Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 616

"Age and Great Invention"

This is from Benjamin Jones:

Great achievements in knowledge are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Using data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors, I find that the mean age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by 6 years over the 20th Century. I estimate shifts in life-cycle productivity and show that innovators have become especially unproductive at younger ages. Meanwhile, the later start to the career is not compensated for by increasing productivity beyond early middle age. I further show that the early life-cycle dynamics are closely related to variation in the age at Ph.D. and discuss a theory where accumulations of knowledge across generations lead innovators to seek more education over time. More generally, the results show that individual innnovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life-cycle, a trend that reduces, other things equal, the aggregate output of innovators. This drop in productivity is particularly acute if innovators' raw ability is greatest when young.

Hat tip goes to Mike Gibson, read his post.

Here is a Gideon Rachmann column from today, on a similar but not exactly the same question.  I agree with his penultimate remark on the division of labor.

Assorted links

1. Symposium on inequality, including Acemoglu and Sumner.

2. China (Afghanistan) photo of the day.

3. Has digital music stopped growing?

4. Ip Man.

5. Critique of Myers-Briggs:"Due to these legitimate criticisms of the MBTI and its unscientific underpinnings, the test is rarely used in clinical psychology. I did a literature search on PubMed and discovered that, interestingly, many of the published studies of its practical utility come from nursing journals. Many of the other publications pertain to relationship counseling and religious counseling. Normally, this is a red flag. When you see a topic that purports to be psychological being used in practically every professional discipline except psychology, you have very good reason to be skeptical of its actual value."

6. The economics of the Davos conference.

7. How we subsidize banks (and see Krugman, to resolve this, one question is how well the expectations theory of the term structure in fact holds).

Kuwaiti Gift Exchange

KUWAIT CITY--Kuwait's ruler is marking several key anniversaries by literally paying tribute - handing out 1,000 dinar ($3,559) grants and free food coupons for every citizen in the Gulf nation.

The state news agency KUNA reports Monday that Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah has ordered the gifts for all the estimated 1 million Kuwaiti citizens.

It even covers newborns until Feb. 1....The food program is expected to offer free staples such as rice, eggs and milk until March 2012.

Hmmm, what could account for this sudden urge to gift?

In praise of picture books

No, I don't mean the pictures, I mean the text.  Picture books are one of the best ways to learn basic information about a topic.  First, by viewing the photos you are more likely to remember some aspects of the material.  It works for kids and maybe it works for you too.  Second, the text is stripped down to essentials.  Third, the authors of picture books are often relatively "agenda-less," since most people don't read the text, the selling point is the pictures, and the book is so expensive that the publisher doesn't want to rule out the broadest possible audience.

I would not use picture books to resolve disputes over details or to find the best conceptual framework.  The text in picture books has some of the same strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia pages.  It's odd to see a similar blandness in both the lowest cost and highest cost corners of the publishing world.

Lately I have been "reading" Ottoman Architecture, by Dogan Kuban, Toyokuni (oddly I can't find it on Amazon or remember the author's name), Textiles: Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art, by Bobbie Sumberg, and Architectura, by Miles Lewis.  You can walk into any public library and take home more splendid picture books than you will have time for.  How many you can carry is another constraint. 

New issue of Econ Journal Watch

In the new issue: 

Channeling Robert Higgs: Steven Horwitz replies to Gauti Eggertsson on the Great Depression.
 
Advanced Placement ® Economics: What Kind of Economics Do High Schoolers Get? Tawni Ferrarini, James Gwartney, and John Morton investigate.
 
Housing Supply Constraints, Natural and Regulatory, by Wendell Cox; with a Reply by Haifang Huang and Yao Tang
 
Troubling Research on Troubled Assets – Linus Wilson reports.
 
Growth Accelerations Revisited: With errors corrected and data extended, previous results prove fragile – Guo Xu reports.
 
The Ideological Profile of Harvard University Press: David Gordon categorizes 494 book published 2000-2010.
 
The Never to Be Forgotten Hutcheson: Excerpts from W.R Scott (1900)
 
 
EJW Audio:Advance Placement ® Economics: Tawni Ferrarini discusses the importance of AP Economics and unsatisfactory aspects of its content.
 
EJW Audio: The Role of Economists in Ending the Draft. Noble efforts recounted by David R. Henderson.

Greek bond buyback

Paul Krugman's link (and old paper) reminded me I had wanted to cover this idea:

Analysts said on Wednesday that having Greece buy back its own devalued bonds could be an important step toward solving Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

It's an interesting equilibrium.  Let's say Greek bonds are selling for 60 cents on the dollar.  If the Greek government offers sixty-one cents, arguably the government is signaling a more optimistic prognosis than a 60 cent value or even a 61 cent value for the bond.  Don't sell ("beware of Greeks bearing gifts!").  If everyone is a rational Bayesian, the price of bonds should go up to the point where the Greek government doesn't want to buy the bonds any more or where indifference holds.

If buying back some of the bonds makes the rest of the debt easier to pay back, all the more reason not to sell your bonds at the initial offer price.

The purchase might work if the Greek government can signal they don't have inside information about their own ability or willingness to pay back the money.  That's hard to do, but not impossible.  After all, companies do buy back their own shares and I don't think tax arbitrage is the only motive.  For instance the company also may wish to shift the composition of its creditors and perhaps governments have the same motive.  Then the purchase can be a win-win.

Another equilibrium is if the Greek government offers to buy back the bonds with some probability.  Sellers might then play a mixed strategy in response and maybe then we are getting somewhere, with some probability that is.  These games usually are complicated and if you don't already get the intuition here don't bother with it.

Overall, the schemes are unlikely to work in practice.

Does mismeasured inflation overturn a relative stagnation thesis?

In the comments, Slocum writes:

My skepticism is not that the nominal household income or GDP number are wrong, but that the inflation-adjusted numbers are wildly off because they fail to capture the innovations and transformational improvements in goods and services. Consider music. The music industry, measured in sales, is shrinking. 25 years ago as a college student, I bought a lot LPs and CDs (probably a few hundred $$ a year). Now I spend very little. Am I worse off as a music listener now? Obviously not -- I am immensely better off. But judging by the gross dollar volume of the music business, you would reach exactly the wrong conclusion about 'stagnation'.

The fundamental fact is that U.S. real median income has risen at a lower rate since 1973, not that progress has been absent.  One might think that the CPI is skewed and there are reasonable arguments to be made in this direction.  But the CPI will be most skewed to underappreciate progress when truly new goods and services are being introduced into the marketplace or spreading to new regions.  And that is (roughly) the 1870-1950 period, more than any other time.  In other words, if you account for CPI bias, the slowdown in median income growth -- the difference -- is probably larger than the numbers make it appear, even though in absolute terms both growth rates will be higher than measured. 

When some people hear the relative stagnation thesis, their minds shoot to various bogeymen: Paul Ehrlich, ridiculous 1907 proposals to close the patent office, predictions of mass starvation, and so on.  The simplest version of the point is that technological progress is not uniform, and that is borne out by thousands of years of human history.  This isn't Lake Wobegon, so some periods have to have lower than average growth in living standards than other periods.  One of those periods happens to be now, since 1973, give or take.  And from that flows many propositions of importance, for politics too.

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