Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 31
March 9, 2015
Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: Death Penalty Eugenics
Anthropologist Peter Frost and anthropologist and population geneticist Henry Harpending argue that killing murderers pacified the population eugenically.
At the beginning of [1500]… the English homicide rate was about 20 to 40 per year per 100,000 people. At the end [1750, AT], it was about 2 to 4 per 100,000, i.e., a 10-fold reduction (Eisner, 2001).
…Can this leftward shift be explained by the high execution rate between 1500 and 1750? During that period, 0.5 to 1% of all men were removed from each generation through court-ordered executions and a comparable proportion through extrajudicial executions, i.e., deaths of offenders at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. The total execution rate was thus somewhere between 1 and 2%. These men were permanently removed from the population, as was the heritable component of their propensity for homicide. If we assume a standard normal distribution in the male population, the most violent 1 to 2% should form a right-hand “tail” that begins 2.33–2.05 SD to the right of the mean propensity for homicide. If we eliminate this right-hand tail and leave only the other 98-99% to survive and reproduce, we have a selection differential of 0.027 to 0.049 SD per generation.
…The reader can see that this selection differential, which we derived from the execution rate, is at most a little over half the selection differential of 0.08 SD per generation that we derived from the historical decline in the homicide rate.
Thus, the authors argue that it is possible that a substantial decline in criminality can be explained by the eugenics of execution. The authors, assume, however, that executed criminals have no offspring which is unlikely, especially if criminals have higher fertility rates.
Hat tip to PseudoErasmus on twitter.
Is there any value to getting a Master’s in economics?
That is a recent question from Michael. I am a biased source, but I say yes for three reasons:
1. A master’s in economics, or for that matter many other areas, is of considerable value if you are working in the DC bureaucracy and trying to scale the ladder.
2. A master’s in economics can be of value in a non-profit organization. It shows you understand the material, and can in some way help promote it, even if you are not producing the research yourself.
3. As Bryan Caplan will be chronicling, there is an increasing demand for degrees and advanced degrees in many endeavors, even when the degree appears irrelevant to the nature of the work. Having a Master’s can set you apart from the crowd.
4. If you study more economics, you actually learn something.
Those of you with the highest of elite aspirations should opt for a Ph.d of course, but still the Master’s in economics will be making somewhat of a comeback. I mean this as something above and beyond the terminal Master’s often given to those who, for whatever worthy reason, do not finish their Ph.d degrees.
I do not readily find good data on line about the economics Master’s, do any of you know of good sources?
March 8, 2015
*Chappie*, or Emile
This Neill Blomkamp (“District 9″) movie has received only lukewarm reviews, but while highly imperfect it is more interesting than most critics seem to realize. The initial premise is that in a few years’ time South Africa resorts to AI-driven, robot policemen. I see the film as revolving around three key questions:
1. What will a robot be like, if he grows up under rather brutal conditions? This is first and foremost a movie about education, and it could have been written by John Gray. Don’t assume that people (robots) have an irrevocable tendency to support liberal values, at least not when the chips are down and they have been beaten up. The gang motive is both popular and enduring.
2. Can a society dependent on robots for law enforcement become/remain a liberal society? Or will the “arms race” between the law and the criminals result in brutality and a loss of liberty?
3. How robust is a robot society to the eventual possibility of human error and depravity?
Along the way there are references to Asimov, “Silent Running,” Blade Runner, Verhoeven of course, and other android sources. I can’t endorse every angle of the ending, or every character decision, but still I didn’t consider leaving this one.
Request for requests
What is on your mind? I am happy to entertain requests for topics and questions for future blog posts…
How happy are academic economists?
Lars P. Feld, Sarah Necker, and Bruno S. Frey have done some new research on this question, I would say this is good news for us, and bad news for many of you, though apparently you are clawing back some of what you gave to us:
We study the importance of economists’ professional situation toward their life satisfaction based on a unique survey of mostly academic economists. On average, economists report to be highly happy with life. Satisfaction is positively related to spending more time on doing research. The lack of a tenured position decreases satisfaction. However, the extent to which the uncertainty created by the tenure system affects satisfaction varies with the contract terms. The effect is stronger if the contract expires in the near future or cannot be extended. Publication success has no effect if it is controlled for academic rank and the contract duration. The finding suggests that publications are rather a means to an end, e.g., to acquire a tenured position. While the perceived level of external pressure also has no impact, the perceived change of pressure in recent years is positively related to economists’ life satisfaction. An explanation is that economists have accepted a high level of pressure when entering academia but are not willing to cope with the recent increase.
The SSRN link is here, via www.bookforum.com.
Assorted links
1. Gett: The Trail of Viviane Ansalem is an excellent movie.
2. Galen Strawson reviews John Gray’s latest book.
3. Knausgaard, book four, is now out in the UK. I just ordered mine, it comes in 6-10 business days. And here is an interview with Knausgaard. And here is the new book by his wife Linda.
4. Scott Sumner on Rubio-Lee tax reform.
5. Transgender experiences later in life.
6. The incentives that are German, St. Pauli edition.
March 7, 2015
Does suffering make Russians happier?
And can happiness research be trusted?:
According to the latest opinion survey in Russia, the share of people who are happy with their life has increased to 52 percent, from 44 percent in December 2014, and from 41 percent in December 2013. The survey results were published at the end of February by the state survey agency VCIOM. This is quite a spectacular finding, suggesting that despite Western sanctions and the recent ruble devaluation, life in Russia is going well.
Except these attitudes are hard to square with some facts.
Fact #1: Between January 2014 and March 2015, the price of food products has increased by 29.3 percent. After the sanctions, prices of fruit have shot up by 45 percent, vegetables by 41 percent, fish by 30 percent, and meat by 28 percent. All this, according to Rosstat, the state statistical agency.
Fact #2: January 2015 saw a 51 percent fall in the number of Russian traveling abroad, relative to January a year earlier. Fewer Russians go skiing in Europe: Russian tourism dropped by 27 percent to Austria, by 52 percent to Finland, and by 43 percent to France. And lest one thinks that most Russian skiers now go to Sochi, it is worth pointing out that the numbers from last summer also show a significant decline in the tourist visits to Thailand, Bulgaria, Spain, Dubai, and other beach destinations.
Fact #3: 115,390 cars were sold in Russia in January 2015, down from 151,000 in January 2014, and 163,000 in January 2013. In other words, about one quarter fewer new cars have been sold so far this year.
That is from Simeon Djankov, via www.macrodigest.com. And if current trends continue, maybe the Ukrainians will end up happier yet.
Protest sentences to ponder, Selma edition
Today, it would be impossible to obtain a federal court order permitting a five-day protest march on a 52-mile stretch of a major U.S. highway. Under contemporary legal doctrine, the Selma protests would have ended March 8, 1965.
…Starting in the 1970s…the federal courts began rolling back this idea. A series of rulings erected what is known as the public forum doctrine, which lets a city, state or the federal government decide whether public property can be used for 1st Amendment activities. It also means that if courts do not designate a place a “traditional public forum,” government may forbid its use as a site of protest altogether.
That is from Ronald J. Krotosynszski, Jr., there is more of interest here.
The endgame of Communist rule in China?
China expert David Shambaugh is claiming exactly that in a bold argument. Here is a summary of his brief:
He points to “five telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability”: an apparent lack of confidence among the country’s wealthy; intensified political repression, betraying insecurity among the leadership itself; a sense that “even many regime loyalists are just going through the motions”; corruption too pervasive and deep-rooted for Xi’s ongoing crackdown to fully address; and an economy “stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit.”
Shambaugh also argues “Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly.”
That’s pretty heady stuff and I am happy to link to material I disagree with, but disagree I do. My reasons are simple:
1. There are internal coups, which are more or less invisible to most of the world, and external coups, where a visible overthrow of a government makes the front page and is accompanied by violent conflict in public places and a change in the labeling of the regime. China already has shown its system can accommodate internal coups, for better or worse. You can argue they have such internal coups (on average) every ten to twelve years.
2. It is entirely reasonable (though very hard to call) to expect another internal coup in China.
3. Does any coup in China prefer to a) jettison the Communist brand?, or b) refurbish the Communist brand? I say b), by a long mile. The Communists drove the foreigners out of the country, built the modern nation, and delivered close to ten percent growth for almost thirty-five years running. Most of the time the Communist Party has been pretty popular, in spite of all the (justified) cynicism about the corruption.
4. Once you accept #3, and work back to rethink #1, you expect at most an internal coup in China, with external continuity and a maintenance of the Communist party brand, albeit in refurbished form.
5. The strongest version of Shambaugh’s argument is that there is no “core” to the internal coups, a’ la Gordon Tullock’s book Autocracy. You get too many internal coups, or too many incipient internal coups, and the public square is required to impose structural equilibrium on the problem. Maybe so, but that requires lots of claims about the internal dynamics of Chinese politics, and the lack of internal coup stability mechanisms. The cited evidence by Shambaugh does not seem to bear directly on this question, and so I am back to having no strong reason to expect an external coup, much less a chaotic and bloody one.
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