Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 325

What I’ve been reading

1. The Childhood of Jesus, by J.M. Coetzee.  Two-thirds of this is superb, although as a whole it doesn’t quite hang together.  It’s still much better than most of what is published.

2. David Soll, Empire of Water: An Environmental and Political History of the New York City Water Supply.  A good overview of the history, plus it makes it clear just how much the growth of the City required somewhat rapacious behavior with respect to the water rights of upper New York State.  The early history of the Groton Reservoir is interesting too.

3. Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!, in America’s Gilded Capital.  I feared this would bore me with atheoretical mud-slinging and gossip, but it is actually an astute look at “behavioral public choice” and how a lot of D.C. politics actually operates.  If you think you might want to read it, you should, although you can stop somewhere in the middle just fine.  My main objection is the subtitle.

Higher education in Greece

From a recent article:

“He says his name is George but declines to give his last name. He’s 29 years old, holds a master’s degree in economics, and has been unemployed for a year and a half, not counting the five months he worked as a street cleaner.

“It’s more difficult for the highly qualified,” he says. “The market thinks we will cost too much.” He’s applying for a position as a secretary, a job that requires a high school degree. For a couple of minutes, he and Stratigaki discuss whether his education will be an asset or a liability, and then their names are called.”

The article is here, sad throughout.  For the pointer I thank George Hawkey.

*How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel*

For a while I resisted reading this novel because I assumed it was a clever title followed by pedestrian content.  But it is actually an engaging book centered around the topic of…how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.  It is also a nice parody of self-help books.  I never considered putting it down.

Furthermore it is a landmark in the integration of economics and fiction, in this case development economics.  It’s more individual-centric than the “economics novels” of Russ Roberts.  You can think of this as a fictional economics biography with the quality of a book you would wish to read for its own sake.

The author is Mohsin Hamid and you can order the book here.

Assorted links

1. What exactly do peahens find attractive in the peacock’s tail?  An eye-tracking study.

2. The Japanese wage curve and aging as a possible source of deflation.

3. Joel Mokyr on technopessimism.

4. What happens when they allow only one trip to the salad bar?

5. Appointing gay ambassadors.

6. The Renzo Piano micro-house.

The new Baptists and bootleggers?

Activists fighting to legalize marijuana in states across the country are running into an unlikely opponent: people who make a living in the medical marijuana industry. Politico calls it “Big Marijuana,” noting that those who form part of the billion-dollar industry are fighting hard to keep competitors out of the game. In its fight against full legalization, the medical marijuana sector has joined some unusual allies. The Medical Marijuana Caregivers of Maine, for example, joined law-enforcement groups and social conservatives to fight against a bill that would have legalized possession of small quantities, reports Politico.

Medical marijuana is good business not just for dispensaries but also the doctors who agree to prescribe the drug. Finding a doctor willing to recommend the drug “can take months,” reports Market Watch. In Massachusetts, for example, some 3,000 people are on the waiting list to see a doctor.

The link is here.

Off-label prescribing vs. RCT

Incidentally, another thing that’s fascinating to me is that, there’s a very funny saying when it comes to the ethical review of science, or an anecdote, which is that if a doctor wakes up in the morning and decides that, for the next 100 patients with cancer that he or she sees that have this condition, he’s going to treat them all with this new drug because he thinks that drug works, he can do that. He doesn’t need to get anyone’s permission. He can use any drug “off-label” he wants when, in his judgment, it is helpful to the patient. He’ll talk to the patient. He needs to get the patient’s consent. He can’t administer the drug without the patient knowing. But, he can say to the patient, “I recommend that you do this,” and he can make this recommendation to every one of the next 100 patients he sees.

If, on the other hand, the doctor is more humble, and more judicious, and says “you know, I’m not sure that this drug works, I’m going to only give it to half of the next 100 patients I see,” then he needs to get IRB approval, because that’s research. So even though he’s giving it to fewer patients, now there’s more review.

That is from Nicholas A. Christakis, via Jim Olds.  The discussion is mostly about Big Data.

Assorted links

1. Christopher Balding on Chinese shadow banking.

2. How important is deliberate practice for sprinters?

3. Markets in everything: Mayan-language telenovelas.

4. Turkey clears bird on charges of spying for Israel.

5. When will drone blimps be hovering over DC?  And Edward Snowden and the future of Atlanticism.

Why don’t economists study Haiti more?

Tate Watkins, referring to an old Chris Blattman post, asks me such a question.  One might raise a similar query about Sri Lanka.  In both cases there are some obvious answers, having to do with ease of access and languages and also levels of violence (in the past, if not always today).

But I would like to raise a more general issue and I hope the development economists and social scientists reading this can add their expertise in the comments section.  To what extent is the choice of venue for study due to what I will call “social science infrastructure”?

I don’t mean roads and bridges.  I mean having trained armies of local assistants, data gathering and processing facilities, populations which are used to signing informed consent forms, medical clinics which understand how to work with social scientists and register data, and other less visible assets.  I once visited a Poverty Action Lab evaluation in Hyderabad and it struck me immediately just how much local assistance they needed to get their study of micro-credit off the ground.  As far as I could tell, the local assistance seemed really quite able but of course that cannot be taken for granted in all locales.

It has struck me for a while just how many RCT papers appear to be set in a relatively small number of places in Kenya.  Presumably these parts of Kenya have a very good social science infrastructure.

So what is going on here?  Who can shed light on this?  And to what extent does having a good social science infrastructure correlate with other features which will bias the results of these studies?

What is the implied model behind assortative mating?

In a fascinating new paper by Brant, et.al. on IQ, I read the following bit:

…we found that higher-IQ parents actually showed less assortative mating: the difference between parental IQ scores was positively correlated with mean parental IQ score.

My questions are numerous but I will start with two.

First, is this the correct metric for “less” assortative mating?

Second, do “straightforward” models predict such a result as a matter of course?  For instance, higher-IQ individuals may have greater scope to choose mates on the basis of complementary skills.  That may imply higher IQ gaps.  Furthermore higher-IQ individuals may marry later in life, put more effort into choosing, and encounter a wider variety of potential partners.  That may also imply wider gaps in IQ across partners, even if assortative mating (as defined in an all things considered way) remains strong.

Very often there is more variability at the tops of distributions rather than at the bottoms or in the middles.  Yet “pull away” forces may continue to operate.

To present a simple analogy, income gaps between marrying couples are probably higher at the upper end of the distribution than at the lower end.  Yet assortative mating with respect to income still may reenforce income inequality.

Does it matter if Muslim representatives are elected in India?

There is a new paper by Sonia R. Bhalotra, Guilhem Cassan, Irma Clots-Figueras,  and Lakshmi Iyer which says yes it does matter:

This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To allow for politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or characteristics that make religion salient, we use quasi-random variation in legislator identity generated by close elections between Muslim and non-Muslim candidates. We find that increasing the political representation of Muslims improves health and education outcomes in the district from which the legislator is elected. We find no evidence of religious favoritism: Muslim children do not benefit more from Muslim political representation than children from other religious groups.

The NBER version is here, there is an ungated pdf here.