The culture of Hollywood vs. the culture of Bollywood

by  Tyler Cowen in

And a comment: “In Bollywood movies throughout multiple eras, the most shameful thing has always been disrespect of parents/family. By a wide margin.”

Substitutes are everywhere

by  Tyler Cowen in
  • The typical plasma donor was younger than 35, did not hold a bachelor’s degree, earned a lower income and had a lower credit score than most Americans. Donors sold plasma primarily to earn income to cover day-to-day expenses or emergencies.
  • When a plasma center opened in a community, there were fewer inquiries to installment or payday lenders. Inquires fell most among young (age 35 or younger) would-be borrowers.
  • Four years after a plasma center opened, young people in the area were 13.1% and 15.7% less likely to apply for a payday and installment loan, respectively.
  • Similarly, the probability of having a payday loan declined by 18% among young would-be borrowers in the community. That’s an effect on payday loan borrowing roughly equivalent to a $1 increase in the state minimum hourly wage.

Here is the St. Louis Fed study, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The willingness to pay for IVF

by  Tyler Cowen in

WHO estimates that as many as 1 in 6 individuals of reproductive age worldwide are affected by infertility. This paper uses rich administrative population-wide data from Sweden to construct and characterize the universe of infertility treatments, and to then quantify the private costs of infertility, the willingness to pay for infertility treatments, as well as the role of insurance coverage in alleviating infertility. Persistent infertility causes a long-run deterioration of mental health and couple stability, with no long-run “protective” effects (of having no child) on earnings. Despite the high private non-pecuniary cost of infertility, we estimate a relatively low revealed private willingness to pay for infertility treatment. The rate of IVF initiations drops by half when treatment is not covered by health insurance. The response to insurance is substantially more pronounced at lower income levels. At the median of the disposable income distribution, our estimates imply a willingness to pay of at most 22% of annual income for initiating an IVF treatment (or about a 30% chance of having a child). At least 40% of the response to insurance coverage can be explained by a liquidity effect rather than traditional moral hazard, implying that insurance provides an important consumption smoothing benefit in this context. We show that insurance coverage of infertility treatments determines both the total number of additional children and their allocation across the socioeconomic spectrum.

That is from a recent NBER working paper by Sarah Bögl, Jasmin Moshfegh, Petra Persson, and Maria Polyakova.

Political Language in Economics

by  Tyler Cowen

LLMs are going to reveal many of the world’s secrets:

Does academic writing in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We use machine learning to measure partisanship in academic economics articles. We predict observed political behavior of a subset of economists using the phrases from their academic articles, show good out-of-sample predictive accuracy, and then predict partisanship for all economists. We then use these predictions to examine patterns of political language in economics. We estimate journal-specific effects on predicted ideology, controlling for author and year fixed effects, that accord with existing survey-based measures. We show considerable sorting of economists into fields of research by predicted partisanship. We also show that partisanship is detectable even within fields, even across those estimating the same theoretical parameter. Using policy-relevant parameters collected from previous meta-analyses, we then show that imputed partisanship is correlated with estimated parameters, such that the implied policy prescription is consistent with partisan leaning. For example, we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 84% to 58%.

Emphasis added by TC.  That is from a new paper by Zubin Jelveh, Bruce Kogut, and Suresh Naidu, recently published in Economic Journal.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books on art criticism ever.

Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won’t read older books, Benjamin’s favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag’s (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston’s intellectual culture, what he’s learning next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, “So much of Sontag’s best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see.” Please explain.

MOSER: This is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag’s work. Of course, in my new book, The Upside-Down World, I talk about how I’m not really great at seeing, particularly. I’m not that visual. I’m a reader. I’m a bookworm. Often, when I’ve looked at paintings, I’ve realized how little I actually see. Sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. You’ll read the label and it’ll be three sentences, and it’ll say like, A Man with a Dog. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even see the dog.” You know what I mean?

On these very basic levels, I just think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t point it out to me, I really don’t see.” I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, that she was not really able to see. She was actually quite terrible at seeing, and this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling.

I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it, but it’s just not something you can force. You can’t force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.

COWEN: What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?

MOSER: I think this question of images — what images do — and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. She had a very deep repulsion to photography. She really hated photography, and this is why a lot of photographers hated her because they felt this, even though she didn’t really say it. She really didn’t trust it. She really thought it was wicked. At the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to understand the world.

I think that tension is very instructive for us, because now, she already says 50 years ago, “There are all these images. We don’t know what to do with them. We don’t know how to process them.” Forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. She uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about mental hygiene and how you can clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That’s why I think reading her helped me at least to understand a lot of what I’m seeing in the world.

COWEN: Do you think she will simply end up forgotten?

Again, I am happy to recommend Benjamin’s latest book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Should former BOE economists be de-banked?

2. “We’re testing a new feature that uses Gemini Nano to provide real-time alerts during a call if it detects conversation patterns commonly associated with scams.”  The protection is all “on-device,” so no privacy loss.  Link here.

3. Nick Frisch and Dan Wang on TikTok (NYT).

4. Advantages of the new GPT (partial list).

5. Is there really a child penalty on female earnings?

6. Can Big Data reveal the origins of Purdah?

7. Dublin to NYC portal taken off-line after too much inappropriate behavior.

Santa Marta (Colombia) and birdwatching bleg

by  Tyler Cowen

Later this month I will be going to Santa Marta, in northern Colombia, with my sister.  We haven’t done a trip together since we were kids!  Birdwatching and bird photography are big hobbies of hers, and I am happy to be of help in this regard and navigate around.

So what is your advice for Santa Marta and environs?  Where should we go?  Where should we eat?  What are your birdwatching tips for the region?

I thank you all for your usual wisdom and sage counsel.

The Screwworm

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Atlantic: Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C. hominivorax or “man eater”—so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.

For untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In the 1950s, however, U.S. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico and Central America—all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. The eradication was a resounding success. But the story does not end there. Containing a disease is one thing. Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating.

To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.

A reminder that civilization takes work. Excellent piece by Sarah Zhang. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Stone Age Herbalist.

Did Norwegian schools actually ban cell phones?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Some commentators are suggesting no real ban was in effect.  I went back to the Sara Abrahamsson paper to confirm the following:

Schools where students are required to hand in their phones in the morning, and therefore cannot access them during breaks, are considered to have a strict policy against smartphones. Schools where students are allowed to access their phones during breaks but are required to have them on for instance silent [mode] during lectures are classified as having a lenient policy toward smartphones. For mental health, the effect between schools with a more lenient and strict policy is relatively similar, as shown in Figure 10.17. Four years post-ban, girls experience 3.48 and 2.3 fewer visits for specialist care related to psychological symptoms and diseases at schools with a lenient and strict policy respectively (p-values 0.036 and 0.068).18 For bullying, there is not much difference dependent on the type of policy implemented when it comes to bullying, neither for girls as documented in Figure 11, or boys as shown in Appendix Figure A21.

However, girls attending a middle school introducing a strict policy against smartphones, experience an increase by 0.12 standard deviations in GPA. This estimate is significant four years post-ban at the 5% level (p-value 0.032). Additionally, girls attending a middle school with a strict policy have significantly higher teacher-awarded test scores by 0.08 and 0.14 standard deviations, three and four years post-ban (p-values 0.075 and 0.011). These results, shown in Panel A and B in Figure 12, show that both GPA and average grades set by teachers for girls improve after strict smartphone bans in schools are implemented.

…However, there are no detectable differences in the likelihood of attending an academic high school track between schools with strict compared to more lenient policies

In other words, there were strict bans and they had only modest effects, including relative to the less strict bans.  On p.34, Figure 2, you will see that 200 schools had strict bans, somewhat less than half the total (not every case is easy to classify).  Note also that if smart phone bans could help with mental health problems in a big way, we still should see a change in mental health diagnoses, following the bans, yet we do not.

Here is my original post on the topic.

Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean, fifth cohort

by  Tyler Cowen

Mwigereri Dorcas, Kenya, for research using machine learning techniques for solar energy distribution optimization.

Mmesomachi Nwachukwu, Nigeria, to support the Special Maths Academy which prepares teams for competitions including the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Mohamed Haoussa, Senegal, for the Pan-African Robotics Competition in Dakar which has had over 2800 participants from middle school to university from 37 countries since inception.

Santiago Eyama, Equatorial Guinea, to support the production of YouTube videos on life and society in his country.

John Anthony Francois, St. Lucia/California, PhD Candidate at Stanford, to support his research on Immune Checkpoint Blockade.

Caroline Ochieng, Kenya, PhD candidate at Jomo Kenyatta University, for research into the molecular characterization and transmission dynamics of Chikungunya and Dengue viruses.

Mohamed Diouf, Senegal, for his startup idea of doing merchandise loans (instead of money) to small scale vendors in West Africa.

Kemar Stuart, Barbados, for the production of YouTube videos on Caribbean politics.

Tyrique King, UAE/UK, for developing an AI coding instructor which can train and upskill talent without prior coding experience within 100 days in Africa.

Kurtis Lockhart, US/Tanzania, for developing an economics focused degree program in Zanzibar.

Daniel Alabi, Nigeria/US, Postdoc CS researcher at Columbia University, for Naija Coder, a summer program teaching Nigerian high school students computer science in Abuja and Lagos.

Joshua Walcott, Trinidad/Poland, University lecturer in politics in Poland, for research and writing on existential risk and Caribbean geopolitics.

Nikita Greenidge, St. Lucia/UK, PhD candidate at University of Leeds, for research on surgical robotics.

Masahiro Kubo, PhD candidate at Brown University, for research on how Catholic missionary work contributed significantly to the accumulation of human capital in Africa.

Fiona Moejes, to assist the Mawazo Institute based in Kenya, which supports early-career female scholars and thought leaders in Africa.

Tobi Lawson, Nigeria, to assist in the production of the Ideas Untapped substack and podcast focused on African development.

Samukai Sarnor, Liberia, for research focused on monetary policy in Liberia.

Chipo Muwowo, Zambia/UK, for Capital Markets Africa, a subtack and podcast focused on listed companies and the regulatory environment for finance in Africa.

Peter Courtney, South Africa/Netherlands, PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University, for research on implementing Georgist land value policies in Africa.

Led by the excellent Rasheed Griffith.