Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 9

There is no great penal stagnation, a drone and cell phone twofer

…the warden of the Lee Correctional Institute, Cecilia Reynolds, said that in recent weeks her officers found 17 phones in one inmate’s cell. She said she suspected that the phones continue to come in on drones.

There is more here, interesting throughout.  How about this bit?:

Prison officials, echoing Ms. Reynolds, say that convicts and their families and friends are willing to pay more than $1,000 to get a device – like an iPhone — into a prison. Smartphones are so desirable because unlike pay phones at prisons, they are not recorded or monitored, enabling gang leaders to freely run their criminal activities from behind bars. The phones also allow them to watch pornography and communicate surreptitiously with fellow prisoners.

The phones are essential for coordinating with smugglers using drones, because the prisoners need to know where to find the deliveries in the yard. Most important for the smugglers, the prisoners can then use the phones to quickly pay them.

How about blocking cell phone signals inside the jail?  Elsewhere, a possibly radioactive drone was found on the roof of the office of Prime Minister Abe.  As I’ve said already on Twitter, the drone wars have begun…

Are eSports real sports, a money pump, or both?

What are non-e sports for that matter?  Via Liam Boluk, I read this from Prashob Menon:

Last year’s League of Legends championship, for example, drew nearly 30 million viewers, putting it in line with the combined viewership of the 2014 MLB and NBA finals, or the series finales of Breaking Bad and Two and a Half Men, plus the Season 4 finale of Game of Thrones. As with most sports, competitive gaming is now firmly entrenched in the US college system, with the country’s largest collegiate league counting more than 10,000 active players, some of whom are on full athletic scholarships. Eager to capitalize on growing interest in the sport, Major League Gaming (MLG) opened the first dedicated domestic eSports arena in October 2014, and major brands such as Ford, American Express and Coke have begun forming partnerships with game developers, teams, players, event organizers and video distributors. The US Department of State has been issuing athlete visas to competitive gamers since 2013.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to say eSports aren’t “real” sports, but the bigger question is whether it even matters. The media business is about eyeballs, and audiences are turning up in droves for the likes of Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends.

The economics indeed do not look so bad:

Moreover, eSports fans, unlike linear TV viewers, are highly engaged in the content. Major League Gaming, for instance, consistently beats the industry average on key digital ad metrics such as completion rates (90% vs. 72%), click-through rates (4% vs. 2%), and ad viewability (99% vs. 44%).

Here is Wikipedia on eSports.  I believe I have timed my birth at more or less the right time, so I will die of old age just when such institutions are taking over the world and pushing out baseball’s eight-team American League, as it ruled in 1968.

Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos

David Cyranoski and Sarah Reardon report:

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.

In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using ‘non-viable’ embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.

“I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes.”

There were too many off-target mutations, but the Chinese attitude seems to be if at first you don’t succeed…

…there are reports that other groups in China are also experimenting on human embryos.

The article is interesting throughout, for instance:

Huang says that the paper was rejected by Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections; both journals declined to comment on the claim (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)

There is more here.  And Carl Zimmer wrote an explainer on it.

Which of your priors need updating now?

The oldest stone tools on record may spell the end for the theory that complex toolmaking began with the genus Homo, to which humans belong. The 3.3-million-year-old artefacts, revealed at a conference in California last week, predate the first members of Homo, and suggest that more-ancient hominin ancestors had the intelligence and dexterity to craft sophisticated tools.

“This is a landmark discovery pertaining to one of the key evolutionary milestones,” says Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco…

The article is here, and the pointer, not surprisingly, is from Robin Hanson.  I say this should make us more pessimistic about dysgenics, and more pessimistic about the likely prospects for civilization in the future.  Ideally we would like to think that once brains reached a critical threshold, all sorts of good things started happening.  That scenario now seems yet further away from the truth, and the notion of civilizational dead ends, if only for long stretches of time, now seems more likely.  Your views?

Wednesday assorted link

1. John Key.

How can faster productivity growth *not* raise middle class incomes?

Jared Bernstein worries that it won’t.  But how can it not?

Let’s say an entrepreneur introduces a new product, call it the iPhone.  At first the relatively wealthy are the main buyers and at first a lot of the gains accrue to the IP holders.  Over time, however, the IP rents erode, smart phones become more popular, even with stupid patent laws smart phone innovations trickle down into cheaper models, and so on.  The middle class ends up better off.

Of course not all productivity gains are innovations.

Let’s say Ford can suddenly make cars — a known product — more cheaply.  Even in a world with market power, this expands output and lowers car prices, thereby raising real wages.  You might think labor won’t “get its fair share,” but still it should raise real wages, and that’s ignoring the possibility that wages in the auto plant might be bid up a bit.

So when some economists argue that faster productivity won’t raise middle class incomes, which model do they have in mind?

Even if you think income is shifting from capital to labor, how does the productivity gain worsen this shift?  (That is, real wages still ought to go up.)  Inquiring minds wish to know.

I am, by the way, familiar with a variety of diagrams showing a disconnect between productivity and real wages.  I’ll be happier with those when a) I know they are using common deflators, and b) they take adequate account of the possibly dysfunctional productivity in our hard to measure sectors of health, education, and government consumption.

Does the internet make you overconfident? (this post may offend some bloggers)

Dan Klein (from Abigail D.) directs my attention to an interesting paper by Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (pdf):

As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.

Having done some further search on this topic, using Google, I can assure you that I now have a much better grasp on whether this hypothesis is true or not…

Why I like trigger warnings

Jonathan Chait writes:

At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.

Read his whole discussion, but he more or less disapproves.  I’ve long wanted to disagree with Chait “from the left,” and it seems this is my chance, I had better grab it while I can.

While teaching Law and Literature this year, I attached very gentle, low key “trigger warnings” to a number of items on the syllabus, namely those dealing with extreme violence, rape, and some other very unpleasant situations.  I am glad I did this.  I told students that if they preferred to do a substitute assignment, I could arrange that.  Is that so unreasonable?  There were no takers, but I don’t see it did anyone harm or limited free speech in the classroom (or outside of it) to make this offer.  If anything, it may have eased speech a slight amount by noting it is OK to feel uncomfortable with some topics, or at least serving up that possibility into the realm of common knowledge.  That struck me as better and wiser than simply pretending we were studying the successful operation of the Coase theorem the whole time.

I don’t doubt that trigger warnings may be misused in some situations by some professors, but overall they seem to me like another small step to a better world.  I do agree we need to liberate trigger warnings from the strictures of the PC movement, no argument there.

Addendum: I am pleased to see that GMU was moved into the highest category for university free speech, according to FIRE.

Assorted links

1. Is Wall Street really robbing NYC’s pensions funds?

2. Do parents favor biological children over adopted children?

3. More on Merle Kling’s three laws.

4. Why did Sweden abolish its inheritance tax?

5. Do unit roots ruin the concept of potential gdp?

6. Swallow your password?

7. The shrinking federal deficit isn’t shrinking any more.

8. What does a robot have to do to get arrested?

Are one-way streets a plague on mankind?

Or at least a plague on Louisville?  From Emily Badger in The Washington Post:

…they took advantage of a kind of natural experiment: In 2011, Louisville converted two one-way streets near downtown, each a little more than a mile long, back to two-way traffic. In data that they gathered over the following three years, Gilderbloom and William Riggs found that traffic collisions dropped steeply — by 36 percent on one street and 60 percent on the other — after the conversion, even as the number of cars traveling these roads increased. Crime dropped too, by about a quarter, as crime in the rest of the city was rising. Property values rose, as did business revenue and pedestrian traffic, relative to before the change and to a pair of nearby comparison streets. The city, as a result, now stands to collect higher property tax revenues along these streets, and to spend less sending first-responders to accidents there.

Gilderbloom and Riggs have also done an analysis of the entire city of Louisville, comparing Census tracts with multi-lane one-way streets to those without them. The basic pattern holds city-wide: They found that the risk of a crash is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with these one-way streets. The property values in census tracts there were also about half the value of homes in the rest of the city.

The full story is here.