https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/20155/how-effective-are-bounties
could do some kinda econometric analysis using the data explorer to determine this once and for all: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:c0cd449b9e69
maybe some kinda RDD in time, or difference-in-differences?
I don't think answer quality/quantity by time meets the common trend assumption for DD, tho... Questions that eventually receive bounty are prob higher quality in the first place, and higher quality answers accumulate more and better answers regardless. Hmm.

https://archive.is/qFL3N
"Weight Gain Trap"
last tweet is great tldr

As a foundation for this study, I organized the collection of village-level panel data on violent actors, managing teams of surveyors, village elders, and households in 380 war-torn areas of DRC. I introduce optimal taxation theory to the decision of violent actors to establish local monopolies of violence. The value of such decision hinges on their ability to tax the local population. A sharp rise in the global demand for coltan, a bulky commodity used in the electronics industry, leads violent actors to impose monopolies of violence and taxation in coltan sites, which persist even years after demand collapses. A similar rise in the demand for gold, easier to conceal and more difficult to tax, does not. However, the groups who nevertheless control gold sites are more likely to respond by undertaking investments in fiscal capacity, consistent with the difficulty to observe gold, and with well-documented trajectories of state formation in Europe (Ardant, 1975). The findings support the view that the expected revenue from taxation, determined in particular by tax base elasticity and costly investments in fiscal capacity, can explain the stages of state formation preceding the states as we recognize them today.

Each school in the district determines adoption independently, providing variation over schools and time. By including student and school fixed-effects we find evidence that uniform adoption improves attendance in secondary grades, while in elementary schools they generate large increases in teacher retention.

A key contribution of our paper is to estimate the returns to an additional year of schooling while holding highest credential constant. We find the year generates a two percent gain in monthly income, with somewhat higher returns for China’s disadvantaged. This is much smaller than most estimates which do not separate the returns to additional schooling from those to earning a credential. We show that the policy, while redistributive, has generated a likely net loss of tens of billions of dollars. We interpret these results through a model of signaling and human capital accumulation and conclude that a high signaling value of earning a credential, also known as “credentialism,” plays a crucial role in household schooling decisions and in the returns to schooling in modern China.

Access to Elite Education, Wage Premium, and Social Mobility: Evidence from China’s College Entrance Exam: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/ecs/events/seminar/seminar-papers/17-08-31.pdf
woah:
Exploiting a discontinuity in elite university eligibility around the cut off scores, we find elite education increases the monthly wage by around 40%. While elite education eligibility does significantly affect mobility, it does not alter the influence of parental background. We also provide suggestive evidence that the wage premium is more likely to be explained by university-related networks and signaling than that of human capital.

pseudoerasmus had some comments on Twitter ("Williamson", IV overuse, etc....)

edit 3/2019: I can't find anything that pseudoerasmus said about this stuff...

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/913863513038311426
https://archive.is/PYRx9
Trump tweets: For his voters.
Tax plan: Something else entirely.
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/913864779256692737
https://archive.is/5bzQz
This is appallingly stupid if accurate

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/28/upshot/what-the-tax-bill-would-look-like-for-25000-middle-class-families.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/30/us/politics/tax-cuts-increases-for-your-income.html

Treasury Removes Paper at Odds With Mnuchin’s Take on Corporate-Tax Cut’s Winners: https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-removes-paper-at-odds-with-mnuchins-take-on-corporate-tax-cuts-winners-1506638463

Tax changes for graduate students under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: https://bcide.gitlab.io/post/gop-tax-plan/
H.R.1 – 155th Congress (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) 1 proposes changes to the US Tax Code that threatens to destroy the finances of STEM graduate students nationwide. The offending provision, 1204(a)(3), strikes section 117(d) 2 of the US Tax Code. This means that under the proposal, tuition waivers are considered taxable income.

For graduate students, this means an increase of thousands of dollars in owed federal taxes. Below I show a calculation for my own situation. The short of it is this: My federal taxes increase from ~7.5% of my income to ~31%. I will owe about $6300 more in federal taxes under this legislation. Like many other STEM students, my choices would be limited to taking on significant debt or quitting my program entirely.

The Republican War on College: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/republican-college/546308/

Trump's plan to tax colleges will harm higher education — but it's still a good idea: http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-plan-taxing-colleges-is-a-good-idea-2017-11
- James Miller

The Republican Tax Plan Is a Disaster for Families With Children: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/the-republican-tax-plan-is-a-disaster-for-families-with-children/
- Kevin Drum

The gains from cutting corporate tax rates: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/corporate-taxes-2.html
I’ve been reading in this area on and off since the 1980s, and I really don’t think these are phony results.

Entrepreneurship and State Taxation: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018003pap.pdf
We find that new firm employment is negatively—and disproportionately—affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/us/politics/johnson-amendment-churches-taxes-politics.html
nobody in the comments section seems to have even considered the comparison with universities

The GOP Tax Bills Are Infrastructure Bills Too. Here’s Why.: http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-republican-tax-bills-impact-infrastructure.html

This study estimates the economic returns to Chinese Communist Party membership using complementary approaches to address the endogeneity of party membership status: propensity score matching and instrumental variable. Although the magnitudes of these estimates vary across estimators, all the estimates show positive economic returns to party membership.

5 The Human Capital Earnings Function: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c1767.pdf
Earnings Over the Lifecycle: The Mincer Earnings Function and Its Applications*: http://ftp.iza.org/dp3181.pdf

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade-offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus.

- III. Methodology has details
- it's an instrumental variable method paper

Table 5: Fraternity Membership and Grades

Do High School Sports Build or Reveal Character?: http://ftp.iza.org/dp11110.pdf
We examine the extent to which participation in high school athletics has beneficial effects on future education, labor market, and health outcomes. Due to the absence of plausible instruments in observational data, we use recently developed methods that relate selection on observables with selection on unobservables to estimate bounds on the causal effect of athletics participation. We analyze these effects in the US separately for men and women using three different nationally representative longitudinal data sets that each link high school athletics participation with later-life outcomes. We do not find consistent evidence of individual benefits reported in many previous studies – once we have accounted for selection, high school athletes are no more likely to attend college, earn higher wages, or participate in the labor force. However, we do find that men (but not women) who participated in high school athletics are more likely to exercise regularly as adults. Nevertheless, athletes are no less likely to be obese.

Online Social Network Effects in Labor Markets: Evidence From Facebook's Entry into College Campuses: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3381938
My estimates imply that access to Facebook for 4 years of college causes a 2.7 percentile increase in a cohort's average earnings, relative to the earnings of other individuals born in the same year.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/might-facebook-boost-wages.html
What Clockwork_Prior said. I was a college freshman when facebook first made its appearance and so I know that facebook's entry/exit cannot be treated as a quasi-random with respect to earnings. Facebook began at harvard, then expanded to other ivy league schools + places like stanford/MIT/CMU, before expanding into a larger set of universities.

Presuming the author is using a differences-in-differences research design, the estimates would be biased as they would essentially be calculating averaging earnings difference between Elite schools and non elite schools. If the sample is just restricted to the period where schools were simply elite, the problem still exist because facebook originated at Harvard and this becomes a comparison of Harvard earnings v.s. other schools.

We investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture, defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms, values, and attitudes. Using survey data for 76 countries, we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values, yet that within-group variation in culture trumps between-group variation. Thus, in contrast to a commonly held view, ethnic and cultural diversity are unrelated. Although only a small portion of a country’s overall cultural heterogeneity occurs between groups, we find that various political economy outcomes (such as civil conflict and public goods provision) worsen when there is greater overlap between ethnicity and culture. (JEL D74, H41, J15, O15, O17, Z13)

definition of chi-squared index, etc., under:
II. Measuring Heterogeneity

Table 5—Incidence of Civil Conflict and Diversity
Table 6—Public Goods Provision and Diversity

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/924002043576115202
https://archive.is/oqMnC
https://archive.is/sBqqo
https://archive.is/1AcXn
χ2 diversity: raising the risk of civil war. Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín, Wacziarg, in the American Economic Review (1/N)

What predicts higher χ2 diversity? The authors tell us that, too. Here are all of the variables that have a correlation > 0.4: (7/N)

one of them is UK legal origin...

online appendix (with maps, Figures B1-3): http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/2017_culture_appendix.pdf

In this study we analyze the relationship between national cognitive abilities and innovational output using data from 124 countries of the world. By employing cross-country IQ scores traditionally used by psychological literature to represent national intelligence, and Economic Complexity Index as a novel measure of innovation, our study shows that there is a positive connection between them. We use a variety of tests to check the robustness of the nexus. Overall, our findings indicate that more intelligent nations export more sophisticated and diverse products to the world market and thus are more innovative. Therefore, developing countries should consider investing in human capital and related institutions if they are to boost innovative capabilities and move up the technology ladder in producing and exporting sophisticated and varied lines of products. This should bring them greater economic diversity which could be a right lever in mitigating negative external shocks.

also serves as a good overview of issues in identification strategies+IV method and why natural experiments are so useful

Paying a Visit: The Dalai Lama Effect on International Trade: http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/research-files/repec/cam/pdf/cwpe1103.pdf

Table 5 has visa application data for 1993

https://www.wsj.com/articles/arkema-report-said-chemical-could-put-one-million-at-risk-1504215571
A chemical stored at a Houston plant that caught fire early Thursday morning presents an airborne danger to more than 1 million people if released in a worst-case scenario, according to a company risk management plan filed to the federal government.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-harvey-engineering-20170828-story.html
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-does-america-need-the-cajun-navy
https://twitter.com/_TamaraWinter/status/903613511082921984
I think this (generally nice) story about the Cajun Navy + groups like it misunderstands civil society in a big way.
How quickly can we adapt to change? An assessment of hurricane damage mitigation efforts using forecast uncertainty: https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/15156/831-martinez.pdf

Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in the US industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize.

Slicing the Pie: Quantifying the Aggregate and Distributional Effects of Trade: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23737
We find that the China shock increases average welfare but some groups experience losses as high as five times the average gain. Adjusted for plausible measures of inequality aversion, gains in social welfare are positive and only slightly lower than with the standard aggregation.

The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20131578
- Justin R. Pierce, Peter K. Schott
This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imports from China, and higher entry by US importers and foreign-owned Chinese exporters. At the plant level, shifts toward less labor-intensive production and exposure to the policy via input-output linkages also contribute to the decline in employment. Results are robust to other potential explanations of employment loss, and there is no similar reaction in the European Union, where policy did not change.

China-Like Wages Now Part Of U.S. Employment Boom: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/04/china-like-wages-now-part-of-u-s-employment-boom/

U.S. Companies Were Hurt by Trade With China Too: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-12/u-s-companies-were-hurt-by-trade-with-china-too
David Autor and David Dorn are two human wrecking balls smashing the edifice of economics consensus. For decades, the one big thing economists could agree on was that free trade, on balance, was good for the U.S. economy. Now, in a series of papers with a variety of co-authors, Autor and Dorn have shown that the dramatic increase in U.S. trade with China in the 2000s was a different and far more destructive beast -- a phenomenon commonly called the China Shock.

The first of these papers showed that the China Shock left deep and lasting scars on huge swathes of the American workforce. The second demonstrated that the China Shock increased political polarization. Now, together with Gordon Hanson, Pian Shu, and Gary Pisano, the wrecking-ball duo have a third paper, showing that the China Shock decreased U.S. corporate innovation.

Importing Political Polarization?: The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure: http://economics.mit.edu/files/11499
Trade-exposed districts with an initial majority white population or initially in Republican hands became substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican, while trade-exposed districts with an initial majority-minority population or initially in Democratic hands became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat.

The China Shock was Matched by a China Boom: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/china-shock-matched-china-boom.html
Our results fit the textbook story that job opportunities in exports make up for jobs lost in import-competing industries, or nearly so. Once we consider the export side, the negative employment effect of trade is much smaller than is implied in the previous literature. Although our analysis finds net job losses in the manufacturing sector for the US, there are remarkable job gains in services, suggesting that international trade has an impact on the labour market according to comparative advantage. The US has comparative advantages in services, so that overall trade led to higher employment through the increased demand for service jobs.

In the model of the economy as a GDP factory, the most fundamental equation is the production function, Y = f(K,L).

This says that total output (Y) is determined by the total amount of capital (K) and the total amount of labor (L).

Let me stipulate that the economy is legible to the extent that this model can be applied usefully to explain economic developments. I want to point out that the economy, while never as legible as economists might have thought, is rapidly becoming less legible.

key fact: cognitive ability is not growing in importance, but non-cognitive ability is

The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs—including many STEM occupations—shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s. JEL Codes: I20, I24, J01, J23, J24, J31

The Increasing Complementarity between Cognitive and Social Skills: http://econ.ucsb.edu/~weinberg/MathSocialWeinberger.pdf

The Changing Roles of Education and Ability in Wage Determination: http://business.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@commerce/@research/documents/doc/uow130116.pdf

Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research: http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf
Moderator analyses showed that the relationship between intelligence and success is dependent on the age of the sample but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship.

https://twitter.com/khazar_milkers/status/898996206973603840
https://archive.is/7gLXv
that feelio when america has crossed an inflection point and EQ is obviously more important for success in todays society than IQ
I think this is how to understand a lot of "corporate commitment to diversity" stuff.Not the only reason ofc, but reason it's so impregnable
compare: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:e9ac3d38e7a1
and: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a38f5756170d

g-reliant skills seem most susceptible to automation: https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/06/14/g-reliant-skills-seem-most-susceptible-to-automation/

THE ERROR TERM: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/the-error-term/
Imagine an objective function- something you want to maximize or minimize- with both a deterministic and a random component.

...

Part of y is rules-based and rational, part is random and outside rational control. Obviously, the ascent of civilization has, to the extent it has taken place, been based on focusing energies on those parts of the world that are responsive to rational interpretation and control.

But an interesting thing happens once automated processes are able to take over the mapping of patterns onto rules. The portion of the world that is responsive to algorithmic interpretation is also the rational, rules-based portion, almost tautologically. But in terms of our actual objective functions- the real portions of the world that we are trying to affect or influence- subtracting out the portion susceptible to algorithms does not eliminate the variation or make it unimportant. It simply makes it much more purely random rather than only partially so.

The interesting thing, to me, is that economic returns accumulate to the random portion of variation just as to the deterministic portion. In fact, if everybody has access to the same algorithms, the returns may well be largely to the random portion. The efficient market hypothesis in action, more or less.

...

But more generally, as more and more of the society comes under algorithmic control, as various forms of automated intelligence become ubiquitous, the remaining portion, and the portion for which individual workers are rewarded, might well become more irrational, more random, less satisfying, less intelligent.

Golden age for team players: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/10/social-skills-increasingly-valuable-to-employers-harvard-economist-finds/
Strong social skills increasingly valuable to employers, study finds

Number of available jobs by skill set (over time)

Changes in hourly wages by skill set (over time)

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/947904725294260224
https://archive.is/EEQA9
A resolution for the new year: Remember that intelligence is a predictor of social intelligence!

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/874440989561176064
Neutral theory is the Real Business Cycle Theory of evolution: a null hypothesis--laden with unit roots--that's often tough to reject.

This paper develops a new method to uncover the causal effect of trust on economic growth by focusing on the inherited component of trust and its time variation. We show that inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants is significantly influenced by the country of origin and the timing of arrival of their forebears. We thus use the inherited trust of descendants of US immigrants as a time-varying measure of inherited trust in their country of origin. This strategy allows to identify the sizeable causal impact of inherited trust on worldwide growth during the twentieth century by controlling for country fixed effects. (JEL N11, N12, N31, N32, O47, Z13)

key data:
Table 1, Figure 1, Figure 3, Figure 4

Trust Assimilation in the United States, Bryan Caplan: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/05/trust_assimilat.html

How Durable are Social Norms? Immigrant Trust and Generosity in 132 Countries: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19855
We find that migrants tend to make social trust assessments that mainly reflect conditions in the country where they now live, but they also reveal a significant influence from their countries of origin. The latter effect is one-third as important as the effect of local conditions. We also find that the altruistic behavior of migrants, as measured by the frequency of their donations in their new countries, is strongly determined by social norms in their new countries, while also retaining some effect of the levels of generosity found in their birth countries. To show that the durability of social norms is not simply due to a failure to recognize new circumstances, we demonstrate that there are no footprint effects for immigrants’ confidence in political institutions. Taken together, these findings support the notion that social norms are deeply rooted in long-standing cultures, yet are nonetheless subject to adaptation when there are major changes in the surrounding circumstances and environment.

The autocratic roots of social distrust: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596717300951
This paper identifies a new source of social distrust: an individual’s autocratic
origin.
 Individuals whose ancestors migrated from countries with higher autocracy
levels are less likely to trust others and to vote in presidential elections in the
U.S.
 The impact of autocratic culture on trust lasts for at least three generations
whereas the impact on voting disappears after one generation.
 The results are not driven by selection into migration or other factors such as the
GDP, education, or the strength of family ties in home countries in the U.S.
 Autocratic culture also has similar impacts on trust and voting across Europe.

Unofficial indicators of Chinese GDP often suggest that Beijing’s growth figures are exaggerated. This column uses nighttime light as a proxy to estimate Chinese GDP growth. Since 2012, the authors’ estimate is never appreciably lower, and is in many years higher, than the GDP growth rate reported in the official statistics. While not ruling out the risk of future turmoil, the analysis presents few immediate indications that Chinese growth is being systematically overestimated.

https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20170831/Politics-Economy/Chinese-provinces-heed-Xi-s-calls-for-accurate-GDP-data

world-wide: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~duffy/papers/jeg2.pdf
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/is-the-us-labour-share-as-constant-as-we-thought
https://www.economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2015/paper_844.pdf
We find that IPP capital entirely explains the observed decline of the US labor share, which otherwise is secularly constant over the past 65 years for structures and equipment capital. The labor share decline simply reflects the fact that the US economy is undergoing a transition toward a larger IPP sector.
https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed015/844.html
http://www.robertdkirkby.com/blog/2015/summary-of-piketty-i/
https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-rise-in-the-net-capital-share/
The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23396
The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013b_elsby_labor_share.pdf
Table 2 has industry disaggregation
Estimating the U.S. labor share: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-us-labor-share.htm

Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists
Automation and offshoring may be conspiring to reduce labor's share of income.

We have shown that management matters, with improvements in management practices improving plant-level outcomes. One response from economists might then be to argue that poor management can at most be a short-run problem, since in the long run better managed firms should take over the market. Yet many of our firms have been in business for 20 years and more.

One reason why better run firms do not dominate the market is constraints on growth derived from limited managerial span of control. In every firm in our sample only members of the owning family have positions with major decision-making power over finance, purchasing, operations or employment. Non-family members are given only lower-level managerial positions with authority only over basic day-to-day activities. The principal reason is that family members do not trust non-family members. For example, they are concerned if they let their plant managers procure yarn they may do so at inflated rates from friends and receive kick-backs.

A key reason for this inability to decentralize is the poor rule of law in India. Even if directors found managers stealing, their ability to successfully prosecute them and recover the assets is minimal because of the inefficiency of Indian civil courts. A compounding reason for the inability to decentralize in Indian firms is bad management practices, as this means the owners cannot keep good track of materials and finance, so may not even able to identify mismanagement or theft within their firms.30

As a result of this inability to delegate, firms can expand beyond the size that can be managed by a single director only if other family members are available to share directorial duties. Thus, an important predictor of firm size was the number of male family members of the owners. In particular, the number of brothers and sons of the leading director has a correlation of 0.689 with the total employment of the firm, compared to a correlation between employment and the average management score of 0.223. In fact the best managed firm in our sample had only one (large) production plant, in large part because the owner had no brothers or sons to help run a larger organization. This matches the ideas of the Lucas (1978) span of control model, that there are diminishing returns to how much additional productivity better management technology can generate from a single manager. In the Lucas model, the limits to firm growth restrict the ability of highly productive firms to drive lower productivity ones from the market. In our Indian firms, this span of control restriction is definitely binding, so unproductive firms are able to survive because more productive firms cannot expand.

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/885915088951095296

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/india-much-entrepreneurial-society-united-states-thats-problem.html
However, when we reverse the employment statistic–only ~15% of Indians work for a firm compared to approximately 90% of US workers we see the problem. Entrepreneurship in India isn’t a choice, it’s a requirement. Indian entrepreneurship is a consequence of India’s failed economy. As a I wrote in my Cato paper with Goldschlag, less developed countries in general, not just India, have more entrepreneurs.

...

The modal size of an Indian firm is 1 employee and the mean is just over 2. The mean number of employees in a US firm is closer to 20 but even though that is ten times the Indian number it obscures the real difference. The US has many small firms but what makes it different is that it also has large firms that employ lots of people. In fact, over half of all US workers are employed by the tiny minority (0.3%) of firms with over 500 employees.

blames colonialism, idk, might have contributed

2019 survey paper:
Caste and the Indian Economy: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20171307

Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150029
Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs. This paper shows that cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future corruption. Students who demonstrate pro-social preferences are less likely to prefer government jobs, while outcomes on an explicit game and attitudinal measures to measure corruption do not systematically predict job preferences. _A screening process that chooses high-ability applicants would not alter the average propensity for corruption._ The findings imply that differential selection into government may contribute, in part, to corruption.

Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment: http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0134_lhwpaper.pdf
Our study extends the understanding of the motivational basis of public sector employment by considering civic virtue in addition to altruism and risk aversion and by investigating selection and socialization. Using a largely representative, longitudinal data set of employees in Germany including 63,101 observations of 13,673 different individuals, we find that civic virtue relates positively to public sector employment beyond altruism and risk aversion. We find evidence on selection and no evidence on socialization as an explanation for this result.

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21716019-penchant-criminality-electoral-asset-india-worlds-biggest
Sadly, this is not a book about some small, shady corner of Indian politics: 34% of the members of parliament (MPs) in the Lok Sabha (lower house) have criminal charges filed against them; and the figure is rising (see chart). Some of the raps are peccadillos, such as rioting or unlawful assembly—par for the course in India’s raucous local politics. But over a fifth of MPs are in the dock for serious crimes, often facing reams of charges for anything from theft to intimidation and worse. (Because the Indian judicial system has a backlog of 31m cases, even serious crimes can take a decade or more to try, so few politicians have been convicted.) One can walk just about the whole way from Mumbai to Kolkata without stepping foot outside a constituency whose MP isn’t facing a charge.

...

What is more surprising is that the supply of willing criminals-cum-politicians was met with eager demand from voters. Over the past three general elections, a candidate with a rap sheet of serious charges has had an 18% chance of winning his or her race, compared with 6% for a “clean” rival. Mr Vaishnav dispels the conventional wisdom that crooks win because they can get voters to focus on caste or some other sectarian allegiance, thus overlooking their criminality. If anything, the more serious the charge, the bigger the electoral boost, as politicians well know.

As so often happens in India, poverty plays a part. India is almost unique in having adopted universal suffrage while it was still very poor. The upshot has been that underdeveloped institutions fail to deliver what citizens vote for. Getting the state to perform its most basic functions—building a school, disbursing a subsidy, repaving a road—is a job that can require banging a few heads together. Sometimes literally. Who better to represent needy constituents in these tricky situations than someone who “knows how to get things done”? If the system doesn’t work for you, a thuggish MP can be a powerful ally.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36446652

https://images.nature.com/original/nature-assets/nathumbehav/2017/s41562-017-0138/extref/s41562-017-0138-s1.pdf
Exposure to Norms: https://images.nature.com/original/nature-assets/nathumbehav/2017/s41562-017-0138/extref/s41562-017-0138-s1.pdf#page=114
Here we test how exposure to corruption norms affect behavior in our game. We do so by using our exposure score (a mean of the corruption perceptions of the countries the participant has lived in) and the heritage corruption score (a mean of the corruption perceptions of the countries the participant has an ethnic heritage). Since there is no incentive to offer bribes or contribute, except when compelled to do so by punishment, we predict that exposure to norms should primarily affect Leader decisions. Nonetheless, internalized norms may also affect the behavior of players in contributing and bribing.

...

The correlation between the direct exposure and heritage measures of corruption is r = 0.67, p < .001.

...

Then we see that direct exposure to corruption norms results in increased corrupt behavior—i.e. in our Canadian sample, those who have lived in corrupt countries from which they do not derive their heritage behave in more corrupt ways.

hard to interpret

https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/884477414100697092
http://psych.ubc.ca/when-less-is-best/

I don't think the solution is to just do nothing. Should look to history for ideas; process of "getting to Denmark" took centuries in NW Euro. Try to replicate and don't expect fast results.

Trust and Bribery: The Role of the Quid Pro Quo and the Link with Crime: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10510
I study data on bribes actually paid by individuals to public officials, viewing the results through a theoretical lens that considers the implications of trust networks. A bond of trust may permit an implicit quid pro quo to substitute for a bribe, which reduces corruption. Appropriate networks are more easily established in small towns, by long-term residents of areas with many other long-term residents, and by individuals in regions with many residents their own age. I confirm that the prevalence of bribery is lower under these circumstances, using the International Crime Victim Surveys. I also find that older people, who have had time to develop a network, bribe less. These results highlight the uphill nature of the battle against corruption faced by policy-makers in rapidly urbanizing countries with high fertility. I show that victims of (other) crimes bribe all types of public officials more than non-victims, and argue that both their victimization and bribery stem from a distrustful environment.

Kinship, Fractionalization and Corruption: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2847222
The theory of kin selection provides a straightforward justification for norms of nepotism and favoritism among relatives; more subtly, it also implies that the returns to such norms may be influenced by mating practices. Specifically, in societies with high levels of sub-ethnic fractionalization, where endogamous (and consanguineous) mating within kin-group, clan and tribe increases the local relatedness of individuals, the relative returns to norms of nepotism and favoritism are high. In societies with exogamous marriage practices, the relative returns to norms of impartial cooperation with non-relatives and strangers are increased. Using cross-country and within-country regression analyses and a cross-country lab experiment, we provide evidence for this account.

Ethnic favouritism: Not just an African phenomenon: http://voxeu.org/article/ethnic-favouritism-not-just-african-phenomenon
Ethnic favouritism is a global phenomenon
We find robust evidence for ethnic favouritism – ethnographic regions that are the current political leader’s ethnic homeland enjoy 7%-10% more intense night-time light, corresponding to 2%-3% higher regional GDP. Furthermore, we show that ethnic favouritism extends to ethnic groups that are linguistically close to the political leader.

Most significantly, these effects are as strong outside of Africa as they are within, challenging the preconception that ethnic favouritism is mainly or even entirely a sub-Saharan African phenomenon. For example, Bolivian presidents tended to favour areas populated by European descendants and Criollos, largely at the expense of the indigenous population. After the election of Evo Morales, a member of the indigenous Ayamara ethnic group, luminosity in indigenous areas grew substantially. Notably, critics suggest Morales gave special attention to the interests and values of the Ayamara at the expense of other indigenous peoples (e.g. Albro 2010, Postero 2010).

Democratisation is not a panacea
Our results further suggest that, while democratic institutions have a weak tendency to reduce ethnic favouritism, their effect is limited. In particular, a change from autocratic regimes to weak democracies does not seem to reduce ethnic favouritism (and may even increase it).

This result could in part be explained by political leaders’ motivations for engaging in ethnic favouritism. We find that the practice intensifies around election years in which the political leader's office is contested, suggesting that leaders may target policies towards their ethnic homelands to improve their re-election prospects, and not solely out of co-ethnic altruism. To the extent that political leaders engage in ethnic favouritism for electoral purposes, democratisation is not likely to be effective in curbing the practice.

Facebook’s war on free will: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will
Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals – or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”. The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revelations will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

The point is that Facebook has a strong, paternalistic view on what’s best for you, and it’s trying to transport you there. “To get people to this point where there’s more openness – that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it,” Zuckerberg has said. He has reason to believe that he will achieve that goal. With its size, Facebook has amassed outsized powers. “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,” Zuckerberg has said. “We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”

Facebook and the Destruction of Private Life: http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/12/30/facebook-and-the-destruction-of-private-life/
- HENRY DAMPIER

The key value of privacy, which tends to be lost amid all the technological babble about the concept, is that it makes social cooperation more feasible among people who disagree, share different tastes, or fundamental points of view.

...

This is especially an issue with democracy. The reason why the United States has anonymous voting laws is because without them, people are persecuted for their party affiliations by people with rival party loyalties. This being forgotten, the age of Facebook and similar technologies has opened up ordinary people to this sort of ordinary political persecution. Moderating influences like that of the respect for privacy put a brake on some of the more rapacious, violent aspects of party politics.

...

The impulse for this comes less from the availability of the technology, and more because of the preexisting social trends. When there is a family life, there is communication and closeness within the family.

With more people living without a family life, they go to the public square to get their needs for social validation met. This doesn’t work so well, because strangers have no skin in the life of the atomized individual that only exists as an image on their screens.

Based on content analysis, we construct a measure of media bias, which has high predicting power of a newspaper being a strictly controlled party organ and of a newspaperís advertising revenues. We Önd that more-biased newspapers 1) cover more news on political leaders in an o¢ cial way, while more heavily suppress reports that are detrimental to the ideology of the ruling party; and 2) cover more news that is related to the accountability of local government o¢ cials, such as corruption, disasters, and accidents, while reporting less on sports, entertainment, and crimes. These results indicate that the Chinese government not only uses the media to maintain regime stability and enhance top-down policy implementation, but also uses the media as a public signaling device to monitor government o¢ cials and mitigate the distortion of information from bottom up.

The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.3

On data, experiments, incentives and highly unconvincing research – papers and hot beverages: https://papersandhotbeverages.wordpress.com/2015/10/31/on-data-experiments-incentives-and-highly-unconvincing-research/
In my view, it has just to do with the fact that academia is a peer monitored organization. In the case of (bad) data collection papers, issues related to measurement are typically boring. They are relegated to appendices, no one really has an incentive to monitor it seriously. The problem is similar in formal theory: no one really goes through the algebra in detail, but it is in principle feasible to do it, and, actually, sometimes these errors are detected. If discussing the algebra of a proof is almost unthinkable in a seminar, going into the details of data collection, measurement and aggregation is not only hard to imagine, but probably intrinsically infeasible.

Something different happens for the experimentalist people. As I was saying, I feel we have come to a point in which many papers are evaluated based on the cleverness and originality of the research design (“Using the World Cup qualifiers as an instrument for patriotism!? Woaw! how cool/crazy is that! I wish I had had that idea”). The sexiness of the identification strategy has too often become a goal in itself. When your peers monitor you paying more attention to the originality of the identification strategy than to the research question, you probably have an incentive to mine reality for ever crazier discontinuities. It is true methodologists have been criticized in the past for analogous reasons, such as being guided by the desire to increase mathematical complexity without a clear benefit. But, if you work with pure formal theory or statistical theory, your work is not meant to immediately answer question about the real world, but instead to serve other researchers in their quest. This is something that can, in general, not be said of applied CI work.

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/662007951415238656
This post should have been entitled “Zombies who only think of their next cool IV fix”
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/662692917069422592
massive lust for quasi-natural experiments, regression discontinuities
barely matters if the effects are not all that big
I suppose even the best of things must reach their decadent phase; methodological innov. to manias……

https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/920988530788130816
Following this "collapse of small-N social psych results" business, where do I predict econ will collapse? I see two main contenders.
One is lab studies. I dallied with these a few years ago in a Kenya lab. We ran several pilots of N=200 to figure out the best way to treat
and to measure the outcome. Every pilot gave us a different stat sig result. I could have written six papers concluding different things.
I gave up more skeptical of these lab studies than ever before. The second contender is the long run impacts literature in economic history
We should be very suspicious since we never see a paper showing that a historical event had no effect on modern day institutions or dvpt.
On the one hand I find these studies fun, fascinating, and probably true in a broad sense. They usually reinforce a widely believed history
argument with interesting data and a cute empirical strategy. But I don't think anyone believes the standard errors. There's probably a HUGE
problem of nonsignificant results staying in the file drawer. Also, there are probably data problems that don't get revealed, as we see with
the recent Piketty paper (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/pikettys-data-reliable.html). So I take that literature with a vat of salt, even if I enjoy and admire the works
I used to think field experiments would show little consistency in results across place. That external validity concerns would be fatal.
In fact the results across different samples and places have proven surprisingly similar across places, and added a lot to general theory
Last, I've come to believe there is no such thing as a useful instrumental variable. The ones that actually meet the exclusion restriction
are so weird & particular that the local treatment effect is likely far different from the average treatment effect in non-transparent ways.
Most of the other IVs don't plausibly meet the e clue ion restriction. I mean, we should be concerned when the IV estimate is always 10x
larger than the OLS coefficient. This I find myself much more persuaded by simple natural experiments that use OLS, diff in diff, or
discontinuities, alongside randomized trials.

What do others think are the cliffs in economics?
PS All of these apply to political science too. Though I have a special extra target in poli sci: survey experiments! A few are good. I like
Dan Corstange's work. But it feels like 60% of dissertations these days are experiments buried in a survey instrument that measure small
changes in response. These at least have large N. But these are just uncontrolled labs, with negligible external validity in my mind.
The good ones are good. This method has its uses. But it's being way over-applied. More people have to make big and risky investments in big
natural and field experiments. Time to raise expectations and ambitions. This expectation bar, not technical ability, is the big advantage
economists have over political scientists when they compete in the same space.
(Ok. So are there any friends and colleagues I haven't insulted this morning? Let me know and I'll try my best to fix it with a screed)

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE TRUST DIFFERENCES-IN-DIFFERENCES ESTIMATES?∗: https://economics.mit.edu/files/750
Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its “effect” as well as the standard error of this estimate. These conventional DD standard errors severely understate the standard deviation of the estimators: we find an “effect” significant at the 5 percent level for up to 45 percent of the placebo interventions. We use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate how well existing methods help solve this problem. Econometric corrections that place a specific parametric form on the time-series process do not perform well. Bootstrap (taking into account the auto-correlation of the data) works well when the number of states is large enough. Two corrections based on asymptotic approximation of the variance-covariance matrix work well for moderate numbers of states and one correction that collapses the time series information into a “pre” and “post” period and explicitly takes into account the effective sample size works well even for small numbers of states.

‘METRICS MONDAY: 2SLS–CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD: http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/12733
As it turns out, Young finds that
1. Conventional tests tend to overreject the null hypothesis that the 2SLS coefficient is equal to zero.
2. 2SLS estimates are falsely declared significant one third to one half of the time, depending on the method used for bootstrapping.
3. The 99-percent confidence intervals (CIs) of those 2SLS estimates include the OLS point estimate over 90 of the time. They include the full OLS 99-percent CI over 75 percent of the time.
4. 2SLS estimates are extremely sensitive to outliers. Removing simply one outlying cluster or observation, almost half of 2SLS results become insignificant. Things get worse when removing two outlying clusters or observations, as over 60 percent of 2SLS results then become insignificant.
5. Using a Durbin-Wu-Hausman test, less than 15 percent of regressions can reject the null that OLS estimates are unbiased at the 1-percent level.
6. 2SLS has considerably higher mean squared error than OLS.
7. In one third to one half of published results, the null that the IVs are totally irrelevant cannot be rejected, and so the correlation between the endogenous variable(s) and the IVs is due to finite sample correlation between them.
8. Finally, fewer than 10 percent of 2SLS estimates reject instrument irrelevance and the absence of OLS bias at the 1-percent level using a Durbin-Wu-Hausman test. It gets much worse–fewer than 5 percent–if you add in the requirement that the 2SLS CI that excludes the OLS estimate.

Methods Matter: P-Hacking and Causal Inference in Economics*: http://ftp.iza.org/dp11796.pdf
Applying multiple methods to 13,440 hypothesis tests reported in 25 top economics journals in 2015, we show that selective publication and p-hacking is a substantial problem in research employing DID and (in particular) IV. RCT and RDD are much less problematic. Almost 25% of claims of marginally significant results in IV papers are misleading.

https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1040887307568664577
Ever since I learned social science is completely fake, I've had a lot more time to do stuff that matters, like deadlifting and reading about Mediterranean haplogroups
--
Wait, so, from fakest to realest IV>DD>RCT>RDD? That totally matches my impression.

https://twitter.com/wwwojtekk/status/1190731344336293889
https://archive.is/EZu0h
Great (not completely new but still good to have it in one place) discussion of RCTs and inference in economics by Deaton, my favorite sentences (more general than just about RCT) below
Randomization in the tropics revisited: a theme and eleven variations: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/deaton/files/deaton_randomization_revisited_v3_2019.pdf

http://svmiller.com/blog/2014/08/reading-a-regression-table-a-guide-for-students/
http://egap.org/methods-guides/10-things-know-about-reading-regression-table
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86xvmUYo-Q
http://psych.unl.edu/psycrs/statpage/full_eg.pdf

typical table in econometrics: http://imgur.com/a/RTqfJ
- different columns summarize robustness checks w/ different sets of controls
- parens = standard errors
- variance explained+number observations at bottom
- dependent variable at absolute top, rows = explanatory variables

This paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, in the sense that economic activity is spread more equally across sectors, but there exists, relatively late in the development process, a point at which they start specializing again. We discuss this finding in light of existing theories of trade and growth, which generally predict a monotonic relationship between income and diversification. (JEL F43, F15, O40)

seems unhealthy to me (complacency)

I'm Tabarrokian on this, trust literatures not papers.
Obvious extension: Trust good identification over correlations.

lmao:
I am wondering to what extent this is a criticism of Chetty et.al., or simply a disaggregation.  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what exactly are the differences between place-level characteristics and family- or person-level characteristics.  I don’t take Chetty’s original story about places to concern _what kind of molecules are in the dirt_, or what is the climate, but rather how people in a particular place interact with each other.  In that sense the result always was about family- or person-level characteristics.  Does the ability of family-level characteristics to pick up these interaction effects mean that place-level effects are not operating?

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/872886479151935488

We find some evidence that terror is systematically imported from countries with large Muslim populations. A larger number of attacks against foreigners in the host country increases the risk of terror from foreigners there. We find that host country policies relating to integration and the rights of foreigners are key to fight terror – stricter policies that exclude foreigners already living in a country increase the risk of terror. High-skilled migrants are associated with a significantly lower risk of terror compared to low-skilled ones, while there is no significant difference between male and female migrants.

Economists believe that because technology is a public good national productivity levels should "converge."

lol, Brad Delong's gonna be confused for a long time

...

Holding constant 1870 per capita income, nations that had Protestant religious establishments in 1870 have 1979 per capita incomes more than one-third higher than do nations that had Catholic establishments. Interpretation of this fact is very difficult, but it does suggest that Max Weber [I9051 (1958) may have something to teach us about the forces that have determined growth in the industrial West over the past century.

nice

An inflow of OOT real estate buyers pushes up prices, rents, and wages. It increases the concentration of young, high-productivity, and wealthy households in the city center (gentrification). When OOT investors buy 10% of the housing stock, city welfare goes down by 0.3% of permanent consumption levels. The average renter suffers a large welfare loss while the average owner gains modestly. We calibrate the model to the New York metro area using data on OOT purchases.The observed increase in OOT purchases is associated with 1.1% higher house prices and a 0.1% welfare loss.

We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/indicators-racial-progress-wolfers.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2597879/

not much of a difference by gender (seems female->more supportive in northern countries, less supportive in southern countries), biggest thing is urbanity+educational attainment

https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/899850410935975940
https://archive.is/nUJp2
Vote share for WEuro populist parties higher in regions: rural, ⇈foreigners, ⇈unemployment, AND ⇈education except in cities (surprising)
the urban educated hate the nationalist parties but the nonurban educated are prone to support them. Not all educated are alike

The success of radical right-wing parties in Western European regions – new challenging findings: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14782804.2016.1198691

Can Television Reduce Xenophobia? The Case of East Germany: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2932276
To examine this question, we exploit the fact that individuals in some areas of East Germany – due to their geographic location – could not receive West German television until 1989. We conjecture that individuals who received West German television were exposed more frequently to foreigners and thus have developed less xenophobia than people who were not exposed to those programs. Our results show that regions that could receive West German television were less likely to vote for right-wing parties during the national elections from 1998 to 2013. Only recently, the same regions were also more likely to vote for left-wing parties. Moreover, while counties that hosted more foreigners in 1989 were also more likely to vote for right-wing parties in most elections, we find counties that recently hosted more foreign visitors showed less xenophobia, which is in line with intergroup contact theory.

With an Open Mind: Openness to Experience Moderates the Effect of Interethnic Encounters on Support for Immigration: https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-abstract/33/5/721/4102111/With-an-Open-Mind-Openness-to-Experience-Moderates

Refugees Unwelcome? Changes in the Public Acceptance of Immigrants and Refugees in Germany in the Course of Europe’s ‘Immigration Crisis’: https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/esr/jcx071/4557564/Refugees-Unwelcome-Changes-in-the-Public
Derived from discussions making up the German immigration discourse during this time, we expect reduced acceptance especially of those immigrants who were explicitly connected to the salient events, like Muslims and the offenders of NYE. Most strikingly, we find that refugees were generally highly accepted and even more so in the second wave, whereas the acceptance of immigrants from Arab or African countries further decreased. Moreover, _female respondents’ initial preference for male immigrants_ disappeared. Contrary to our expectations, we find no changes in the acceptance of Muslims.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-14/the-world-s-most-important-graph-heads-to-the-graveyard
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21707219-charting-globalisations-discontents-shooting-elephant
https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/deconstructing-branko-milanovics-elephant-chart-does-it-show
http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/rebuttal-elephant-graph-discussion-or-elephants-are-tough-animals
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1093/wber/lhv039
http://www.css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html/172467
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/09/29/world-income-distribution/
https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/

Still an awesome chart!: https://principlesandinterest.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/still-an-awesome-chart/
controversy around Brank Milanovic's elephant chart

Recently it has become clear that many technologies follow a generalized version of Moore's law, i.e. costs tend to drop exponentially, at different rates that depend on the technology. Here we formulate Moore's law as a correlated geometric random walk with drift, and apply it to historical data on 53 technologies. We derive a closed form expression approximating the distribution of forecast errors as a function of time. Based on hind-casting experiments we show that this works well, making it possible to collapse the forecast errors for many different technologies at different time horizons onto the same universal distribution. This is valuable because it allows us to make forecasts for any given technology with a clear understanding of the quality of the forecasts. As a practical demonstration we make distributional forecasts at different time horizons for solar photovoltaic modules, and show how our method can be used to estimate the probability that a given technology will outperform another technology at a given point in the future.

model:
- p_t = unit price of tech
- log(p_t) = y_0 - μt + ∑_{i <= t} n_i
- n_t iid noise process

by Robert Solow (positive)

The data then exhibit a clear pattern. In France and Great Britain, national capital stood fairly steadily at about seven times national income from 1700 to 1910, then fell sharply from 1910 to 1950, presumably as a result of wars and depression, reaching a low of 2.5 in Britain and a bit less than 3 in France. The capital-income ratio then began to climb in both countries, and reached slightly more than 5 in Britain and slightly less than 6 in France by 2010. The trajectory in the United States was slightly different: it started at just above 3 in 1770, climbed to 5 in 1910, fell slightly in 1920, recovered to a high between 5 and 5.5 in 1930, fell to below 4 in 1950, and was back to 4.5 in 2010.

The wealth-income ratio in the United States has always been lower than in Europe. The main reason in the early years was that land values bulked less in the wide open spaces of North America. There was of course much more land, but it was very cheap. Into the twentieth century and onward, however, the lower capital-income ratio in the United States probably reflects the higher level of productivity: a given amount of capital could support a larger production of output than in Europe. It is no surprise that the two world wars caused much less destruction and dissipation of capital in the United States than in Britain and France. The important observation for Piketty’s argument is that, in all three countries, and elsewhere as well, the wealth-income ratio has been increasing since 1950, and is almost back to nineteenth-century levels. He projects this increase to continue into the current century, with weighty consequences that will be discussed as we go on.

...

Now if you multiply the rate of return on capital by the capital-income ratio, you get the share of capital in the national income. For example, if the rate of return is 5 percent a year and the stock of capital is six years worth of national income, income from capital will be 30 percent of national income, and so income from work will be the remaining 70 percent. At last, after all this preparation, we are beginning to talk about inequality, and in two distinct senses. First, we have arrived at the functional distribution of income—the split between income from work and income from wealth. Second, it is always the case that wealth is more highly concentrated among the rich than income from labor (although recent American history looks rather odd in this respect); and this being so, the larger the share of income from wealth, the more unequal the distribution of income among persons is likely to be. It is this inequality across persons that matters most for good or ill in a society.

...

The data are complicated and not easily comparable across time and space, but here is the flavor of Piketty’s summary picture. Capital is indeed very unequally distributed. Currently in the United States, the top 10 percent own about 70 percent of all the capital, half of that belonging to the top 1 percent; the next 40 percent—who compose the “middle class”—own about a quarter of the total (much of that in the form of housing), and the remaining half of the population owns next to nothing, about 5 percent of total wealth. Even that amount of middle-class property ownership is a new phenomenon in history. The typical European country is a little more egalitarian: the top 1 percent own 25 percent of the total capital, and the middle class 35 percent. (A century ago the European middle class owned essentially no wealth at all.) If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy.

Income from wealth is probably even more concentrated than wealth itself because, as Piketty notes, large blocks of wealth tend to earn a higher return than small ones. Some of this advantage comes from economies of scale, but more may come from the fact that very big investors have access to a wider range of investment opportunities than smaller investors. Income from work is naturally less concentrated than income from wealth. In Piketty’s stylized picture of the United States today, the top 1 percent earns about 12 percent of all labor income, the next 9 percent earn 23 percent, the middle class gets about 40 percent, and the bottom half about a quarter of income from work. Europe is not very different: the top 10 percent collect somewhat less and the other two groups a little more.

You get the picture: modern capitalism is an unequal society, and the rich-get-richer dynamic strongly suggest that it will get more so. But there is one more loose end to tie up, already hinted at, and it has to do with the advent of very high wage incomes. First, here are some facts about the composition of top incomes. About 60 percent of the income of the top 1 percent in the United States today is labor income. Only when you get to the top tenth of 1 percent does income from capital start to predominate. The income of the top hundredth of 1 percent is 70 percent from capital. The story for France is not very different, though the proportion of labor income is a bit higher at every level. Evidently there are some very high wage incomes, as if you didn’t know.

This is a fairly recent development. In the 1960s, the top 1 percent of wage earners collected a little more than 5 percent of all wage incomes. This fraction has risen pretty steadily until nowadays, when the top 1 percent of wage earners receive 10–12 percent of all wages. This time the story is rather different in France. There the share of total wages going to the top percentile was steady at 6 percent until very recently, when it climbed to 7 percent. The recent surge of extreme inequality at the top of the wage distribution may be primarily an American development. Piketty, who with Emmanuel Saez has made a careful study of high-income tax returns in the United States, attributes this to the rise of what he calls “supermanagers.” The very highest income class consists to a substantial extent of top executives of large corporations, with very rich compensation packages. (A disproportionate number of these, but by no means all of them, come from the financial services industry.) With or without stock options, these large pay packages get converted to wealth and future income from wealth. But the fact remains that much of the increased income (and wealth) inequality in the United States is driven by the rise of these supermanagers.

and Deirdre McCloskey (p critical): https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/170
nice discussion of empirical economics, economic history, market failures and statism, etc., with several bon mots

Piketty’s great splash will undoubtedly bring many young economically interested scholars to devote their lives to the study of the past. That is good, because economic history is one of the few scientifically quantitative branches of economics. In economic history, as in experimental economics and a few other fields, the economists confront the evidence (as they do not for example in most macroeconomics or industrial organization or international trade theory nowadays).

...

Piketty gives a fine example of how to do it. He does not get entangled as so many economists do in the sole empirical tool they are taught, namely, regression analysis on someone else’s “data” (one of the problems is the word data, meaning “things given”: scientists should deal in capta, “things seized”). Therefore he does not commit one of the two sins of modern economics, the use of meaningless “tests” of statistical significance (he occasionally refers to “statistically insignificant” relations between, say, tax rates and growth rates, but I am hoping he does not suppose that a large coefficient is “insignificant” because R. A. Fisher in 1925 said it was). Piketty constructs or uses statistics of aggregate capital and of inequality and then plots them out for inspection, which is what physicists, for example, also do in dealing with their experiments and observations. Nor does he commit the other sin, which is to waste scientific time on existence theorems. Physicists, again, don’t. If we economists are going to persist in physics envy let us at least learn what physicists actually do. Piketty stays close to the facts, and does not, for example, wander into the pointless worlds of non-cooperative game theory, long demolished by experimental economics. He also does not have recourse to non-computable general equilibrium, which never was of use for quantitative economic science, being a branch of philosophy, and a futile one at that. On both points, bravissimo.

...

Since those founding geniuses of classical economics, a market-tested betterment (a locution to be preferred to “capitalism”, with its erroneous implication that capital accumulation, not innovation, is what made us better off) has enormously enriched large parts of a humanity now seven times larger in population than in 1800, and bids fair in the next fifty years or so to enrich everyone on the planet. [Not SSA or MENA...]

...

Then economists, many on the left but some on the right, in quick succession from 1880 to the present—at the same time that market-tested betterment was driving real wages up and up and up—commenced worrying about, to name a few of the pessimisms concerning “capitalism” they discerned: greed, alienation, racial impurity, workers’ lack of bargaining strength, workers’ bad taste in consumption, immigration of lesser breeds, monopoly, unemployment, business cycles, increasing returns, externalities, under-consumption, monopolistic competition, separation of ownership from control, lack of planning, post-War stagnation, investment spillovers, unbalanced growth, dual labor markets, capital insufficiency (William Easterly calls it “capital fundamentalism”), peasant irrationality, capital-market imperfections, public … [more]

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/852339296358940672
deleeted

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/943238170312929280
https://archive.is/p5hRA

Did Nations that Boosted Education Grow Faster?: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html
On average, no relationship. The trendline points down slightly, but for the time being let's just call it a draw. It's a well-known fact that countries that started the 1960's with high education levels grew faster (example), but this graph is about something different. This graph shows that countries that increased their education levels did not grow faster.

Where has all the education gone?: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1016.2704&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/948052794681966593
https://archive.is/kjxqp

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/950952412503822337
https://archive.is/3YPic

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/862961420065001472
http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/schooling-educational-achievement-and-latin-american-growth-puzzle

The Case Against Education: What's Taking So Long, Bryan Caplan: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_case_agains_9.html

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education.
- Bryan Caplan

College: Capital or Signal?: http://www.economicmanblog.com/2017/02/25/college-capital-or-signal/
After his review of the literature, Caplan concludes that roughly 80% of the earnings effect from college comes from signalling, with only 20% the result of skill building. Put this together with his earlier observations about the private returns to college education, along with its exploding cost, and Caplan thinks that the social returns are negative. The policy implications of this will come as very bitter medicine for friends of Bernie Sanders.

Doubting the Null Hypothesis: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/doubting-the-null-hypothesis/

Is higher education/college in the US more about skill-building or about signaling?: https://www.quora.com/Is-higher-education-college-in-the-US-more-about-skill-building-or-about-signaling
ballpark: 50% signaling, 30% selection, 20% addition to human capital
more signaling in art history, more human capital in engineering, more selection in philosophy

Econ Duel! Is Education Signaling or Skill Building?: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/03/econ-duel-is-education-signaling-or-skill-building.html
Marginal Revolution University has a brand new feature, Econ Duel! Our first Econ Duel features Tyler and me debating the question, Is education more about signaling or skill building?

Against Tulip Subsidies: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/read-the-case-against-education.html

https://nintil.com/2018/02/05/notes-on-the-case-against-education/

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018-02-19-0000/bryan-caplan-case-against-education-review

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/the-case-against-education/
Most American public school kids are low-income; about half are non-white; most are fairly low skilled academically. For most American kids, the majority of the waking hours they spend not engaged with electronic media are at school; the majority of their in-person relationships are at school; the most important relationships they have with an adult who is not their parent is with their teacher. For their parents, the most important in-person source of community is also their kids’ school. Young people need adult mirrors, models, mentors, and in an earlier era these might have been provided by extended families, but in our own era this all falls upon schools.

Caplan gestures towards work and earlier labor force participation as alternatives to school for many if not all kids. And I empathize: the years that I would point to as making me who I am were ones where I was working, not studying. But they were years spent working in schools, as a teacher or assistant. If schools did not exist, is there an alternative that we genuinely believe would arise to draw young people into the life of their community?

...

It is not an accident that the state that spends the least on education is Utah, where the LDS church can take up some of the slack for schools, while next door Wyoming spends almost the most of any state at $16,000 per student. Education is now the one surviving binding principle of the society as a whole, the one black box everyone will agree to, and so while you can press for less subsidization of education by government, and for privatization of costs, as Caplan does, there’s really nothing people can substitute for it. This is partially about signaling, sure, but it’s also because outside of schools and a few religious enclaves our society is but a darkling plain beset by winds.

This doesn’t mean that we should leave Caplan’s critique on the shelf. Much of education is focused on an insane, zero-sum race for finite rewards. Much of schooling does push kids, parents, schools, and school systems towards a solution ad absurdum, where anything less than 100 percent of kids headed to a doctorate and the big coding job in the sky is a sign of failure of everyone concerned.

But let’s approach this with an eye towards the limits of the possible and the reality of diminishing returns.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/poison-ivy-halls/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/poison-ivy-halls/#comment-101293
The real reason the left would support Moander: the usual reason. because he’s an enemy.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/bright-college-days-part-i/
I have a problem in thinking about education, since my preferences and personal educational experience are atypical, so I can’t just gut it out. On the other hand, knowing that puts me ahead of a lot of people that seem convinced that all real people, including all Arab cabdrivers, think and feel just as they do.

One important fact, relevant to this review. I don’t like Caplan. I think he doesn’t understand – can’t understand – human nature, and although that sometimes confers a different and interesting perspective, it’s not a royal road to truth. Nor would I want to share a foxhole with him: I don’t trust him. So if I say that I agree with some parts of this book, you should believe me.

...

Caplan doesn’t talk about possible ways of improving knowledge acquisition and retention. Maybe he thinks that’s impossible, and he may be right, at least within a conventional universe of possibilities. That’s a bit outside of his thesis, anyhow. Me it interests.

He dismisses objections from educational psychologists who claim that studying a subject improves you in subtle ways even after you forget all of it. I too find that hard to believe. On the other hand, it looks to me as if poorly-digested fragments of information picked up in college have some effect on public policy later in life: it is no coincidence that most prominent people in public life (at a given moment) share a lot of the same ideas. People are vaguely remembering the same crap from the same sources, or related sources. It’s correlated crap, which has a much stronger effect than random crap.

These widespread new ideas are usually wrong. They come from somewhere – in part, from higher education. Along this line, Caplan thinks that college has only a weak ideological effect on students. I don’t believe he is correct. In part, this is because most people use a shifting standard: what’s liberal or conservative gets redefined over time. At any given time a population is roughly half left and half right – but the content of those labels changes a lot. There’s a shift.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/bright-college-days-part-i/#comment-101492
I put it this way, a while ago: “When you think about it, falsehoods, stupid crap, make the best group identifiers, because anyone might agree with you when you’re obviously right. Signing up to clear nonsense is a better test of group loyalty. A true friend is with you when you’re wrong. Ideally, not just wrong, but barking mad, rolling around in your own vomit wrong.”
--
You just explained the Credo quia absurdum doctrine. I always wondered if it was nonsense. It is not.
--
Someone on twitter caught it first – got all the way to “sliding down the razor blade of life”. Which I explained is now called “transitioning”

What Catholics believe: https://theweek.com/articles/781925/what-catholics-believe
We believe all of these things, fantastical as they may sound, and we believe them for what we consider good reasons, well attested by history, consistent with the most exacting standards of logic. We will profess them in this place of wrath and tears until the extraordinary event referenced above, for which men and women have hoped and prayed for nearly 2,000 years, comes to pass.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/02/05/bright-college-days-part-ii/
According to Caplan, employers are looking for conformity, conscientiousness, and intelligence. They use completion of high school, or completion of college as a sign of conformity and conscientiousness. College certainly looks as if it’s mostly signaling, and it’s hugely expensive signaling, in terms of college costs and foregone earnings.

But inserting conformity into the merit function is tricky: things become important signals… because they’re important signals. Otherwise useful actions are contraindicated because they’re “not done”. For example, test scores convey useful information. They could help show that an applicant is smart even though he attended a mediocre school – the same role they play in college admissions. But employers seldom request test scores, and although applicants may provide them, few do. Caplan says ” The word on the street… [more]

We instrument our measures of schooling by using the variation in compulsory schooling laws and differences in mobilization rates in WWII, which we relate to the education benefits provided by the GI Bill Act (1944). This novel instrument provides a clean source of variation in the costs of attending college. Two-stage least squared regressions find no effect of the share of population with secondary schooling on outcomes such as n R&D per worker or TFP growth. On the other hand, the share of population with tertiary education has a significant effect on both R&D per worker or TFP growth.

1. News Media: Murdoch and the Purple Land
2. The Effects of Money and Lobbying in Politics
3. Video Games: Crash Bandicoot Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theatre
4. Porn: Having an Orgasm in a Crowded Theatre
5. Sexist Speech: Crash Bandicoot Making Rape Jokes in a Crowded Theatre
6. Race Related Speech: Hollywood, Skokie and Umugandas in Rwanda
7. Incitement, Obedience and Speech Act Theory: Eichmann to Jihadi Twitter
8. Conclusion: Epistemic Humility

...

Here is what I am seeking to show in the next few paragraphs:
1. Corporate ownership of the media does not lead to corporate-friendly media output arising from a conflict of interest.
2. The main driver of media output is consumer demand (i.e., people read what they already agree with) as the above extract indicates.
3. This could create a new negative effect of a free media: people living in a bubble where their views are reinforced by an uninformative partisan press.
4. I do not believe this bubble exists: reputational effects and consumer demand for truth rather than reinforcement of existing beliefs means that the partisan media does not, uniformly or consistently, distort the truth.

...

For clarity: my primary argument is that things like campaign contributions and lobbying don’t matter. But, in deference to how mixed the literature is, I would say that our aversion to interest groups is misguided. Whether it’s Save the Children campaigning for minimum levels of aid or Citigroup lobbying for certain legislation, we needn’t jump to accusations of corruption or cronyism. Democratic politics is about legislators listening, being persuaded in a marketplace of ideas – and it really doesn’t matter if the person putting forward that idea is Exxon Mobil or a constituent. The burden for suggesting that there is impropriety is necessarily high and I simply haven’t seen any convincing evidence that there is necessarily or mostly a link between money, lobbying, politics and impropriety.

...

[some stuff on video games, porn, sexism, and racial hate speech]

[this is pretty crazy:]
In essence, ‘learning from the peasant ideology… and the everyday propaganda during umuganda had also motivated people to see their fellow ba-Tutsi as enemies’ in the run up the genocide. When the genocide finally hit, umugandas were used more directly in the genocide:

During the genocide, umuganda did not involve planting trees but ‘clearing out the weeds’ – a phrase used by the genocidaires to mean the killing of Tutsis. Chopping up men was referred to as ‘bush clearing’ and slaughtering women and children as ‘pulling out the roots of the bad weeds’... The slogan, ‘clearing bushes and removing bad weeds’, were familiar terms used in the course of ordinary agricultural labour undertaken in umuganda.

...

One more Saturday with rainfall above 10mm corresponds to a 0.41 percentage point reduction in the civilian participation rate. Those who wish to stop curtail certain forms of hate speech might very easily rely on studies like this. But there is an even better study which they can rely on in doing so: RTLM was the radio station in Rwanda and much like the umugandas: referring to Tutsis as cockroaches and dirty.

Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19201
Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least 15% faster Nazi Party entry. All types of societies – from veteran associations to animal breeders, chess clubs and choirs – positively predict NS Party entry.

White, middle-class social capital helps to incarcerate African-Americans in racially diverse states.: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/09/22/white-middle-class-social-capital-helps-to-incarcerate-african-americans-in-racially-diverse-states/
Social capital is mostly seen as a ‘good’: bringing communities together and, in the case of criminal justice, encouraging social empathy which can lead to less harsh sentencing. But these analyses ignore racial divisions in social capital. In new research, Daniel Hawes finds that while social capital can reduce the Black-White disparity in incarceration rates in states with few African Americans, in states with greater numbers of African Americans, perceptions of racial threat can activate social capital in white communities, leading to greater targeting, profiling and arrests for minorities.

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of “structured” management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D, and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four “drivers” of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices.

human capital measures including Raven's progressive matrices scores
https://growthecon.com/blog/Peasant/

externalities outweigh benefits

Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. The largest industrial contributor to external costs is coal-fired electric generation, whose damages range from 0.8 to 5.6 times value added.

We present evidence that measures of “social cohesion,” such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn causally determines growth.

THE LINEAR-LOG MODEL IN ECONOMETRICS: http://www.dummies.com/education/economics/econometrics/the-linear-log-model-in-econometrics/

For causal identification, we exploit exogenous variation in equipment availability and cost-shifting institutional aspects of the 1033 Program. Our results indicate that these items have generally positive effects: reduced citizen complaints, reduced assaults on officers, increased drug crime arrests, and no increases in offender deaths.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150478
We use temporal variations in US military expenditure and between-counties variation in the odds of receiving a positive amount of military aid to identify the causal effect of militarized policing on crime. We find that (i) military aid reduces street-level crime; (ii) the program is cost-effective; and (iii) there is evidence in favor of a deterrence mechanism.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150525
https://www.usna.edu/EconDept/RePEc/usn/wp/usnawp56.pdf
contradictory: http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-hub.tw/doi/abs/10.1177/2053168017712885

http://econ.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1708.pdf
I find that the implementation of Stand Your Ground policies lead to an average of 2.75 additional black Alleged Perpetrators of Crimes being killed each month, 2.39 of whom are killed by black citizens. Additionally, I find 0.5 additional white Alleged Perpetrators are killed each month, 0.49 of whom are killed by white citizens.

A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html
But what happens when the cameras are on the chests of police officers? The results of the largest, most rigorous study of police body cameras in the United States came out Friday morning, and they are surprising both police officers and researchers.

For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras.

We find that as the county unemployment rate increases by 1 percentage point, the opioid death rate (per 100,000) rises by 0.19 (3.6%) and the ED visit rate for opioid overdoses (per 100,000) increases by 0.95 (7.0%). We also uncover statistically significant increases in the overall drug death rate that are driven in most specifications by increases in opioid deaths. These results hold when performing a state, rather than county, level analysis. The results are primarily driven by adverse events among whites, although there is some sensitivity to choice of models in the results for nonwhites. Additionally, the findings are relatively stable across time periods; they do not pertain only to recession years, but instead represent a more generalizable and previously unexplored connection between economic development and the severe adverse consequences of substance abuse.

Importing people is not like importing apples: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2016/02/importing-people-is-not-like-importing-apples.html
"Total Factor Productivity" is not some geological feature like the Canadian shield. There has to be a reason why some countries are rich and other countries are basket cases, and unless you are lucky enough to find yourselves sitting on great reservoirs of oil that someone else will pay you to pump out of the ground, that reason seems to have something to do with social/economic institutions, and social/economic institutions seem to have something to do with people.

If you have a model which treats Total Factor Productivity as exogenous, then yes, if "resources" flow from places with low TFP to places with high TFP, as they will if the invisible hand is allowed to operate, that would be a Good Thing. But you need to stop and ask: "Hang on. I wonder why TFP is higher in some places than in others?" Which should lead you to the next question: "I wonder if TFP really would be exogenous to the sort of policy experiment I'm using my model for?". Which should lead you to the next question: "I wonder if social/economic institutions really would be exogenous to the sort of policy experiment I'm using my model for?"

How exactly will social/economic institutions change when we import people? God only knows. They might change for the better; they might change for the worse. It depends on them; it depends on us. But they almost certainly will change. And if you can't even see that question, and wonder about it, then you really are missing something that even the great unwashed uneducated rabble can see. And the great unwashed uneducated rabble are going to put even less credence on what you intellectual elites are telling them they ought to think.

Migration is complicated. Don’t pretend it’s not: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/migration-is-complicated-dont-pretend-its-not/
The concept of freedom of movement is quite different to that of the freedom of goods.

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch dishwasher doesn’t pine for its washing-machine mates back in Stuttgart. Your Ikea sofa doesn’t claim benefits. If you buy a Mercedes, you don’t suddenly find two Audis and a Volkswagen turning up on your drive claiming to be close relatives and demanding to live in your garage.

We show that commuting zones most affected by robots in the post-1990 era were on similar trends to others before 1990, and that the impact of robots is distinct and only weakly correlated with the prevalence of routine jobs, the impact of imports from China, and overall capital utilization. According to our estimates, each additional robot reduces employment by about seven workers, and one new robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 1.2 to 1.6 percent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/29/places-that-saw-more-job-loss-to-robots-were-less-likely-to-support-hillary-clinton/
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/Political%20Machinery-Automation%20Anxiety%20and%20the%202016%20U_S_%20Presidential%20Election_230712.pdf
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201707_TrumpAutomation%20

A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to take a factor-augmenting form, which, by complementing either high or low skill workers, can generate skill biased demand shifts. In this paper, we argue that despite its notable successes, the canonical model is largely silent on a number of central empirical developments of the last three decades, including: (1) significant declines in real wages of low skill workers, particularly low skill males; (2) non-monotone changes in wages at different parts of the earnings distribution during different decades; (3) broad-based increases in employment in high skill and low skill occupations relative to middle skilled occupations (i.e., job 'polarization'); (4) rapid diffusion of new technologies that directly substitute capital for labor in tasks previously performed by moderately-skilled workers; and (5) expanding offshoring opportunities, enabled by technology, which allow foreign labor to substitute for domestic workers in specific tasks. Motivated by these patterns, we argue that it is valuable to consider a richer framework for analyzing how recent changes in the earnings and employment distribution in the United States and other advanced economies are shaped by the interactions among worker skills, job tasks, evolving technologies, and shifting trading opportunities. We propose a tractable task-based model in which the assignment of skills to tasks is endogenous and technical change may involve the substitution of machines for certain tasks previously performed by labor. We further consider how the evolution of technology in this task-based setting may be endogenized. We show how such a framework can be used to interpret several central recent trends, and we also suggest further directions for empirical exploration.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/structural-unemployment-yes-it-was-humbug/