Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 153

How big a deal is replication failure?

From Jason Mitchell at Harvard:

Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value.

Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way. Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.

Three standard rejoinders to this critique are considered and rejected. Despite claims to the contrary, failed replications do not provide meaningful information if they closely follow original methodology; they do not necessarily identify effects that may be too small or flimsy to be worth studying; and they cannot contribute to a cumulative understanding of scientific phenomena.

Replication efforts appear to reflect strong prior expectations that published findings are not reliable, and as such, do not constitute scientific output.

The field of social psychology can be improved, but not by the publication of negative findings.   Experimenters should be encouraged to restrict their “degrees of freedom,” for example, by specifying designs in advance.

Whether they mean to or not, authors and editors of failed replications are publicly impugning the scientific integrity of their colleagues. Targets of failed replications are justifiably upset, particularly given the inadequate basis for replicators’ extraordinary claims.

The full piece is here, I don’t quite buy it but a useful counter-tonic to a lot of current rhetoric.  I found this in my Twitter feed, but I forget whom to thank, sorry!

Addendum: An MR reader sends along this related argument.

Assorted links

1. More on the amazing economics of Transformers 4.  And what are the economics and politics of Snowpiercer?

2. A waterless toilet?

3. The culture that is San Francisco.

4. Expensive Japanese grapes, more than you think.  Yet I don’t see anyone complaining, you don’t have to buy them.

5. The surprising surge of Medicare Advantage.

6. B.S. about love stories.

Same sex parents and adopted children

The largest-ever study of same-sex parents found their children turn out healthier and happier than the general population.

A new study of 315 same-sex parents and 500 children in Australia found that, after correcting for socioeconomic factors, their children fared well on several measures, including asthma, dental care, behavioral issues, learning, sleep, and speech.

Do note this:

Perceived stigmas were associated with worse scores for physical activity, mental health, family cohesion, and emotional outcomes. The stigmas, however, were not prevalent enough to negatively tilt the children’s outcomes in a comparison to outcomes across the general population.

There is more here, from German Lopez, the study itself is here.

German leberkas meatloaf and sweet sausages with mustard arbitrage

A man exploited the perks of business-class travel to feast for free 35 times in a year at Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHA’s) Munich airport lounge — without ever taking off.

The man used the flexibility of the one-way fare to Zurich to repeatedly reschedule his travel plans after gaining access to food and drink, Munich district court said in a statement. Lufthansa canceled the ticket after more than a year and refunded the price, only for the man to purchase a replacement.

The court ruled that lounge services are provided on the assumption that travelers will seek to fly, and ordered the man to pay Lufthansa 1,980 euros ($2,705), equal to about 55 euros per visit or more than twice the cost of the 744.46-euro ticket. Lufthansa pursued a prosecution only after the man bought the second ticket with the intention of resuming his foraging raids.

Business-class fares typically offer the flexibility to rebook when plans change, while offering perks such as access to premium lounges, conference facilities and showers. The Munich facility at Lufthansa second-biggest hub offers Bavaria’s Loewenbraeu beer on tap, together with local delicacies including leberkas meatloaf and sausages with sweet mustard.

The link is here and for the pointer I thank Hugo Lindgren.  And yes, I know there are various spellings of “leberkas.”

What does real business cycle theory predict about the cyclicality of prices?

At least since King and Plosser 1984, the core prediction is that prices are procyclical and perhaps a leading indicator as well.  Think of inside money/credit as another input into production, and real business cycle theory as showing a general comovement of economic variables.  That means broader measures of the money supply go up in good times and fall in bad times.  Of course you don’t need real business cycle theory to get to those rather general conclusions, but they are fully consistent with real business cycle theory and will fall out of most sensible models with credit.

Now consider prices.  If money supply expansions/contractions come more quickly than output expansions/contractions, the price level will be pro-cyclical in an RBC model, at least during the early stages of the cycle before other outputs adjust.  Especially on the upswing it is easy to imagine how optimistic expectations give rise to some M2 which comes before the actual output rise.  And in bad times the broader aggregates won’t put much pressure on prices.  You can think of the broader “comovement effects” as outweighing possible interest rate effects.

Paul Krugman has a post attacking a bunch of people, but he is not focusing on what RBC models actually imply, and have implied for a long time.  (He sticks with attacking the easier target, namely those who predicted very high inflation from the high monetary base.)  It is not that “RBC models explain the crisis,” but rather demand and supply side models have more in common than is often recognized, all the more once you move beyond the immediate short run.

Furthermore there is nothing in the behavior of prices which rules out a significant (and I would say non-exclusive) role for the supply side.  On top of that the pure demand side theories predicted more deflation than we have ended up seeing and thus they would do well to incorporate some supply-side considerations.

How does education lower the demand for children?

It doesn’t always, but sometimes it does and here are some reasons why:

Caldwell identifies five mechanisms by which education reduces fertility by reshaping the economic relationship of parents and children. First, education reduces the ability of a child to work inside and outside the home – not just because school and studying take up time, but also because the child’s student status makes others reluctant to enforce traditional duties. Second, education increases the expense of raising a child, again not just because school is expensive, but because education increases a child’s demands on his parents for non-school expenses in a manner Caldwell describes as unprecedented. Third, education increases the dependency of children, reframing a formerly hard-working, productive child as primarily a producer and citizen. Fourth, schooling speeds up cultural change and creates new cultures. Finally, fifth, in the developing world education specifically transmits the values of the Western middle class, which is contemptuous of traditional “family morality” as described above.

That is from The View from Hell, via bullet-biting Ben Southwood on Twitter.

Not surprisingly, that is a post from the UK.  And if you’re wondering, there is a discussion involving the word “women” later in the post.

Swedish emotion markets in everything

The world’s first “emotional” auction, where people pay with feelings rather than money, has taken place in Sweden.

Bids were generated by the way people’s biometrics – heart rate and sweat changes – altered when they saw an item for sale.

Note that if you click on the link, it will make sounds and set a video in motion, caveat emptor.  Via Colin Camerer.  If all markets were run on this basis, what is it you would take home at the end of the day?  And who would be taking you home?

Assorted links

1. Markets in everything: respond to simulated zombie attacks.  Bring your own gun.

2. The case that inflation will increase.

3. If you are serious about self-constraint, exercise, “nudge,” and electric shocks.

4. This year’s bestselling album? The soundtrack to Frozen.

5. The actual, correct link to Matt’s blog-like entity on Vox.

6. Will the first conscious machines be on Wall Street?

Which major language has the lowest percentage of borrowing?

Chinese is an imperial language that has always loaned more than it borrowed. In the Max Planck Institute’s World Loanword Database, Mandarin Chinese has the lowest percentage of borrowings of all 41 languages studied, only 2 percent. (English, with one of the highest, has 42 percent.) In part because of the difficulty of translating alphabet-based languages into Chinese characters, it’s common to see what are called “calques”—nonphonetic literal translations like “re gou” for “hot dog” or “zhi zhu ren” for “Spiderman.” Despite (or because of) the vast appetite among the Chinese for learning English as a foreign language, Chinese ministers have recently cracked down on loanwords. And yet Chinese people still say “baibai” and “sorry”; “e-mail” is just a lot easier than “dianzi youjian,” the official substitute.

I also liked this bit:

…Japan often adapts words in ways that make them nearly unrecognizable to English-speakers. Über-Japanese media franchise Pokémon actually takes its name from English (“pocket monster”). Japan’s “puroresu” is another abbreviated compound, from “professional wrestling”; similarly, the extra syllables required to pronounce English consonants have given rise to “purasuchikku” (“plastic”) and “furai” (“fry”). Then there are loans where a word stays intact but the meaning shifts. A “smoking” is French for a tuxedo, and a “dressman” is a German male model. Chinese people say they want to “high” when they want to have a (non-drug-related) good time.

That is from Britt Peterson, there is more here, hat tip goes to The Browser.

Depersonalize the key questions

Ilan Mochari reports:

4. Depersonalize the key questions. Yeh suggests approaching your employees by saying something like this: “It’s my job to help you overcome bottlenecks and all the things that are in your way. What things are preventing you from accomplishing your mission, and how can I solve them?”

Phrasing the question this way enables you to emphasize the mission, rather than the employee himself. It allows the employee to describe what’s wrong with his job, without feeling like he’s critiquing his own performance or ability to adapt to challenging circumstances.

Casnocha says he learned a great conversational tactic from Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University. The idea is another form of depersonalizing questions: Ask an employee what “most people” think of a certain situation. Usually, the employee will tell you what most people think. But in doing so, she will also provide a glimpse of her own personal feelings. Specifically, Casnocha suggests these conversational cues:

How is everyone feeling about what’s going on in the office?

What do you think people are frustrated about here at work?

These questions allow you, as a leader, to follow up on whatever topics arise. But you can do so delicately, without pouncing on the employee who–even in sharing what “most people” think–has just displayed a great deal of vulnerability.