has been experimenting with digital public goods. A digital public good is open source software with open data and open standards–available for use or even modification and adaption by anyone. The blockchain community, for example, has long aspired to develop a blockchain-based Uber, connecting drivers and riders without a corporate intermediary. India has achieved this through digital public goods instead.

Namma Yatri is an open-source, open-data Uber-like protocol with 100% of the commission flowing directly from rider to driver. Namma Yatri is built on the Beckn Protocol, a product of the Beckn Foundation which is backed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani (Tyler and I had the opportunity to talk with many people behind the project including Nandan on a recent trip to India). Namma Yatri has booked over 15 million trips in just one year of operation, mostly in one city, Bangalore. I expect it will expand rapidly.

Namma Yatri is only one example of a digital public good in the India Stack, a collection that includes identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI) and digital data sharing (e.g. digital lockers). Since its launch in 2008, for example, India’s Aadhaar system has created a digital identity for over 1.2 billion people allowing them to open some 650 million bank accounts. This has enhanced financial inclusion and facilitated direct government payments of pensions and rations, reducing corruption. Likewise, the UPI system built modern payment rails which are then leveraged by banks and firms such as Google Pay and WhatsApp. The resulting payments system does some 10 billion transactions a month and is one of the fastest and lowest cost in the world.

Challenges remain. The development of digital public goods relies on funding from non-profits, governments, and private consortiums, raising questions about long-term sustainability. These goods need regular maintenance and updates, and some require backend support. Namma Yatri began as a completely free app for drivers and users but if there is a problem who do you call? To support the back-end office, and to pay for updated inputs (such as maps) the service has started to use a subscription fee. Nothing wrong with that but it’s a reminder that firms are not so easily dispensed with. Privacy is another concern. While blockchains offer privacy at the technology layer, privacy for digital public goods depend on legal and normative frameworks. For instance, India’s Aadhaar system is legally restricted from police use, a smart balance that needs to be maintained in changing times.

Despite these challenges, there is no denying that India has built digital public goods at scale in a way that demonstrates an alternative pathway for digital infrastructure and a challenge to blockchains.

My favorite fiction books of 2023

by  Tyler Cowen

These were my favorite fictional works from this year’s reading:

Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid.  About communist Romania, long, profound, a major work of fiction which can justifiably enter the pantheon.

Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood.  A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her.  Here is more on the author.  Only 76 pp., can be read in one bite.

Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface.

J.M. Coetzee, The Pole.

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, new translation by Michael R. Katz.  I am on about p.200, so far my favorite of the major translations.

Ovid, Metamorphosis, new translation by Stephanie McCarter.  I have only browsed this one, but expect it to be very good.

I will of course provide an update by the end of the year, if only because the new Ha Jin novel is coming soon.

What would you all recommend?

Labor market evidence from ChatGPT

by  Tyler Cowen in

So far some of the main effects are quite egalitarian:

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds the potential to either complement knowledge workers by increasing their productivity or substitute them entirely. We examine the short-term effects of the recent release of the large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, on the employment outcomes of freelancers on a large online platform. We find that freelancers in highly affected occupations suffer from the introduction of generative AI, experiencing reductions in both employment and earnings. We find similar effects studying the release of other image-based, generative AI models. Exploring the heterogeneity by freelancers’ employment history, we do not find evidence that high-quality service, measured by their past performance and employment, moderates the adverse effects on employment. In fact, we find suggestive evidence that top freelancers are disproportionately affected by AI. These results suggest that in the short term generative AI reduces overall demand for knowledge workers of all types, and may have the potential to narrow gaps among workers.

That is from a new paper by Xiang Hui, Oren Reshef, and Luofeng Zhou, via Fernand Pajot.  And here is an FT summary of some key results.

I would stress this point, however.  As more ordinary life and commerce structures itself around AI, more and more AI-driven or AI-enable projects will become possible.  That will favor those who are good at conceiving of projects and executing them, and those longer-run effects may well be less egalitarian.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “The pūteketeke has been crowned New Zealand’s Bird of the Century after US talk show host John Oliver’s controversial intervention in the poll.”

2. My New Statesman interview about the UK.

3. Electric air taxis for NYC?

4. Metaphor does something with MR’s assorted links, don’t ask me exactly what.

5. EA commentary from Brian Chau, his representation of my remarks is accurate.