Two excellent political scientists take on the topic of How Democracies Die--and specifically the question of whether the U.S. democracy will die. TheTwo excellent political scientists take on the topic of How Democracies Die--and specifically the question of whether the U.S. democracy will die. They argue we should be worried for three principals reasons:
(1) Democracies do not just die in violent coups, they also fade away into authoritarianism, often in a manner that is fully "legal" at every step as institutions get coopted and subverted, in many cases in the name of democracy itself.
(2) A constitution is not enough you need norms of mutual tolerance and restraint. The United States has always had demagogues. But previously these norms, enforced by the political parties, acted as a gatekeeper, including smoke filled rooms to keep the most dangerous demagogues from rising to the Presidency. That is no longer true.
(3) Extreme polarization preceded Donald Trump and won't end with him as the two parties are no longer big tents but much more homogenous not just in beliefs but also in culture.
All of this is punctuated with discussion and analysis of the experience of other usually non-violent ends to democracy, like the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of authoritarians in Latin America and more recent examples like Venezuela, Hungary and Turkey.
I do wish the book had a more political science and less recounting of the now familiar arguments about Trump and recent polarization, including better understanding what the broader lessons are about causes of Democratic decline. Some of it reads a bit too current and a bit too reactive to Trump in a way that will end up seeming dated (I hope). Relatedly, I think the idea of the U.S. democracy "dying" is deeply overwrought, although by the conclusion the "dying" scenario is defined down to mean something more like an unpleasant extension of the extreme polarization we have now.
But it is a relatively fast read on an important topic so would recommend it, just expect to have gaps in your knowledge filled in rather than an entirely new perspective on the issue....more
This book has a huge amount of good economics. It surveys a wide range of areas: labor, tax, growth, politics, immigration, trade, and generally proviThis book has a huge amount of good economics. It surveys a wide range of areas: labor, tax, growth, politics, immigration, trade, and generally provides up-to-date discussions of some of the latest literature. The discussions of development--particularly India--are subtle, nuanced and thought provoking. A lot of the evidence is in the form of randomized control trials (RCTs), Abhijit Baanerjee and Esther Duflo are as committed to the method and process as they are to any particular conclusions. They are also consistently skeptical of neoclassical theorizing on the basis of first principles, and particularly critical of the ideas of people's preferences as having special weight (a la Becker and Stigler) because they see these preferences as shaped by society and malleable.
Banerjee and Duflo do not limit themselves to RCTs and attempt to discern what can be learned without them on a variety of topics, although they mostly throw their hands up at the impossibility of understanding some of the big questions in growth--like what other countries would need to do in order to achieve Chinese-levels of growth.
The book also has an interesting shifting back and forth between the advanced economies and developing ones, drawing out similarities but also contrasts between them that help better understand each. Often this technique and presentation works, but sometimes it does not and creates a slightly disjointed feel.
What was disappointing to me--and I say this relative to my high expectations based on the authors, their research, and also their previous book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global PovertyPoor Economics--was that when it came to the biggest contemporary hot button issues they left all nuance and care behind to present selective evidence for an overly simplistic narrative that would be comforting to typical progressive reader without challenging any of their preconceptions. Moreover, they framed their view too much in terms of "good economics vs. bad economics" and the "facts" when it was actually a very substantial dose of values that were in play (many of which I agree with) along with a subset of the facts that would be more suitable to a polemic than a self-styled balanced presentation.
Four examples:
1. On immigration, they present a 100 percent positive picture while denying that there has been a very rapid and in many countries unprecedented change in the composition of the population. I happen to think this change is wonderful, but understand that many others do not--and their perception of the facts is not entirely wrong. Banerjee and Duflo, however, essentially deny these facts writing, "MIGRATION IS BIG NEWS, big enough to drive the politics of much of Europe and the United States. Between President Donald Trump’s imaginary but enormously consequential hordes of murderous Mexican migrants and the anti-foreigner rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany, the French Rassemblement National, and the Brexit crew, not to mention the ruling parties in Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia, it may be the single most influential political issue in the world’s richest countries… Why the panic? The fraction of international migrants in the world population in 2017 was roughly what it was in 1960 or in 1990: 3 percent…. Racist alarmism, driven by a fear of the intermingling of races and the myth of purity, doesn’t heed facts."
The "facts," however, from the same source they cite for the 3 percent statistic is that the foreign-born share of high-income countries has risen from 7.6% in 1990 to 14.1% in 2017 with even faster rises in several of the countries they cite. "Facts" and "economics" do not settle the debate about whether this change is wonderful or threatening and demeaning the people who find it threatening as factually delusional does not help build understanding, change minds, or advance good economics.
2. The discussions of inequality have a similar feature. Words like "exploding inequality" and "hard times" overstate what the data say. A wide range of data show that a inequality is high and has increased, but Baanerjee and Duflo rely too uncritically on just one source and perspective on the data (Piketty, Saez and Zucman), missing out on the nuance they bring to other areas of discussion. In the process, they don't address the methodological choices made by these authors or present any facts that run counter to their narrative (e.g., CEO pay relative to median worker pay has been flat for two decades now, the very richest Americans are less likely to be inherited wealth than in the past, mobility is higher at the bottom of the income distribution than the top, income of the bottom quintile or the median is very highly correlated with average incomes across countries, the fiscal system has become more redistributive, etc.)
Overall, the term "dark times" that a is the subtitle and leitmotif of their book seems somewhat off for the United States (when in the past would rather be alive than today?) and is particularly off for a book that devotes substantial fraction of its focus to India and other developing countries, places that are growing rapidly and have lifted massive numbers of people out of deep poverty (points they also make in the book).
I have no dispute that we could and should do a lot better in the United States and around the world (inequality is too high, income growth and mobility too low, etc.), just wished the evidence was a presented with more nuance.
3. The discussion of taxes is a useful corrective to the wild-eyed claims of many conservatives about the huge growth potential of cutting taxes. But in the course of this corrective, the authors' almost appear to deny that incentives matter at all, that taxes can affect welfare and macroeconomic outcomes, and the like. Some of the evidence they present for these propositions is high quality, as in top journals. But others were observations like tax rates were high in the 1950s and growth was high, ergo taxes don't hurt growth, statements that do not meet the evidentiary standards they set elsewhere and that express more confidence in a precise estimate of zero on the impact of taxes as opposed to failing to reject. a null of zero or even the magnitude of uncertainty they appropriately express in the chapter that discusses growth.
4. My fourth example is much less clear cut, more of a disagreement than a clear cut issue. But I think Banerjee and Duflo overly caricature trade economics as an apologia for trade that has almost entirely ignored inequality, something I think is too simplistic a presentation of a field that has its modern theoretical origins in Heckscher-Ohlin and Stolper-Samuelson which are all about inequality (and discussed extensively in Good Economics). Moreover, I think the authors' place too much weight on the Autor, Dorn and Hansen China Shock literature which I view as largely about the gross costs of trade not the net costs of trade because they fail to capture the general equilibrium effects and the tremendous gains from exports. Moreover, it is not clear if the China Shock tells us about China's entry into the WTO or China's growth, likely it is more the later than the former--which matters because it is more about developments in China than policy changes in the West. I also think their discussion of the "dirty little secret" that the gains from further trade liberalization are small in advanced economies puts too little weight on the fact that standard static Ricardian models may miss gains that come from increased competition, a larger market for innovation, learning by exporting, increased specialization in innovation, supply chains, and regulatory reciprocity or even harmonization. I don't know how big the gains from all of these are, they do not lend themselves to precise modeling, but it is possible they are substantially larger than the Ricardian effects that do lend themselves to precise quantification.
The above really emphasizes everything I disagreed with, but I want to reiterate what I began with--much of the book is a fabulous, sophisticated, exciting discussion of economics and what it can teach us about some of the most important issues in the world today. These criticisms are out of respect for the mission the authors accomplish in much of the book--to present a balanced picture of the facts, the good economics that interprets these facts, while also being honest about our uncertainty and the limits on our understanding....more
A great read on an important topic that advances a bold thesis about the United States economy, a counterintuitive re-thinking of the economic instituA great read on an important topic that advances a bold thesis about the United States economy, a counterintuitive re-thinking of the economic institutions of the European Union, and a synthesis of a lot of Thomas Philippon's research.
The bold thesis about the U.S. economy is that that concentration has risen across the economy with a smaller number of businesses dominating in each industry, an idea that a number of economists have advanced in recent years with Thomas Philippon among the leading ones in this group. In his telling the rise of concentration has resulted in a host of economic maladies, but the one Philippon makes most vivid is the higher prices and larger increase of prices for many goods and services relative to Europe, most notably airlines and cell phone bills. Philippon understands that increased concentration itself may be a consequence of more competition (that weeds out inefficient businesses) or a cause of less competition. He uses retail as an example of the more competition story where innovation has helped some companies, like Wal-Mart, grow and bring low prices. But he also shows the evidence that the less competition story predominates in much of the economy, including his previous papers finding that much of the investment gap--the reduction in investment below what one would predict from the economic fundamentals--is explained by the reduced competition. All told Philippon estimates that this is costing American consumers $1 trillion.
Philippon blames the rise in concentration on the fact that American institutions lend themselves to lobbying for a variety of reasons including our lack of restrictions on many forms of political contributions and the way a single set of national institutions matters. The lobbying chapters of the book were an excellent synthesis of the economic literature on the returns to lobbying and a subtle discussion of the empirical challenges that make forming precise conclusions difficult (e.g., how do you measure a lobbying campaign whose victory is defined by inaction when you don't see inaction in the data).
I do not think Philippon was fully convincing in establishing that this lobbying rose extremely rapidly, that it had a huge influence on the issue of antitrust in particular, and that this influence manifested itself in enough of a policy shift that it could yield the large changes he shows. This is especially true when ideas and ideology do matter in antitrust enforcement, but crass lobbying matters much less than it does with, say, your typical regulatory issues. Philippon does not really explore an alternative thesis for the decline in antitrust enforcement which is changing ideas, specifically the rise of the Chicago School and its increased influence in the judiciary which increasingly thought that outside of cartels there was nothing particularly to be worried about in mergers or conduct. Of course, the ideas themselves were related to set of powerful economic interests but the story is a different one than lobbying. Even with the Chicago School story, I think it is hard to see this as such a large abrupt change that it or any other policy changes could do more than explain part of the shift in recent decades.
The counterintuitive rethinking of the European Union's economic institutions is that they are not a large, cumbersome bureaucracy but instead have developed to reduce regulation and promote markets that would otherwise be restrained by the large, cumbersome bureaucracies that the individual member states would have. The origins of the European Coal and Steel Community were in attacking excessive concentration in that sector. Philippon discusses a theoretical model he developed with Germán Gutiérrez in which individual countries will tend to overregulate but when they give up their sovereignty to a higher level entity it will be rational for them to have less regulation than they would prefer because they will be reducing that higher level entity's ability to steer things in the direction of another country. Philippon goes through the ways that the EU's harmonization of rules, antitrust enforcement, anti-state aid efforts, and the like have helped create more of a market not less of one, with some particularly striking examples like airlines which were deregulated with the resulting spectacular rise in prices. All told, European institutions--especially DG Competition which enforces competition rules--were built in a more robust and resilient manner than the United States.
Philippon only briefly speculates on how European institutions might evolve when its most pro-market member (the United Kingdom) is exiting and two of its leading members (France and Germany) were recently highly critical of the blocking of the Siemens-Alstom merger. I personally think the former is a worry but the later is actually a testament to the strength of European institutions, but we will see.
Finally, the book concludes with a series of topic chapters, including the pay of bankers, the rise of digital giants, and monopsony in the labor markets. In some cases Philippon is describing his own research (e.g., his paper on the fall and rise of banker's pay over the last century) and in others he is thoughtfully synthesizing and summarizing the research of others.
Philippon clearly has a perspective on the direction policy should go but his book eschews making policy recommendations, and in his opening he cites that as an important virtue in a social scientist. I think this was probably the right choice since he sets up a great direction for others to go in. But I do wish we could understand how much of the $1 trillion loss to consumers he estimates could be regained by a shift in policy. Is this toothpaste back into a tube? Are these changes as much economic as policy so they cannot be reversed by policy? Or is the scope for policy impacts in this area quantitatively large? I think the promise is large enough I am for more of it but to start to understand the potential magnitude of impact we would need to get more tangible about the proposed changes.
Overall, a great and highly readable contribution to the debate from the first book that looks at the rise of concentration from more of a macroeconomic/finance perspective and develops insights by comparing U.S. and European institutions and outcomes....more
I am impressed with most students I have encountered at my university and other universities for their willingness to challenge themselves, take risksI am impressed with most students I have encountered at my university and other universities for their willingness to challenge themselves, take risks, have open conversations, experiment with different points of view, and empathize with the arguments of those they disagree with. I am also struck by just how many students--including many liberal ones--how afraid they are to fully speak their minds, how carefully they check their surroundings before speaking, and how they worry that something they do might get misunderstood and lead to their being "cancelled." In a recent survey 44% of self-identified conservatives at Harvard said they did not feel they could speak their minds, the only political, racial, ethnic, gender, or class background group where a majority did not feel comfortable speaking their mind.
The Coddling of the American Mind is an important book that attempts to diagnose that second set of problems, understand its causes, and offer remedies. They do all of this from a very sympathetic perspective to progressive causes--both consistently vote Democratic--but also a deep commitment to an ideal of education and free speech. The book is well written (although occasional seams showing as it passes between the perspectives of the two authors), thought provoking, but sometimes seems to miss some of the point and lack the broader perspective I opened with.
The book centers around the "Three Great Untruths": (1) fragility (what doesn't kill you makes you weaker); (2) emotional reasoning (always trust your feelings), and (3) us vs. them (life is a battle between good people and bad people). The authors argue--somewhat implausibly to my mind--that there was a discontinuous increase in these vices in recent years as what they call "iGen" showed up on campus with a new outlook shaped by political polarization, increased anxiety and depression, paranoid parenting, the decline of play, the bureaucracy of safetyism and the quest for justice. Much of their analysis these individual factors seems right and important (e.g., my children walk around on their own less often than I did as a child even though it is far safer today than it used to be). But I am not as convinced of the causal link between all of these and an abrupt discontinuity which seems to understate how much the three vices were present in the past and how much the majority of students don't live by the three vices even today.
The long descriptions of every rejected conservative speaker in recent years was less original and read like the same recitation of events we have heard about over and over again. In most cases, attacking speakers and faculty was clearly wrong. But reading the same examples over and over again almost makes the point seem less compelling.
By the conclusion of the book they remember they also subscribe to Steven Pinker's view that people are constantly overstating the ways in which the world is getting worse and missing that it is actually getting better, at which point there is a little bit of a tortured attempt to reconcile that view with what they are seeing. More importantly, however, are several tangible ideas of what we can do as students, universities and societies to make it better. These suggestions are important and I, for one, can feel optimistic when I remember that this is what the majority of students want from their educations already--and that it can be combined with something else many of them want from their education, which is an understanding of the tools they can employ to make the world a better place....more
Jumpstarting America is an excellent read, a compelling case for more public investment in innovation, and a manifesto for an innovative plan to accomJumpstarting America is an excellent read, a compelling case for more public investment in innovation, and a manifesto for an innovative plan to accomplish this goal that the authors argue is a good combination of politics and economics. Jon Gruber and Simon Johnson marvel at the rapid growth and change of Kendall Square, the MIT neighborhood they both work in, and ask whether this same transformation is possible in cities across America. Their answer: yes it is, but it will require an ambitious effort.
Jumpstarting America is a mash-up of a history of big science in the United States (starting with radar in World War II), a presentation of some of the economics of the economics of R&D and the geography of the economy—an unusual combination that the authors use to motivate their novel plan.
The history centers around the United States funding big science starting with World War II. It talks about the public-private partnership and how it was centered at a university, in this case MIT, and the scientific and technological spill offs that came from it and how it transformed an area. The authors provide a similar treatment for the space program and, more briefly, the human genome project. Some unusual suspects also make an appearance, like learning that Orlando is a leader in modeling and simulation of aerospace.
The economics is the standard model for R&D, that it has spillovers that are not captured by private companies so will tend to be underprovided. The other part of the economic story is one told by Enrico Moretti, that we used to see convergence between places but we are increasingly seeing divergence as the most successful cities pull away from all the others, while also putting up barriers to movement through zoning and other rules.
Gruber and Johnson’s proposal combines these two sets of observations: they propose a massive increase in research funding but want a substantial portion of that funding to go to new hubs that would be selected by a competitive application process. The proposal gets a bit more creative when they suggest the federal government should own the associated land, make money on the increase in land values, and distribute this as a dividend like Alaska does with oil revenue. So instead of focusing on how to pay for this plan, they emphasize the way it would pay for all of us.
The proposal should get serious attention but also serious critical scrutiny. They are stronger on successes for place-based policies than their many failures. Would we do a good job selecting the places? Should we really pick a diverse set of places, potentially undermining some of the synergies and positive spillovers that we already have in successful places like Boston and the Bay Area? Would we really be able to capture many of the benefits sufficiently to provide a dividend? Is some R&D investment just about driving up the salaries of researchers and discovering things slightly earlier? How would we select the more applied technologies they think we should invest in? To Gruber and Johnson’s credit they are explicit that many of the investments would fail, pointing out that in venture capital only a tiny fraction of super successes pay for the many experiments that try and fail.
Overall, Jumpstarting America is an enjoyable read that should help to refocus the public debate on the importance of growth, innovation and place....more
A sociological study of how disadvantaged students fare at the pseudonymous “Renowned University” (my guess is Harvard, but I have no inside informatiA sociological study of how disadvantaged students fare at the pseudonymous “Renowned University” (my guess is Harvard, but I have no inside information) based on years of extensive interviews and observation. Anthony Jack distinguishes between three groups: “upper income,” “privileged poor” (poor parents but went on scholarship to prep school), and “doubly disadvantaged” (poor parents and went to a poor school). In his telling, cultural divides put the upper income and privileged poor on the same side of the ledger, both for example know how to navigate contacts with faculty and office hours and the other cultural codes at elite universities. But a number of economic issues put the divide in a different place, between “upper income” who can afford nice clothing, vacations during spring break, and tickets to campus events while—in Jack’s telling—both the “privileged poor” and the “doubly disadvantaged” have to make do with worse clothing, jobs they view as demeaning on dorm crew, separate lines for cultural events, and the threat of hunger when dining halls close for spring break.
I found a lot of these observations powerful and important and appreciated how the book did so much to let the students speak for themselves with extensive quotes. Jack is also not just an observer or a critic but gets involved to try to address the problems he documents, in some cases successfully (e.g., getting the university to provide meals during spring break). Moreover if more people read the book it would increase sensitivity and understanding in a manner that would help continue to address problems.
At times the portrayal of university life seemed starker than would seem warranted. At times the book makes it sound like all upper income and privileged poor have no problem navigating the complexity of university life and, in fact, thrive on it. In my experience there is substantial heterogeneity, based on backgrounds and also idiosyncratic personal differences. I also would be interested to learn more about how boarding and other prep schools worked for the privileged poor but the university does not seem to work for the doubly disadvantaged. Finally, while is is beyond the scope of this book, it also left me wondering how outcomes in college (like grades) and post college (like incomes) vary across the three groups.
Regardless, worth reading for any of us at universities and for others beyond as well....more
No one else could have written a book with this range. Rockonomics draws on economic theory, standard government surveys, proprietary administrative dNo one else could have written a book with this range. Rockonomics draws on economic theory, standard government surveys, proprietary administrative data, a unique survey fielded by the author, and interviews with a range of people in the music industry. It covers just about every aspect of the music industry. The book focuses on the economics of the music industry, including a number of familiar themes like how streaming revenue is rising but recorded music primarily drives touring revenue, how live ticket prices are set, how merchandise is marketed, how streaming is changing the makeup of songs, and more. Relatively little of this was revelatory, as someone who only casually follows these issues I knew most of it, but all of it was definitive and authoritative. A secondary purpose of the book (and it is secondary, notwithstanding the subtitle) is to use the music industry to illustrate a number of economic concepts, like superstars and inequality, the behavioral economics that leads stars to underprice their tickets for fear of sending the wrong signal, the economics of incomplete contracts, the endogenaity of preferences, and even simple demand curves--but in advertising revenue.
It is hard not to linger over the references in the book to artists that died prematurely, including some sympathetic references to them dying at their own hands. This, plus the broad range of Rockonomics, makes it all the harder to accept the fact that Alan Krueger will not write another book....more
Loved this. A graphic novel that is a sympathetic polemic for Open Borders—exploring the economics, ethics, and policy of it in a way that is meant toLoved this. A graphic novel that is a sympathetic polemic for Open Borders—exploring the economics, ethics, and policy of it in a way that is meant to move and persuade without shaming or condescension. It manages to convey a lot of information and arguments in a format that is easy to absorb and sometimes amusing. The core argument is that world would be about twice as rich if people were free to move from less productive countries to more productive countries, this would also be more moral under a variety of approaches (Bryan Caplan emphasizes the libertarian argument that you should not deny people the freedom to locate where they want, but also goes through how this follows from a variety of other moral frameworks like utilitarianism, Kantianism, Rawlianism, and more. Caplan goes through all the potential objections, generally finds them wanting, but also offers what he calls “keyhole solutions” that he argues would accommodate these objections (e.g., make immigrants pay an entry fee or temporarily higher taxes, delay citizenship and make it conditional on a tough test, delay access to government benefits, etc.—in many cases he views these as compromises that are better than the current system which is denying people entry).
Caplan’s book definitely filled in some holes in my understanding (especially on the cultural assimilation side) and provided some new powerful moral arguments (e.g., if someone was starving, wanted to buy food in a store, and you forcefully turned them away and they died that would be like murder—but it is the equivalent of turning people away at the border who are willing to trade labor services for money and voluntarily exchange that money for housing and food in America).
Caplan de-emphasized some of the ambiguities about the impacts of immigrants on wages and definitely did not fully grapple with how his arguments would expand to the very rapid and large-scale immigration that might occur with open borders (he does address this and based on previous experience thinks it will take a while to build up). He also is overly dismissive of the notion of nation states, even though it is hard to ground them in any abstract philosophy (although Rawls did think Rawlsianism stopped at the border, a point Caplan didn’t make), they are a unit that allows a greater degree of sympathy and sharing than humans seem capable of doing at the unit of the entire planet.
Personally, any amount of expanded immigration within what is politically possible would be fine with me. I’m not sure if advocating open borders is more likely to freak people out and if it is better to reassure with a combination of expanded immigration, legalization for people here, and tougher border enforcement. But Caplan makes a good case for the importance of expanding the Overton Window and if he succeeds in doing that it would raise the odds of any outcome I would personally find desirable....more
Joshua Greene, an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher, sets out to “use twenty-first-century science [neuroscience] to vindicateJoshua Greene, an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher, sets out to “use twenty-first-century science [neuroscience] to vindicate nineteenth-century moral philosophy [utilitarianism] against its twentieth-century critics [Rawls and other deontological ethicists].” And he succeeds admirably. This book persuasively and creatively tied together several strands of literature that interest me and will have an enduring impact on the way I think about ethical issues.
Greene’s core argument is that humans evolved to be able to cooperate with each other, solving the problem of “me vs. us” (the “Tragedy of the Commons”) but in the process we created a new problem that is increasingly bedeviling us today of “us vs. them” (the “Tragedy of the Commonsense Morality”) where different “tribes” clash not because they are selfish and immoral but instead because they are deeply motivated by their morality to see their tribe as right and the other tribe as wrong. Greene proposes a solution to this which is to use “utilitarianism” as a “metamorality” to adjudicate places where different tribes have fundamental disagreements with each other. Greene grounds his arguments in a combination of critique of traditional deontological philosophical attempts to settle these issues (e.g., Kant and Rawls) along with an understanding of the neuroscience and psychology of how we actually do make decisions.
A little more detail (and most of this is a summary of the book rather than a critique, in part for my own sake):
Greene points out that humans are much better at solving the “tragedy of the commons” or the “prisoner’s dilemma” than a simplistic, selfish economic model would lead you to believe. A combination of moral beliefs, reciprocity, repeated games, willingness to punish, willingness to have asocial punishments of others, etc., can keep us working together. The way we overcome the Tragedy of the Commons is not original to Greene, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it in the context of the tragedy of the commons and Thomas Schelling in the context of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Greene puts these solutions in the context of our “automatic settings” or quick reactions, that put us in a better position to solve these types of problems.
Part of the solutions to the tragedy of the commons to have a tribal identity which comes with incidental beliefs about what is and is not wrong about a wide range of behavior. This is what gives rise to the tragedy of the commonsense morality where different tribes clash on issues like religion, abortion, LGBT rights, etc. This tragedy can’t be solved by our automatic settings but instead requires us to use our “manual mode” or reason. Greene argues that we all “get” utilitarianism, agree in general, and just need to work together on the facts/analysis so that we can use it in practice.
Greene is scathing on the alternatives to his approach. One is religion/virtue, but this can solve the tragedy of the commons, but is really just elevating one tribe’s moral views and thus can’t solve conflicts between tribes. Another is Kant/Rawls, which Greene argues have failed to actually use reason, are riddled with logical flaws, and instead are just rationalizations of their particular tribe’s moralities. Instead utilitarianism allows one to transcend the limits of one’s tribal views.
Greene defends utilitarianism against the idea that it us overly strong (e.g., requiring us to give up all our money to the least well off) by saying utilitarianism is really “deep pragmatism” and asking people to do something impossible they won’t do is itself not actually utilitarian. And he argues against the idea that it is to weak in not respecting “fundamental right” by pointing out that the reason these rights see so important is that they involve horrible consequences, and that more generally no one actually views the rights as absolute, and that they exacerbate tribal tensions, so appealing to rights is an emotional weapon not a sound argument.
A lot of the argument and analysis of the book also involves empirical psychology, in particular Greene’s studies of various Trolley dilemmas, and trying to learn from how people make moral decisions and infer from this what a workable “deeply pragmatic” moral approach could be.
As an aspiring but highly imperfect and inconsistent utilitarian/consequentialist, I was very happy to see that Greene grounds the approach in 21st century science, makes an argument for its universality, and addresses some of the shortcomings that intuitively bothered me, including the ways in which all of us fail to live up to Peter Singer’s vision of utilitarianism. I also appreciated that while Greene shared a certain amount of the analysis of Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he was much less nihilistic and actually reached a conclusion with more teeth than just that liberals were morally deficient and we should understand each other better.
But I still have a nagging worry that all of this is less reason than rationalization for a particular modern ideology that I happen to like. Moreover, even if it is correct, I’m still not sure that it is as applicable to solving the problem’s of warring tribes as Greene believes when so much of the wars involve different views of happiness, whose happiness and what happiness (e.g., in the case of abortion, does the “happiness” of the fetus count or not? Greene thinks utilitarianism can solve the abortion debates, I’m less sure). But those are nagging suspicions and I don’t think there is a better moral approach. And more important, by grounding this in empirical psychology and neuroscience Greene’s approach holds out the prospect of making further progress. I look forward to seeing it....more
A lot of what I've learned about fiscal policy over the last twenty-five I learned from Bill Gale. And now anyone can get the same education in one hiA lot of what I've learned about fiscal policy over the last twenty-five I learned from Bill Gale. And now anyone can get the same education in one highly readable book. Fiscal Therapy's argument is that we have twin problems: debt that is too high and a budget that does not meet our priorities. Gale provides a primer on the budget itself, an analysis of its problems, and then proposes a remedy that would increase investment, reform entitlements, raise revenue, and bring the debt down to 60 percent of GDP in 2050 with a stable trajectory thereafter. All of this in short, readable chapters that can be read on their own or alternatively used as a reference for someone that wants to know some good ideas on healthcare, Social Security, individual taxation, corporate taxation, or any of the other topics Gale covers.
Gale's specific proposals are a combination of economically sensible and politically feasible (insofar as anything in this area is politically feasible). I have quibbles with various of his specific but overall they are very good (e.g., I would not reduce aggregate Social Security benefits in the manner he proposes, would not do premium support in Medicare, would raise the top individual income tax rate further, and would use more of the carbon tax revenues to pay for items other than deficit reduction). I am also comfortable with a higher debt level than Gale is and do not think we ever need to balance the annual deficit since a growing economy reduces the debt automatically (Gale emphatically agrees with this point in theory but in practice does propose a plan that gets to annual balance by 2050). But almost all of the changes I would make to his plan would be to dial various of his parameters rather than adopt a brand new structure.
Overall, Fiscal Therapy is an excellent introduction for novices to the budget and can help fill in gaps and provide broader analysis for anyone with more experience in this area....more
The Antitrust Paradigm is about as passionate and readable as a book with 976 footnotes can be. Nine reasons to believe market power has increased? Check. Rebuttals of nine Chicago-school style arguments against more vigorous antitrust enforcement? Check. Five high-level exclusionary behaviors by platforms, with four subsets of exclusionary behavior just under the heading of “exclusivity through vertical merger and exclusive dealing”? Check. Five proposed new rebuttable presumptions or rules? Check.
Just about every argument made in The Antitrust Paradigm could, or at least should, hold up in a court of law. This is to be expected given Baker’s combination of academic economics, law, and substantial experience in government (including as the Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission as well as stints at the Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission and the Council of Economic Advisers).
All of these specific arguments are embedded in a broader theme, that antitrust emerged as a “centrist” alternative to laissez faire and regulation, culminating in the “structural” period of antitrust that began around 1950 but has (partially) ended with rise of the Chicago School. Baker argues that this intellectual revolution has been invalidated by the outcome it has contributed to: increased concentration in the economy, slower productivity growth, and, in a particularly detailed analysis, reduced innovation.
Baker does accept the Chicago School premise that antitrust should be grounded in economics but shows that modern economics justifies a tougher approach both to mergers and enforcement against existing businesses. He further argues that best way to step up enforcement in an efficient and administrable manner would be to rely on the types of presumptions that have guided antitrust, but to reformulate these in a manner that is more consistent with the modern economic literature and more pro-competition. Although Baker does not explicitly frame his arguments against the renewed “neo-Brandesian” or “structuralist” approach to antitrust advanced by people like Tim Wu, Lina Kahn, and Barry Lynn, there are enough stray references to it that you can tell that he finds its arguments somewhat wanting and also unnecessary in building the case for more vigorous action.
If forced to quibble with The Antitrust Paradigm, I would cite two places where Baker’s deep grounding may come at the cost of his contributing to expanding the broader policy debate. The first is his (de facto) argument that we do not need to change the law but just its application. As Baker writes, “I have therefore emphasized the sort of arguments that can convince the [Supreme] Court: economic ones... the justices will be most responsive to economic arguments and evidence concerning competition and welfare.” For someone sitting at the FTC, this is the right approach. Given the challenges to changing the Court’s attitude, however, changes in the law itself may be warranted and I would love to know what Baker thinks those changes should be and how he would widen the debate to make them more acceptable in the future.
The second quibble is that Baker focuses almost exclusively on competition policy and dismisses regulation. At times Baker’s exclusive reliance on competition policy seemed like a carpenter with a hammer for whom everything looks like a nail. But not everything is a nail and in some cases regulation may be warranted. This is certainly the case for natural monopolies where utility-style regulation may be warranted. I do not believe the natural monopoly designation applies to the leading digital platforms, but in that area there is also substantial scope for pro-competition regulation to facilitate entry and switching, as I outlined in recommendations for the UK government.
These quibbles reflect more a desire to hear more from Baker and see him expand the debate further, not a disagreement with any of his analysis or ideas. And his analysis and ideas are so rigorously and carefully argued that The Antitrust Paradigm will be the standard text on a revived economic approach to antitrust for some time to come....more
The overarching argument of The Moral Economy is that people are motivated by more than just greed, specifically by a sense of what is fair and just. The overarching argument of The Moral Economy is that people are motivated by more than just greed, specifically by a sense of what is fair and just. Moreover, encouraging a greater focus on greed can actually lead them to behave in a less fair and just manner. If markets and information were perfect that would not be a problem and greed would be sufficient for efficient outcomes. But in Samuel Bowles’ telling they are not so that by “crowding out” moral motives over-reliance on market mechanisms can lead to worse outcomes. Bowles is completely convincing that all of this is true but disappointingly unconvincing that it is important or that he knows what to do about it. As such, this is a worthwhile perspective to understand, an idea that should be pursued further, but I’m not sure how much it informs just about any public policy issue I really care about.
A lot of Bowles’ argument is compelling and is less a critique of the “textbook economics” that he sometimes rails against than it is a summary and extension of it. Strikingly for someone who started out as a Marxist economist in the early 1970s, the featured example in this book is the same as the one in Freakonomics: the Haifa day care centers which tried out a fine to deter parental lateness but found that it resulted in even more lateness as parents went from feeling guilty about being late to pick up their children to rationally calculating that it was actually quite cheap daycare.
The analysis itself draws much from standard research on behavioral economics, incomplete contracts (which make it impossible to specify every contingency and thus require something else, like trust, to avoid an inferior outcome), and mechanism design (which often finds that it is impossible to design incentives so that rational people will collectively lead to efficient outcomes)—all of which have won Nobel prizes in economics in recent years, hardly a buried set of heterodox notions. (Bowles often has an interesting set of perspectives and interpretations of this research. For example, he argues that most of the major results are “negative,” ways in which it does not work, and posits a trilemma that it is impossible to have Pareto efficiency, voluntary participation and preference neutrality.)
Bowles is particularly detailed in describing much of his own work on experiments running various games to understand when cooperation emerges. For example, in the prisoner’s dilemma it is rational for each player not to cooperate so as to get a better outcome for themselves, but Bowles points out about half of the time people playing the game in lab conditions actually do cooperate. He tries to understand what makes this cooperation more or less likely.
I see three overarching problems in Bowles’ analysis:
First, as a general matter it may not be the case that markets crowd out trust and moral behavior but can in fact crowd it in. Bowles himself cites research showing that CEOs show more trusting behavior in experiments, diplomats from highly capitalist economies are less likely to run up parking tickets than those from less capitalist ones, and East Germans play experimental exhibit less cooperative behavior than West Germans. It turns out that the security of property rights really does seem to motivate people to behave in a better manner than if they are afraid that their goods can be confiscated at any moments.
Second, Bowles has lots of tiny examples of where his approach matters but no big ones. The Haifa daycare center should have used moral suasion instead of fines. To discourage overuse of plastic bags you should reward people for bringing their own bag rather than just punishing them for not bringing one. These seem fine, but they are mostly very local examples and pale in comparison to the importance of the triumphs of “textbook” economics—for example the idea of a carbon tax, cigarette taxes, or the need to regulate fisheries to prevent overfishing. Bowles does not have a compelling argument against any of these (even though, in his theory, a carbon tax could be counterproductive because it gives permission to pollute rather than counting on people’s caring for the greater good to restrain their behavior).
Third, Bowles gives no compelling way in which the government can inculcate the trust and morality he wants. It is clear how small communities, like daycare centers, can do this. But do we want the state to impose morality on all of us? Which morality would it pick? How do we decide? The one case he does show that this morality works is that by protecting property rights and cementing a certain notion of fairness (which might involve some redistribution and less inequality), it leads people to be more trusting and reduces the inefficiencies that might otherwise result from incomplete contracts and the limitations of mechanism design.
It is notable that behavioral economics, which is really what this book is, has had many of the same problems, including how to translate the many anomalies it has documented into general propositions about behavior and recommendations for large-scale public policy. These are still fruitful avenues for pursuit. The empirical mindset of testing incentives and different ways to frame them is clearly right and completely standard in economics today. Behavioral considerations are clearly important in the details of program design. But I will be more sympathetic to the arguments against the textbooks when this approach can show that it can go beyond lab experiments and boutique examples to some bigger, implementable ideas....more
If I had to assign policymakers one up-to-date guide to the latest economic policy issues on taxes and trade it would be this one. Kimberly Clausing hIf I had to assign policymakers one up-to-date guide to the latest economic policy issues on taxes and trade it would be this one. Kimberly Clausing has done research in both areas and has been a leader in the economics of international corporate taxation, including profit shifting by multinationals, and it shows throughout this book. Open makes a strong, fact-based case for openness towards trade and immigration. The case ranges from explaining long-standing ideas like comparative advantage to a sensible evaluation of the latest literature, including a balanced assessment of the "China shock" literature that has found a large and persistent impact from Chinese imports but also serious methodological issues that make it a potentially less reliable guide to untangling the causal impact of changing trade policies towards China.
Open, however, is not a polemic for the status quo and in fact nearly one-third of the book is a case for policy agenda to better prepare workers for the global economy, reform the tax system, and reshape globalization more broadly. Clausing does not offer any one simple solution, but then again I don't think that there is one....more
Factfullness is getting a lot of attention and deservedly so. A lot of the major points--the majorest being that the world is generally getting betterFactfullness is getting a lot of attention and deservedly so. A lot of the major points--the majorest being that the world is generally getting better--should be known more widely. And a number of the mental habits it encourages like being aware of biases around small salient events, extrapolations, overly reductive groupings are also worthwhile life lessons. I don't think most of these facts and mental habits will be news to anyone paying attention but it seems like a lot of people have not been.
At its best Factfullness is charming, funny and endearing. But at its worst, it is annoying, repetitive, self satisfied and condescending. Also for a book that is called Factfullness it has a decent amount of spin and wishful thinking, including omitting negative trends or interpretations of these trends and thinking that just knowing these facts will have larger and more salutary effects than might be the case.
First the positive. Global poverty is down a lot, child mortality is down a lot, 80 percent of the world is vaccinated, fertility rates are down as more women exercise choices and education is up--with the gap between girls and boys substantially narrowed. These are all true. And they often get obscured in the type of news coverage that never has stories like "300,000 planes landed safely today" or "I'm reporting from a country at peace."
Why might these facts matter? I don’t think it is going far out on a limb to say that truth is better than falsehood. These facts certainly give a certain amount of deserved comfort to the general parameters of the broad counters of the global system, including both globalization and also the massive efforts of governments, NGOs and activists on issues like vaccinations and child health.
Moreover focusing on facts can ensure that you are not allocating effort and resources to emotionally salient issues like rare, small-scale and costly-to-prevent deaths but instead to major killers that can be really cheap to prevent/treat like diareal disease, malaria, and the like. Much of our spending on homeland security and some of our airplane regulations, for example, may be examples of extremely high cost per life saved in a manner that is not motivated by Factfullness.
Hans Rosling is also excellent at skewering the condescension that Westerners (or those on Level 4 in the income groupings that Rosling prefers) towards the rest (those in countries that are on Levels 1 through 3, Rosling sensibly rebuts that notion of a unified concept of “developing”). For example, Tunisia is filled with incomplete houses in poor neighborhoods. Some have ascribed this to laziness and the like, but Rosling talks to people and finds that they know what they are doing and are perfectly rational—without safe savings opportunities they put their extra resources into bricks that they layer on top of their homes so they can’t be stolen, slowly building new levels to their houses. He has story after story like this of Africans, Asians and others being much more rational than they are given credit for.
This attitude, however, is what makes it so unfortunate that Rosling spends much of the book condescending to all the people that get the answers to his quizzes wrong. And not just criticizing them for getting them wrong, but arguing that their errors lead them to make major mistakes in their own businesses and efforts.
For example, in over a dozen places Rosling talks about how he had to explain to naïve and uncomprehending Western business leaders that the world outside the west was larger and richer than they thought and that they should expand sales and investment into it because of the limited size/resources of the West. Does anyone think that point was lost on Western multinationals? Moreover Rosling is less than Factfull when he keeps using Africa as an example of that overlooked opportunity, extolling how incomes are much higher there than anyone thinks, but never once pointing out an important piece of context that most of these corporate leaders implicitly or explicitly know already: Sub-Saharan Africa is only about 2% of the global GDP. I’m not saying it’s not a great opportunity for some companies, but their not paying as much attention to it may be more rational and fact based than Rosling realizes.
Another example is his condescension to all of the activists working on issues. He thinks that people pushing for girl’s education should spend more time talking about how great it is that girls on average get 9 years of schooling, just below the 10 years for boys instead of lamenting how many countries seriously discriminate against girls schooling. But he doesn’t stop to think that: (i) this 9 vs. 10 is an average and he cautions us about using averages that conceal the full distribution, and a lot of countries are on a very bad part of this distribution and (ii) possibly activist groups know what they are doing in how they make their appeals, get support and advance change. To be clear, I think we should keep all these facts in mind, I’m just less sure than he is that this perspective would do more to advance these causes.
Finally, Factfullness almost always presents positive stories. The one negative story it includes is climate change and even there the argument is that it is not as bad as you think. For example, incomes in the United States are higher than they were 50 years ago. But they are also growing more slowly than they were 50 years ago which matters to a lot of people. And they are growing increasingly unequally which also matters. And very slowly for people at the bottom of the distribution. Rosling would look at these data and point out the progress not the change in the pace of progress or its distribution. The number of global refugees is at an all-time high (I believe, may not be true as a share of population which as Rosling notes, is how one should do all these numbers). Suicides/drug overdoes/alcohol poisoning are all up, at least in the United States.
Most importantly, there is widespread discontent in many Western countries. It is hard to believe that this is just because people are not aware of all of the facts. After all, people are more expert in their own situations than any statistician, including Rosling. If he gave Westerners (i.e., people on Level 4) as much credit as he gives people in the rest of the world he would listen to them a little more instead of just condescend about what the facts say.
All of that said, Factfullness is a quick, easy and generally fun read and it is hard not to find Rosling and his life mission moving--along with his death and the finishing of his book and work by his son and daughter in law. You should just read it with the same critical eye that Rosling says you should apply to everything else....more
A nice, readable presentation of the important empirical work that the three International Monetary Fund (IMF) authors of this book (and their many coA nice, readable presentation of the important empirical work that the three International Monetary Fund (IMF) authors of this book (and their many co-authors) have done over the last decade on rethinking the impacts of inequality on growth and of various policies on inequality. The conclusions represent a radical change for the IMF in many respects, although at points the authors do not appear to take their policy recommendations as far as their empirical evidence would suggest.
I had read many of the papers underlying this book but had missed a number of them so appreciated that the ideas were all brought together. The authors make the reasonable choice to keep their results readable so they mostly present empirical conclusions while showing very little of the data or models that led them to those conclusions. As a result, most economists will want to read the Appendices as well (if not the papers). And most non-economists should not have much problem reading it, although occasionally too much IMF jargon and acronyms still manage to slip through the otherwise relatively clear prose.
On the substance, the book finds that, on average, inequality results in less sustainable growth and lower growth. Redistribution has no direct adverse impact on growth and by reducing inequality actually helps it. Structural reforms (like deregulation) generally increase growth and inequality. Fiscal austerity hurts both growth and especially inequality, with the authors suggesting that it does not generally pass a cost-benefit test because the benefits of less debt are outweighed by the cost of getting to less debt. Monetary expansion reduces inequality.
The book falls in to the genre of "summarizing our research" rather than "surveying the field." As such, it does not present a two-handed perspective but a clear and forceful articulation of a very consistent set of empirical results. That is generally reasonable, but would treat this as one perspective on the question. In particular, all of the evidence is from panel studies of macroeconomic data which is one useful perspective but certainly not the only one. And it is hardly a definitive randomized trial or even as credibly identified as modern micro studies. So a fuller perspective would have to take this as one input together with other macro perspectives, micro evidence and the like.
The authors largely present their work as finding that there is no tradeoff between inequality and growth. But there is some tension between that conclusion and their chapter on structural reforms which finds that almost all of these types of policies boost growth and increase inequality. They never exactly explain how they square that with their overall macroeconomic results.
Also, ultimately we do not care about growth by itself or inequality by itself by how people are doing--the median person, the bottom 90 percent, the mean of log income, or some other fancier social welfare function. The authors, however, consistently present growth and inequality separately without any discussion of how to judge the integration of the two together. When there is no tradeoff that does not matter--if growth goes up and inequality goes down, for example. But what about policies that raise growth and increase inequality? Are they good or bad? Judging this requires combining the two and applying some sort of social welfare function (or prioritization of the different parts of the income distribution), something the authors never do.
Finally, the policy conclusions are radical. The reducing inequality is actually less radical than it looks because the international institutions have actually been pushing that for a while. And the authors shrink from the full conclusion, saying we need market reforms regardless of the empirical results they find for them. Perhaps the most consequential shifts are about fiscal austerity and open capital flows, two areas that the IMF has made some consequential changes in recent years, many of them in part because of the research done by the authors of this book....more
The Republic of Beliefs has one big idea I had never thought about before and lots of fascinating small ideas and asides spread throughout. The big idThe Republic of Beliefs has one big idea I had never thought about before and lots of fascinating small ideas and asides spread throughout. The big idea is law and economics as traditionally conceived is incomplete because it does not explain why anyone follows the law. Kaushik Basu argues this is akin to partial equilibrium analysis that treats the sovereign as exogenous .
Basu endogenizes the sovereign by broadening out game theory to a "game of life" that encompasses not just the payoffs to the traditional players but also to the authorities, like the police, judges, and heads of government. If the law is not an equilibrium then it will not be enforced by the police/judges/heads of government. So laws do not create new equilibria but serve as focal points that shift people's beliefs so that they all shift to another equilibrium. Think, for example, driving below 60 miles per hour. If you try to create laws that are not compatible with people's incentives, they will not be obeyed and instead you'll get rampant corruption and authorities looking the other way.
That's the big idea. It is not particularly relevant for many of the questions in law and economics, for example how to do antitrust or regulation in the United States, because it is reasonable to take the enforcement of those rules as given. It seems incredibly relevant in the context of a developing country like India to understand under what circumstances laws are and are not followed, since this may matter just as much as the substance of any law.
Basu conveys many of these points with relatively simple game theory, often taking familiar two player games--like the prisoner's dilemma--and adding a third player who represents the authorities and can affect the payoffs of the first two players. This allows him to explore the difference between laws and norms.
One challenge with the framework, is that multiple equilibria do not readily answer the question of which equilibrium is chosen. Kaushik Basu argues that "for the law to develop roots and the rule of law to prevail requires ordinary people to believe in the law; and to believe that others believe in the law. Such beliefs and meta beliefs can take very long to get entrenched in society." But he cannot fully explain how and why this does and does not work. Maybe because such an answer does not exist.
Most of the analysis assumes rational agents with fixed, exogenous payoffs. In part this serves an analytical purpose of showing that Basu's critique of the incompleteness of law and economics does not rely on challenging the standard assumption of rationality. In part Basu seems to think this assumption generates reasonable results. But he does eventually introduce behavioral considerations, like people liking to follow the law and having preferences that are shaped by the law itself.
Overall, The Republic of Beliefs is a creative, thoughtful and learned book that draws on economics, law, political philosophy, moral philosophy, and more to form a new basis for law and economics and understanding political authority more broadly that is intellectually interesting, potentially relevant in a developing country context, but not (as the author himself would agree) relevant to many of the narrower policy questions faced by advanced economies.
This was exactly the book I was looking for: a rigorous guide to the cutting edge of the emerging genetic-based social science that explains the methoThis was exactly the book I was looking for: a rigorous guide to the cutting edge of the emerging genetic-based social science that explains the methodologies scientists are using and also their limitations. The book is both hopeful about the future of research but also appropriately critical of the limitations of the study so far. Could not recommend it more highly—and I would not skip any of the footnotes or appendices which contain a lot of important insights, elaborations, and background. Reading the book left me excited for the future of the field but also frustrated about our ability to overcome the many inevitable limitations that they are so careful in expositing.
Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher are both sociologists (and Dalton is also got a Ph.D. in genetics). The main point of their book is that genetic analysis is giving social scientists a powerful new tool to better understand the causes of differential educational attainment, incomes, poverty and other social phenomenon. But that we are still having a hard time linking particular genes to social outcomes let alone understanding the biological pathways and there is a huge amount of complex intersection between different genes and genes and the environment. Much of the book is about the social outcome of educational attainment, both because it is important but also because it is easier to study because is often included in the genetic data.
Conley and Fletcher start out by going through the research that establishes the high degree of heredity in many traits, including physical ones like height (80%) but also social ones like educational attainment (40%). They explain the models used to assess heredity, like comparing identical twins and fraternal twins or other well measured genetic distances. They explain in detail the methodology of the ACE model, the assumptions underlying it, why they thought it might be wrong, and how they ended up confirming it in their own research.
They then go on from the overall measures of the hereditary component of different traits to linking these to actual genes. Their take on the attempts to link behavior to single genes is that it was also spurious data mining, caused by the fact that while medical outcomes are well defined social outcomes have numerous measures and you can always find one correlated with the genes. The single gene efforts have given way to genome wide association studies (GWAS) that look at millions of genes and correlate them with outcomes at very high levels of significance to avoid data mining. Taken together, GWAS can produce a “polygenic score” that predicts a particular outcome, like educational attainment. GWAS, however, has three shortcomings: (1) you need to be careful to avoid the “chopsticks problem” (i.e., mistakenly inferring there is a gene for chopsticks when really is just a correlation with East Asian genes); (2) it gives up most any hope of a biological pathway because so many genes; and (3) it suffers from the “missing heredibility” problem of not explaining as much hereditability as know is there from twin studies. This last problem, they suggest, is caused by not analyzing the full genome for cost reasons.
They then go through a series of topics. One is genetic sorting where they examine the arguments in The Bell Curve about the increasing salience of genes and increased marriage based on them and thus locked in genetic stratification. Contrary to this the evidence they produce shows: (1) some traits are more genetically determined now than in the past (like height or weight, because most people have access to enough food so environment matters less) but others are less genetically determined now than in the past (like education, because of compulsory schooling laws); (2) people do mate based on phenotypes but much less on genotypes; and (3) no strong correlation between polygenic score for education and number of children.
They then have a chapter on race where they make the (familiar) point that there is much more genetic distance between most any two African tribes than between Europeans and Asians—which undermines many genetic concepts of race. This is because of the bottleneck of only ~1,000 people leaving Africa for Europe and Asia. They rebut the standard Stephen Jay Gould arguments against important racial differences (e.g., small genetic differences can matter a lot and evolution can happen quickly), but they establish that much of genetic variation is due to random drift not natural selection and that there is no links, and not really much research that could find a link, between race-based genetics and important social outcomes.
The chapter on the genetics of economic growth and war is a good literature review on the non-genetic studies in these areas but thin on the actual genetic studies, really just one for each topic. And finally the book concludes with a discussion of future “designer babies” either through embryo selection or gene editing, raising many concerns including that often “bad” traits are associated with “good” ones and have a benefit for the ecosystem as a whole so we will be taking risks.
Overall, I really appreciated that the book was research-based, did not just list discoveries but explained their methodology, and also that it was critical and skeptical throughout—but used that as an argument for more research not less....more
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