I have been captivated by Alan Turing’s story ever since I saw Derek Jacobi perform it in Breaking the Code. The Imitation Game movie almost ruined itI have been captivated by Alan Turing’s story ever since I saw Derek Jacobi perform it in Breaking the Code. The Imitation Game movie almost ruined it. But this book does not share much more than a subject and a title, it is much better.
I really like the Jim Ottaviani scientific biographies in graphic novel format ostensibly aimed at YA readers (Feynman, Hawking, and Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas) and this one was no exception. This was probably a higher ratio of life to works than the others with Jim Ottaviani making less effort to explain Alan Turing’s major contributions and doing more to showcase his life. But it is quite a life.
I say ostensibly YA because all of the biographies are relatively sophisticated in a variety of ways: flashbacks, imaginary scenes, someone narrating interspersed with the stories, somewhat complicated themes that do not whitewash some of the more sordid personal details, and most importantly a lot of attempt to explain the science....more
A fantastic book about calculus. A blend of the history of the development of calculus, its applications, and intuitive explanations of its power fillA fantastic book about calculus. A blend of the history of the development of calculus, its applications, and intuitive explanations of its power filled with nicely intuitive explanations that will either provide a refresher or a different way of understanding what you have already learned.
Steven Strogatz proceeds in (sort of) chronological order, defining calculus not as what you learn in school but any technique that breaks things apart into infinitesimal pieces and puts them back together again in order to solve problems. Rather than describing an immaculate conception of calculus by Leibniz and Newton, Strogatz starts with Archimedes, shows several geometric applications, and even spends a lot of time on Descartes and Fermat before even getting to what we consider calculus today. In all of these he shows how a combination of abstract ideas but also in many cases practical problems led to the development of calculus.
The chronological order is interrupted (in a good way) by Strogatz’s many descriptions of the applications of calculus to different practical problems, most of which are in the analytically relevant chapter. These include GPS, AIDS drugs, rocketry, and more. In all of these cases Strogatz shows his pedigree as an applied mathematician, going into significant but highly readable detail about the models and discoveries underlying these areas.
Overall, the book is very nicely written and highly recommended....more
The Teenage Brain provides an up-to-date(ish, was published in 2015) study of the science of the teenage brain and its implications for a host of pracThe Teenage Brain provides an up-to-date(ish, was published in 2015) study of the science of the teenage brain and its implications for a host of practical issues like learning drinking, drugs, screens and sports. It was written by Frances Jensen, a neurologist, and it describes what it says are the major advances in the understanding of the teenage brain the last decade that resulted from a turning attention to it and new tools, like functional MRIs. Overall the argument is that there is something special and different about teenage brains, that much of their behavior is rooted in this, giving them a tremendous capacity to learn but also tremendously bad judgment and difficult problems to navigate. Much of the science feels relatively cutting edge, but most of it does little to change what are the many commonsense recommendations on many of the issues. Sometimes the link between the science and the specific issues even gets a bit more tenuous than it should be. And at times the book suffers from the awkward marriage of science and self help, with too much science for one type of reader and too much self help for another type.
The teenage brain has a lot of grey matter (neurons) but not as much white matter (the connectivity for these neurons). The neurons need to be cleared out a little to make paths and the connectivity proceeds from back of the brain to the front, with the frontal lobe that is responsible for judgement the last to get “myelinated” and thus able to function as quickly and effectively as it does in adult brains. The brain itself reaches physical maturity long after the body does, fooling us into thinking that older teens are adults when really they have substantial mental differences. The 20% of the brain that is underdeveloped is responsible for executive functioning, “prospective memory” of what you intend to do, judgment and the like. Often teenagers compensate by doing these tasks with other parts of the brain, but the result is they are less effective. At the same time, the abundance of grey matter makes the brain even more plastic, capable of rewiring itself through more learning.
This scientific overview is followed by specific chapters on specific topics. The sleep chapter explains that teenagers release of melatonin results in them going to sleep later than adults and they still have a substantial amount when they wake, making them groggy. As Matthew Walker argued in Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, the result of less than the recommended 9-1/2 hours of a sleep a night is less mental ability, more diseases, emotional problems, and more. A series of chapters focus on various types of addiction, arguing that the flip side of the superior capacity of the brain to learn is the greater capacity to become addicted, because both rely on plasticity. Much of the rest of these chapters is relatively commonsense.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is on gender, documenting the substantial physical differences in male and female brains (e.g., men have less connections between hemispheres), the differences in the pace of development and the differences in how and which parts of the brain work on what problems by gender. Nevertheless, Jensen asserts that the functional differences are much smaller or even non-existent, just different physical ways to get to the same place. More explorations of this question would have been interesting.
I look forward to further rapid developments in neuroscience general, and for teenagers in particular. I am also interested in seeing whether any further developments challenge any more of our ideas rather than mostly just affirm them....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
A nice, short book on cosmology with an emphasis on the theories of the shape, history and the future of the universe, from the Big Bang to the latestA nice, short book on cosmology with an emphasis on the theories of the shape, history and the future of the universe, from the Big Bang to the latest ideas. The book can be read at multiple levels--with larger font text, smaller font text (described as optional but I found it valuable), detailed definitions of terms and lots of pictures with captions....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
I am very glad that “Winners Take All” was written and that it is being widely read in precisely the circles that need to read it. I could see it actuI am very glad that “Winners Take All” was written and that it is being widely read in precisely the circles that need to read it. I could see it actually making the world a better place. A lot of the reportage is excellent, in many ways looking from multiple perspectives, being as sympathetic as possible, and by virtue of that sympathy its criticisms are that much more biting and compelling. The weakness of the book, however, is the superficiality of its underlying analysis of the economy and politics. But that is much less important than its strengths and those strengths and very strong.
The target of “Winners Take All” is the “doing good by doing well” crowd. The people that populate the Aspen Ideas Festival (full disclosure, I go pretty much annually), flying out in private planes, talking about their minor initiatives that may by themselves do a small amount of good but leave the system itself intact.
It is easy to satirize this set but Anand Giridharadas doesn’t just do that. He conveys sympathy for their desire to change the world. His targets are less the people that populate the book than the system that puts them there and that they themselves reinforce.
Giridharadas’ argument is that all of the “doing good by doing well” efforts aren’t just harmless and slightly annoying, but profoundly harmful. They undermine the notion of democracy and collective governance. Instead of the government collecting taxes and democratically deciding what to do with them, plutocrats decide how much of their money to give and what to give it to. Giridharadas argues that these efforts can reinforce the bad aspects of the current system by allowing corporations and individuals to effectively whitewash their rent seeking and bad actions and argue they don’t need regulation because they’re busily making the world a better place.
To the degree that Giridharadas is portraying people who—for example—oppose the taxes needed to fund the types of issues they agree need more funding, I’m sympathetic to his perspective.
But I’m also much more sympathetic to capitalism than Giridharadas is and in some ways I find his views confused. Many of the CEOs that show up at the Aspen Ideas Festival touting their minor initiatives to train the disadvantaged are actually not talking about the biggest good they do in the world which is innovating in the core businesses, increasing productivity and wages, making products consumers want, and the like.
If that innovation is in the form of, for example, making better cigarettes or marketing them better that will make the world a worse place. But most of it isn’t and when it is the answer is regulation and taxes so that when businesses are maximizing their profits they are doing it in a way that increases social welfare. Giridharadas powerfully advocates for the stronger regulations and taxes, but still somehow often finds himself drawn into the argument that the solution is corporations being more communally oriented, caring more about the public good, and the like—without recognizing that this is an unrealistic basis to build a better society on and lends itself to precisely the “elite charade” that he is criticizing. Better corporations that are honest, saying all they care about is profits, so that it will be clearer that we need to set the rules so that their profit maximization is socially beneficial.
Often the solution is more market not less. The denizens of what Giridharadas calls “Marketworld” are themselves often unsympathetic to the market. Business leaders don’t love competition and run large centrally planned organizations. They can see this lack of competition and central planning as a model for society more broadly. The solution is not more planning but less, with greater competition within well-defined rules leading to the types of innovation we should want. We should be calling the “Marketworlders” on their bluff.
The question is whether all the superficial world changing stuff that I also find annoying suppresses these types of public policies. Some efforts at self governance, self regulation, and self donation are substitutes for collective action and, as a result, share Giridharadas’ concern about these. But I don’t think he does enough to grant the many ways that private action can complement the types of public action he supports. For example the business community doesn’t say it is sufficient for them all to use green lightbulbs but also is reasonably decent at advocating carbon taxes and supporting the Paris Agreement.
This point is indicative of some of the limitations of Giridharadas’ political theories. He depicts a world of a monolithic all powerful elite that wants to stamp out all use of the word “inequality” because it views it as threatening its own power and prerogatives. But the elite is not monolithic, in fact many of them actively support different sides of the debate, including many that actively support higher taxes on themselves. Nor is the elite all powerful, just witness Donald Trump getting the Republican nomination against the entire elite of the Republican Party and then winning the election. The elite wants all sorts of things, like immigration reform, that seem to never happen. Finally, it is not like the “people” are completely innocent. In Giridharadas’ telling, the elite are offended by talk of inequality and instead want to hear euphemisms like expanded opportunity. But much of the public has exactly the same preferences around framing nd is less excited about the term and concept of inequality than I personally am or think they should be
All of these arguments and quibbles, however, pale in comparison to the fact that the book aims at broadly the right target, hits it squarely, and might actually accomplish something in the process. There really is a bit too much of an “elite charade of changing the world”. And not enough actual engaging with the public policies that are needed to change the world. Giridharadas has written a compelling book that just might help to change that....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
I started this on January 1st and just finished it today. It is a separate movement from a classical piece for each day of the year, generally rangingI started this on January 1st and just finished it today. It is a separate movement from a classical piece for each day of the year, generally ranging from 2 to 20 minutes. In some cases motivated by the feeling of the day (like the champagne popping in the Johann Strauss waltz for today’s piece), in some cases the birthday, death day of the composer or the date of the composition, and in some cases even more arbitrary.
Clemency Burton-Hill is ecumenical in her tastes, incredibly enthusiastic, not remotely snobby—talks about pieces she listens to in the Tube, while doing housework, or reverentially in a concert hall. All of the major composers are here but with 366 days (yes, it has the leap day—so perfect for 2020), there are lots of women, non-European/Americans, and composers who are still alive and working—many of them under 50.
A book like this would have been impossible prior to streaming but with streaming I was able to listen to all 366 pieces (mostly on the designated day, but sometimes I did in groups because I got behind or felt like getting ahead). This introduced me to so many new pieces/composers that I downloaded and will help add to my listening next year and beyond.
If you like classical music and want to expand your horizons this is a great way to do it....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.
Murder By the Book is a true crime account of what, according to the author, was one of the most sensational murders in 19th century London: that of LMurder By the Book is a true crime account of what, according to the author, was one of the most sensational murders in 19th century London: that of Lord William Russell by his valet, François Courvoisier. Claire Harman documents the night of the murder, the crime itself (his throat was cut presumably while he was sleeping), the investigation, trial, hanging and aftermath. This is interspersed with an account of the role that William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Jack Shephard played in inspiring the murder, by depicting a criminal as a hero in a genre then known as Newgate novels. Different pirated versions of Jack Shephard were also playing as plays simultaneously at multiple London theaters. Another writer who also wrote a book that depicted the criminal life plays a big role in Harman's book, Charles Dickens. He was at pains to distinguish Oliver Twist from the "Newgate" label, according to Harman after the criticism of the entire genre made more of an effort to distance himself from it in future novels (starting with Barnaby Rudge which was writing at the time), and thus he diverged from Ainsworth with two initially parallel novelists going very different directions in their abilities and history's memory of them. Dickens himself was very absorbed by the entire genre, writing letters to the editor about it, going to the execution (an event that features prominently in his biographies), partly turning it into fiction, and then into an argument against public executions.
Overall, the book was relatively short and interesting, steeped in its time, murder, Victorian London, and the early part of Dickens's career. But the links between the murder and the book were a little weak and not every detail was equally interesting. ...more
AI Superpowers several short books in one: a fantastic book about China’s recent internet innovation, a very good book about the current and near futuAI Superpowers several short books in one: a fantastic book about China’s recent internet innovation, a very good book about the current and near future of AI, a sometimes moving but mixed personal reflection memoir and a terrible set of predictions about the economics of AI. It also doesn’t ask some of the most fundamental questions one would want in a book like this.
Leading Chinese AI researcher and internet innovator (founder of Microsoft Research China, Google China, and now a leading venture firm Sinovention Ventures) Kai-Fu Lee sets out to compare the prospects of AI development in China and the United States. Many would give the United States the edge because of our greater degrees of creativity and cutting edge research whereas China, to date, has done more to copy, adapt and apply. Lee argues that this misses what is actually going on in AI: “the casual observer—or even expert analyst—would be forgiven for believing that we are consistently breaking fundamentally new ground in artificial intelligence research. I believe this impression is misleading. Many of these new milestones are, rather, merely the application of the past decade’s breakthroughs—primarily deep learning but also complementary technologies like reinforcement learning and transfer learning—to new problems... Much of the difficult but abstract work of AI research has been done, and it’s now time for entrepreneurs to roll up their sleeves and get down to the dirty work of turning algorithms into sustainable businesses.”
Lee argues that the success of this “dirty work” will require four inputs: (1) data, (2) entrepreneurs, (3) AI scientists, and (4) a policy-friendly environment. Taking these four in turn:
DATA: Lee argues that China is collecting much more data and willing to use it, including data that intersects between the real and online world. This seems overwhelmingly true and was not exactly a novel insight. The only open question is how important will data be in the future. My guess is very and Lee’s statement “Given much more data, an algorithm designed by a handful of mid-level AI engineers usually outperforms one designed by a world-class deep-learning researcher.” will remain true. But I don’t think we’re sure, as AlphaGo Zero, for example, was better than the original AlphaGo and used no data. Lee is thinking within the current deep learning paradigm and may be understating the importance of what comes next.
ENTREPRENEURS: This was the most fascinating and novel part of the book. Lee provides a capsule history of the internet in China, the copycat businesses, the failure of American businesses in China, and the emergence of much more innovative firms. At its heart is the argument that recent Chinese entrepreneurship arguing that it is more successful than the American variant because it is hungrier, willing to work harder, less distracted by any purpose other than moneymaking, and more willing to copy instead of innovate. A lot of this seems true but I think devalues the successes of Silicon Valley and underestimates the degree to which Chinese entrepreneurs may become more like that in the future. And perhaps for obvious and forgivable reasons, but some of this discussion misses the role of the Chinese policy—for example the book portrays the exit of Google from China as an unfortunate decision by the company not the result of censorship policies in China.
AI SCIENTISTS: Lee argues there are more and more of them in China, they’re excellent, but not as innovative as Geoffrey Hinton or Yann Le Cunn. But he argues that the innovations are not needed anymore. As discussed above, this is interesting, plausible, but may undervalue the paradigm changing innovations we can’t foresee.
AI POLICY: Lee argues that China has made a concerted policy effort to encourage AI while the United States has effectively ignored it. This is true. The question is how consequential it is. Lee gives the example of China using subsidies to create an AI/innovation cluster outside of Beijing to mimic the dense networks in Silicon Valley. But by analyzing only one success case Lee fails to understand what worked about the policy. Governments around the world have done similar cluster funding with nothing like China’s success, so this hardly seems necessary (Silicon Valley did without) or sufficient. Moreover, I would think future Chinese policy is a big risk to AI if continued clamp downs discourage innovation of certain types in China.
Lee’s analysis leads him to a make predictions about four areas of AI applications and how relative US-China capabilities today will shift over the next five to ten years (e.g., from 50-50 in internet applications to 60-40 in favor of China, 10-90 in autonomous applications today in favor of the US to 50-50, with similar trends in business applications and perception AI).
Lee’s predictions about China’s development in the future and the relative balance of capabilities seems broadly reasonable, subject to the caveats above. But he never addresses the fundamental question: is this zero sum or positive sum? The “Superpowers” of the title would make one think it was zero sum, that there is a first mover advantage and whoever, for example, figures out self-driving cars will own that industry permanently. In reality, in much of AI I think “positive sum” is likely to be the better model as innovations are disseminated, copied or reverse engineered. The entire relative capabilities frame makes much less sense in this positive sum world.
All of the above was the meat of the book and the reason it was much more interesting than even the summaries I read. I would recommend most readers just stop there, about 60% of the way through, and I wish I did too. Instead what follows is an absurd semi-apocalyptic argument that AI will take all our jobs, cause massive inequality, and lead to a huge economic gap between the US and China and the rest of the world.
The AI jobs discussion is economically rudimentary and Lee misses some major points (e.g., he acknowledges AI will create new types of jobs but seems to miss that richer people will want more of old types of jobs, eg will eat out more and thus more restaurant servers). The GDP discussion is similarly rudimentary (I would predict US and Australia GDP closer 50 years from now than US and China GDP, he seems to not understand how these innovations can be used by countries that didn’t make them and the notion of spillovers and convergence). More importantly, there is a huge tension between Lee’s skepticism about the imminence of general AI, his belief that we will not make future paradigm innovations but instead will continue to tinker and apply, and then his claim that existing modeling attempts understate the pace of AI progress.
Finally, Lee has a sometimes moving account of his own battle with cancer, how it changed his priorities towards more balance with life, and why this tells him that future AI policy should center not around UBI but subsidies for volunteering, caring, and other human interaction. This was sometimes moving, a little thought provoking, but also had the usual shortcoming of a highly successful person who can afford to make these types of statements without giving up any of that success.
Overall, I thought I knew the main points of this book from the reviews and that it would not add much. The first 60% of the book did indeed add a lot. Unfortunately, if you paid attention to the last 40% it would also subtract a lot so maybe just skip or skim that part. ...more
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
An outstanding, short, insightful capsule history of antitrust and antitrust through from the establishment of the Clayton Act in 1890 through the latAn outstanding, short, insightful capsule history of antitrust and antitrust through from the establishment of the Clayton Act in 1890 through the latest issues with the tech giants. All of it written very much for a general reader with little or no law or economics. In many places I would have liked to see much more, but you can find more in Wu’s papers—this book was for a different purpose. Underlying Wu’s version of history is an argument in favor of Louis Brandeis’ approach to antitrust, which focused as much on the political as the economic—specifically the risks of both concentrated economic power and concentrated political power.
Wu discusses the establishment of antitrust, its first major use with Standard Oil, and its growth through the Microsoft breakup pushed by Joel Klein during the Clinton administration. As antitrust actions are growing, the Chicago School was growing in importance as well with its emphasis on a much narrower concept of consumer welfare as determined by economic experts primarily with regard to whether a given merger will raise or lower prices. Ultimately Wu credits (or discredits) the “Harvard School” with taking the rough edges of the Chicago School and making it possible for the legal system to use it.
Wu faults the Chicago school’s narrow focus on economics while also faulting their economics. On the later, he is sympathetic to their limiting predatory pricing claims but thinks they way overshot the mark with their lack of concern about virtual all vertical mergers, many monopolies, and abuses of dominance.
At the same time Wu documents the benefits of antitrust enforcement, arguing the breakup of AT&T and the cases against Microsoft and IBM unlocked vast new economic terrains and were part of why the United States has outpaced countries like Japan which kept their monopoly telecoms in place. Some of this is widely accepted but Wu make a particularly compelling reinterpretation of the IBM case—often used as an argument against antitrust enforcement because it dragged on for over a decade—as central the separation of hardware and software and the rise of the PC.
Overall the book did not fully persuade me of the overarching “ne0-Brandesian” theory that Wu is seeking to revive for three reasons. First, I’m not sure how much link there is between corporate concentration and political power. It is the case that the wealthy have much more political power, but antitrust won’t do anything about hedge funds and private equity and I’m not sure that political power is much stronger with four airlines than six airlines. Second, much of Brandeis’s “big is bad” celebration of small businesses seems to be stronger on nostalgia than evidence. While too much corporate concentration can tilt bargaining power in a problematic way, it is not like small businesses are ideal places to work and in fact tend to have less workplace protection, benefits, training and room for advancement.
Finally, and most importantly, Wu shows that you don’t need to buy his broader political arguments to believe that antitrust needs to be more vigorous and specifically more vigorous in many of the ways he recommends (e.g., greater merger control, more reliance on structural remedies like breakups instead of conduct remedies about how companies are supposed to behave). Ultimately, Wu’s own arguments convincingly show that just appealing to economics—but expanding the focus to include innovation, quality, choice and other issues that are increasingly being considered in antitrust enforcement—is sufficient to get policy most or all of the way to where he would (rightfully in many cases) want it to go....more
A thoughtful, provocative, carefully argued book that made me change my mind on some issues that I thought I’d thought about quite a lot, which is aboA thoughtful, provocative, carefully argued book that made me change my mind on some issues that I thought I’d thought about quite a lot, which is about the best a book can do. Cass agrees with many progressives on the problem (the lack of work for less-skilled workers), proposes some solutions that are not just the standard trickle-down, laissez faire ideas like wage subsidies, but also finds new arguments for a number of old conservative ideas like less environmental regulation. Overall a refreshing take on center right economic policy.
I strongly agree with Cass on the definition of the problem. Cass rejects the Panglossian views of some the people who like to deny the increased economic dysfunctions we are facing. Cass goes through a familiar recitation of the standard data on the slowdown of median income growth, the reduction in absolute mobility, and rising mortality rates. (Cass never uses the word “inequality” but in talking about the gap between mean and median incomes he is talking about the same topic.) The novelty was hearing this from the Manhattan Institute which I associated with the Scott Winship perspective that all these data were flawed and everything was much better than it appeared.
Cass goes one step further, rejecting the emphasis on growth and instead establishing a “working hypothesis” that “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.” I am sympathetic, in many ways being excluded from the workforce is much worse than income inequality, creating a downward spiral of exclusion for people and communities. But I also think Cass goes too far given the strong correlation between growth and median/bottom income and broader positive effects, many of them documented in, among other places, Ben Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
This orientation sets him apart from both the “welfarism” that dominates economics by focusing on incomes and income distribution not the jobs and broader meaning Cass focuses on. It also separates him from supply siders and their relentless focus on economic growth over everything else. Some of this makes sense but, again, I think Cass understates the degree to which more money—especially for families with children—improves long-run outcomes in areas like health, education, crime and the labor market.
The second part of Cass’s book focuses on policy issues and in almost every case he evaluates them based on their impact of the employment prospects of less-skilled men. This leads him to be more supportive of manufacturing and less supportive of free trade and immigration than your typical center right conservative or, for that matter, myself.
In other places, it leads him to familiar arguments—like the need for less environmental regulation, a shift from cost-benefit analysis to a regulatory budget, and a lexicographic focus on less-skilled employment over environmental protection. Some of his arguments on the misapplication of cost-benefit analysis ring true but in my view the solution is better cost-benefit analysis not less of it. And he does not acknowledge the ambiguous relationship between environmental protection and employment (e.g., does requiring scrubbers create jobs retrofitting power plants or cost them?)
Cass’s discussion of unions is a mostly one-sided case against them but is followed by a thoughtful set of ideas on alternative work relationships that have much in common with Richard Freeman and what many on the left are thinking about, only in Cass’s case these would be in lieu of standard work protections.
The leading “big idea” in the book is Phelps-style wage subsidies for low wage work, an idea that I think deserves serious consideration although I would pilot it first since it is relatively untested and lends itself to fraud (people and employers can agree to report higher hours worked and thus record lower wages and collect a bigger subsidy).
Finally, the third part of Cass’s book is in many ways the most interesting, covering cultural and community issues that many progressives shy away from, including what Cass perceives as the increased denigration of more blue collar jobs and what this means for images and support for this work.
In the end, I disagree with many of Cass’s recommendations but I’m glad he is in what is mostly the right debate to be having about our economic future....more
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