Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 562
January 21, 2012
*Life in the Sick-Room*
This neglected gem of a book was written by Harriet Martineau, best known for her 19th century tracts on political economy. Now I learn she was a forerunner of behavioral economics, occupying a space somewhere between Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the pain meditations of Dan Ariely, excerpt:
I have spoken of the relief afforded by visitations of severe pain. These really the vital forces, and dismiss the temptation, by substituting torture for weariness — at times a welcome change. The healthy are astonished at the good spirits of sufferers under tormenting complaints; and the most strait-laced preachers of fortitude and patience admit an occasional wonder that there is no suicide among that class of sufferers. The truth is, however, that the influence of acute pain, when only occasional, and not extremely protracted, is vivifying and cheering on the whole. The immediate anguish causes a temporary despair: but the reaction, when the pain departs, causes a relish of life such as the healthy and the gay hardly enjoy. Though a slow death by a torturing disease is a lot unspeakably awful to meet, and even to contemplate, there can be no question to the experience, that illness in which severe pain sometimes occurs is less trying than some in which a different kind of suffering is not relieved by such a stimulus and its consequent sensations.
The Wikipedia page on Martineau is especially good.
Fifty
Fifty is the smallest number that is the sum of two non-zero square numbers in two distinct ways: 50 = 12 + 72 = 52 + 52.[1] It is also the sum of three squares, 50 = 32 + 42 + 52. It is a Harshad number.
There is no solution to the equation φ(x) = 50, making 50 a nontotient. Nor is there a solution to the equation x – φ(x) = 50, making 50 a noncototient.
The aliquot sum of 50 is 43 and its aliquot sequence is (50,43,1,0). Fifty is itself the aliquot sum of 40 and 94.
There is more here.
Tale of a published article
From Joshua Gans:
But people are wrong on the Internet all of the time. So what really annoyed me was how Cowen ended the post:
"This counterintuitive conclusion is one reason why we have economic models."
…Now where did all that lead? Frustrated by the blog debate, I decided to write a proper academic paper. That took a little time. In the review process, the reviewers had great suggestions and the work expanded. To follow through on them I had a student, Vivienne Groves, help work on some extensions and she did such a great job she became a co-author on the paper. The paper was accepted and today was published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy; almost 5 years after Tyler Cowen's initial post. And the conclusion: everyone in the blog debate was a little right but also wrong in the blanket conclusions (including myself).
The rest of the story is here. Stephen Williamson serves up a different attitude, and here is Paul Krugman's very good post on open science and the internet.
January 20, 2012
From my inbox
I feel like the young economist bloggers of the world need some advice, but I don't have the stature, experience, or age to give it.
Working for a consulting company I'm fairly detached from the academic world, but we are staffed with PhD economists and we do hire grad students. When I read stuff that, for instance, REDACTED writes, in the tone that he writes it, I know that at my company if he were a potential hire we would a) Google him, and b) this would hurt his chances. This isn't about political leanings either. My liberal colleagues would look at his writings with the same distaste and worry that my conservative colleagues would.
Is this the same way it is in academia? Should young economist (and other academic) bloggers be more careful than many seem to be? Are they hurting their job market chances? Because that is my impression.
That is another reason for polite discourse, namely that it improves the career prospects and quality of one's readers and followers. The best reason, however, is still that it improves one's own thought processes and that is a point of substance not just style or manners. I've seen that point ignored a lot in the commentary of the last few weeks but not once seriously disputed.
How well can you communicate over email? (or blog posts? how about in person?)
Justin Krueger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker, and Zhi-Wen Ng write (pdf):
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one's own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators "hear" a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.
The pointer is from Sendhil Mullainathan on Twitter.
M3 in Italy
The link is here. There is a lot of talk of self-defeating austerity, and I agree that spending cuts often lead to real and nominal gdp declines in the short run, but most likely this is the critical problem, including in Greece.
For the pointer I thank Antony Slumbers.
Simulations and the Fermi paradox
If we are living in a simulation, does that resolve the Fermi paradox? I would think so. The "aliens" would be here, we just would not "see" them as such. But in fact we would be looking at nothing but the alien products, namely the creators of the simulation.
Should we expect to find alien civilizations in a simulation? The priors are not so clear: do the simulation creators want full Bayesian realism? Is the universe run by an alien version of Daniel Kahneman? The simulation has not excluded animals, but it has (so far) excluded self-replicating von Neumann probes or the use of supernovae as alien corporate advertisements. The simulation still might have alien civilizations turn up in ways which do not make Bayesian sense, but which add to the drama. For the time being, we are still in a "no aliens" do loop.
I thank Jim Olds for a conversation related to this topic. In any case, the Fermi paradox raises the likelihood that we are living in a simulation.
Addendum: Robin Hanson comments, as does Jim Olds.
Does fortune favor dragons?
John Nye and Noel Johnson report:
Why do seemingly irrational superstitions persist? This paper analyzes the widely held belief among Asians that children born in the Year of the Dragon are superior. It uses pooled cross section data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to show that Asian immigrants to the United States born in the 1976 year of the Dragon are more educated than comparable immigrants from non-Dragon years. In contrast, no such educational effect is noticeable for Dragon-year children in the general U.S. population. This paper also provides evidence that Asian mothers of Dragon year babies are more educated, richer, and slightly older than Asian mothers of non-Dragon year children. This suggests that belief in the greater superiority of Dragon-year children is self-fulfilling since the demographic characteristics associated with parents who are more able to adjust their birthing strategies to have Dragon children are also correlated with greater investment in their human capital.
An alternative link to the paper is here. What else does this imply for how to raise your kids?
Tyler Cowen's Blog
- Tyler Cowen's profile
- 844 followers
